Seeing Red
Story Submitted by Nicolas Theunissen
Early last spring, my dive buddies Sam, Axel and I planned a two-night diving and camping trip to Southern Big Sur. We packed up Axel's Jetta after class on Friday, and drove from Santa Cruz through Monterey on to Big Sur, stopping along the way to check out any potential spots for the next morning. The weather was gorgeous, the water was a deep blue and there was almost no wind or swell. We were all super stoked to get in the next day at one of the spots we found. I got behind the wheel and we left the last spot we had checked out to make our way up to the ridge where we were planning on camping. The sun had just set when I came around a corner and saw a large pyramid-shaped rock in the middle of my lane. I hoped that the car would clear the rock, but unfortunately we felt a loud thud as it hit something under the car.
We pulled off soon after and found oil slowly dripping from what I assumed was the oil pan. Since we had no service, we made the call to try to drive as far back to Santa Cruz as we could, filling the engine back up with oil on our way. We kept checking the oil, but it was suspiciously not going down. We topped it off just in case. Finally, after two and a half hours of frantic driving, we got home. I put an oil pan under the car and we chatted about what to do. We decided that the conditions were too good to pass up. The next morning, we packed all our things into Sam's car and drove the same two and a half hours back to a spot we had found the previous day.
We were very grateful that we decided to persevere. Conditions could not have been better. We had 30-foot visibility and almost no swell. There were fish everywhere—blues, olives, perch, all over the water column, and we were quick to find cabs and lings in the holes at the bottom. Sam had recently shot his first vermillion rockfish, and I was itching to get one of my own, so I ventured into around 40 feet of water and made a drop. Right as I was about to head back up, a fish caught my eye. I quickly recognized it as a large verm, turned around, and placed a good shot right behind its gill plate through the thickest part of the fillet. As I was at the end of my breath hold, I dropped my gun and swam up. I was ecstatic as I reached the surface, however, a quick pull on my float line indicated that it had managed to get itself stuck in a hole somewhere and I would need to go back down to get it out. On my next drop, I found the fish stuck in a hole headfirst between two rocks, with its gill plate and spines making a sort of Chinese finger trap. The harder I pulled on it the more stuck it got. I called Sam and Axel over, and the three of us spent the next half hour diving on the fish trying to pull it out to no avail. We tried everything from pulling down on its tail, to trying to push it from the other direction, but nothing we tried would get the fish to budge. Finally, I decided to simply pull as hard as I could on the spear, hoping that it would not tear off. Unfortunately, my biggest fears came true, and I was left holding my bare spear with the fish still wedged in the rock. With my float line no longer marking the hole, we lost where it was and the fish was gone.
Luckily for me, however, a few dives later I came across another verm. This one looked even bigger than the first. Determined not to let this one get away, I pulled it up as quickly as I could immediately after shooting it. I was so relieved to get it to the surface. It ended up measuring out to 21 inches, my biggest and only verm to date.
We ended up camping that night and eating the verm on the camp stove. The next day we tried another spot and Sam shot his PB lingcod to round off a crazy but rewarding trip.
A week later, after Axel had taken his car to the shop, he told me it was not the oil pan that we punctured but the transmission pan, and we had therefore also overfilled the engine. Luckily there were no lasting damages to the transmission or the engine, and only the pan needed to be replaced.