My June Underwater

June is a bit of a transition month here in New England. The nudibranchs are mostly gone from shallower shore diving sites, but you can still find a few around. The fish are starting to return - first the rock gunnels and grubbies and then the flounder, cunner, and pollock. This year, we have had a huge number of American sand lance all around Cape Ann and apparently as far north as Maine, which makes for a shiny and shimmering swim back in through the shallows.

I managed five dives across four dive sites, with a return to Lanesville after several years. As the water warms up, the dives stretch longer and I’ll soon swap over to my wetsuit at least for shallower shore diving. Summer is here!

Jume 4 - Folly Cove (Gloucester, Massachusetts)

Our plan was to go to Lanes and the seas were calm enough, but there was a visible surface current so we bailed and went to Folly. Folly was flat calm and we were one of three groups diving on this lovely day. We entered the water surrounded again by thousands of tiny sand lance and headed over to the wall to see what we could find. We were greeted by countless gunnels and sculpin again, two zebra lebbeid shrimp, and numerous nudibranchs on the sugar kelp. While I was photographing one of the nudibranchs, a small scallop jetted up into the water column briefly before disappearing back into the weeds. We had a brief burst of cold water that showed a visible thermocline and a 5-6 degree temperature drop before returning back to the previous temperature. We also spotted several winter flounder and a horseshoe crab wandering the sand. The visibiity wasn’t amazing, so the footage of the sand lance wasn’t as good this time around, but this was a nice dive.

June 6 - Peirce Island (Portsmouth, New Hampshire)

We decided to make a late season visit to Peirce to see if anyone was still around. The current seemed to take a little bit longer to calm down than expected, but we descended maybe 5 minutes late. There were definitely still some nudis around, with a bunch of tiny individuals on the kelp before we descended down the slope. There were 2 big clusters of Coryphella verrucosa slurping on some hydroids, but it felt like more because I found these same groups on the way down and on the way back. I also found a sea lemon on some kelp and a few big rock gunnels. This dive was fine, but this was likely my last Peirce dive until winter.

June 11 - Canoe Beach (Nahant, Massachusetts)

It was a beautiful day with flat calm seas, but there was some decent surge and “snotty” viz. We had a good time regardless, cruising out to the Chimneys and getting in a complete circle around there complete with some mini cave exploration. I was first in the big cave and I completely silted it out trying to turn around, so that was my bad. I was playing around with the snoot and some narrow depth of field and actually managed a couple decent images despite the conditions. This was a chill, pleasant dive, but not particularly remarkable.

June 21 - Folly Cove (Gloucester, Massachusetts)

It was a gorgeous day, but surprisingly we had Folly Cove to ourselves. The sand lance were still around in the shallows, so that made for a fun start and end of the dive. Otherwise, we cruised the west side finding countless tiny sculpin and rock gunnels, some sand shrimp, and even a zebra lebbeid out by the anemone overhang. Another unusual find was a threeline mudsnail eating a sand lance. Nice dive.

June 26 - Lanesville (Gloucester, Massachusetts)

The surface was a bit stirred up, so I didn’t have high expectations for conditions underneath and my assessment was accurate. The viz wasn’t great and there was pretty significant surge most of the dive. There was some good life on the granite ledges including several tiny dotos actively laying eggs and some unusual white things I believe were whelk eggs, but the surge and milky viz made photography very difficult. We navigated straight out at 330 and it took us 25 minutes to get to the wall. We slowly descended to 60 feet and I found a half-blind sea raven, a couple nudis, a slime worm, and some anemones, but we soon had to turn back. I navigated back attentively, but when we surfaced to look, we were way off track due to a current running perpendicular to shore. We descended again, slightly overshot the exit, and swam back. Some waves had kicked up, which made the exit a bit messy. There was quite a bit of crawling on hands and knees to scramble out of the water and up the rocks. Not the best dive, but good to get back to Lanes after a long while.

Pictures