Scary Close Up Encounter with Humboldt Squid

— Many thank to Shawn Ferley for letting me post his dive report here!

Above are the pics I took prior to being “felt up” by the Humboldt squid… AWESOME!!

I went diving at the Cove in La Jolla on Saturday. I’ve discovered
my new favorite place from the shore. My Dive buddies were Tagen and Mitch.
Long kick out to the kelp forest but completely worth the effort. Time was
9am, 25ft, 63F.

Mitch was the first to notice the Humbolt squid about 15–20 ft away. He got
my attention and started pushing me towards the beast, I was happily
snapping pictures of everything of course.

At first the squid was a gray color of in the distance, but the closer it
came towards us it started flashing to Red stripes and then solid blood red
and dark brown. Amazing the way they can do this. I was snapping away when
the next thing you know my camera housing and hand were wrapped up by the
tentacles of the 3–4 foot squid that was as big or bigger round as our scuba
tanks. Mitch felt my whole body tense up (he was holding my arm trying to
pull me back at that point). The next thing I remember was reaching out and
smacking the squids body to try and push it off my hand and camera. The
little bugger must have darted off, I didn’t really look to see, I was
trying to back off and was looking behind me. I remember seeing on
discovery channel about Humbolt squid and how intelligent these creatures
are, but they have really BIG beaks that could easily snap off a finger.

Tagen came up behind me laughing his ass off and all three of us agreed
later that it was an incredible dive.

I was unaware of an earthquake about 22 miles of the coast that apparently
caused a large population of squid to get washed ashore at 7:43am on
Saturday. I guess we were “lucky” to be there at the time.