Pt. Lobos
Latitudes and Longitudes

Thank you to Pat Lovejoy for getting me the lat/long of the corners of the park from the original survey documents, and also for showing me the dive sites, and to Ian Puleston for doing the first generation of these maps.

Safety is your responsibility and only your responsibility.  The easiest of these sites is advanced (or worse) on the worst of days.  Some are advanced sites on the best of days. There are days to dive and days to go have a nice lunch in Monterey.  Make this choice wisely and conservatively, it's your life.  I've only told you where they are.  Whether you dive them or not is up to you and only up to you.

Dive sites are rated by the skill required to dive them on a good day:

- Beginner.

- Intermediate.

- Advanced.  Note: An AOW card doesn't mean you are an advanced diver.  It means you have some of the skills and a little of the experience to be an intermediate diver, but may well not be intermediate yet.

- Very Advanced.

All positions are WAAS/DGPS accuracy and datum NAD83/WGS84.  If you don't understand what that means, see the section on Datums.  The positions are in degrees and minutes.  I chose this format because it can be copied and pasted into Garmin Mapsource and other GPS support software. N36 29.276  W121 57.373  means 36 degrees 29.276 minutes North latitude, 121 degrees 57.373 minutes west longitude.

The sites have a link that looks like this:.  It's a Garmin MapSource .GDB file.  If you have Garmin MapSource V6 and up, and you click the link, MapSource will be opened and you can download a waypoint for the site to your GPS.  Note that earlier versions of MapSource supported a different format called .MPS.  You can download a free upgrade from Garmin's website.

First, the corners of the park, at least those that count if you are on a boat.  I want to make sure I don't stray into the park unintentionally when I launch elsewhere, and that I stay out of the No Diving areas when I do launch at Whaler's.  With my old GPS, I just defined a route from LOBOS0 to LOBOS1 and on to LOBOS5.  With my new GPS, I created a named track with the same information.  This has the advantage of being visible even when I'm navigating another route.

Secondly: Please note that only about 20% of the marine area of Pt. Lobos State Reserve is open to diving, and any diving in the area that is open requires a reservation, even if you come in by boat from outside, and if you do THAT, it takes a lot of extra organization with the rangers (faxing C-cards in advance, checking in by cell phone, etc., etc.

This map is a USGS topographic sheet with the waypoints added to it.  Depths are in fathoms -- a fathom is six feet.  All positions are datum NAD83 (which is essentially the same as WGS84).

Note that there's a large portion (about 80%) of the park where no diving is allowed.   The boundary between the dive area and the no-dive area is at about W 121° 56.682'.   Here's link to a named track that will draw the boundaries on recent Garmin GPSs:
 

LOBOS0	N 36° 30.349' W 121° 56.388'	Landfall for the south boundary
LOBOS1	N 36° 30.328' W 121° 56.688'	Boundary corner, off the point, south side
LOBOS2	N 36° 30.812' W 121° 57.987'	SW corner of the park
LOBOS3	N 36° 31.503' W 121° 57.626'	NW corner of the park
LOBOS4	N 36° 31.594' W 121° 56.274'	NE corner of the park
LOBOS5	N 36° 31.395'  W 121° 56.172'	Landfall for the north boundary at MonoLobo

Now for some interesting dive sites:

 

GRANPTARCH	N 36° 31.473'  W 121° 56.233'	There's supposed to be a nice little arch here.
GRANPTWALL	N 36° 31.466'  W 121° 56.288'	Granite Pt. Wall
GREAT PIN	N 36° 31.513'  W 121° 56.616'	The Great Pinnacle.  This is arguably the nicest dive in all Monterey County.  The top is at about 40', the bottom on the north side is deeper than you want to go.
GREATANCHR	N 36° 31.500'  W 121° 56.595'	This is a small sand channel at about 85' that makes a great place to anchor for the Great Pinnacle.  Be sure to use lots of scope, there's water 180' deep just north of it.
MARCOS PIN	N 36° 31.422'  W 121° 56.590'	Marco's Pinnacle, named in honor of Marco Flagg who was attacked by a Great White Shark here June 30, 1995, and lived to tell about it.
SWIM THRU	N 36° 31.325'  W 121° 56.642'	There is supposedly a cool little swim through here.  I've never dived it.
THUMBS UP	N 36° 31.561'  W 121° 56.286'	This is a neat pinnacle in the northeast corner of the dive area.  The tops at about 40', the surrounding bottom's at 70-90'  It's got lots of nice hydrocoral, so don't anchor on top.  Drop the hook in the 70-90' area.  There's a small sand patch at N36° 31.575' W121° 56.276'
WHALE  BONES	N 36° 31.392'  W 121° 56.360'	There are several big whale ribs here, and at least one verteba in 77'.  Please don't anchor right on top of the bones.  I usually anchor about 30' straight north, and with the usual NW winds, the bones are visible as I swim down the anchor line.  Note: it's not shown on the map above.

http://garlic.com/~triblet/swell/gpslobos.html
Last updated: 12:12 PM, Friday, December 19, 2008.
Webmaster:  Chuck Tribolet, triblet@garlic.com