Marine Room

Marine Room

Marine Room

The entrance to this dive site is a sidewalk and stairs on the south side of the Marine Room Restaurant at La Jolla Shores. You have three basic options at this site:

Option 1: Leave your scuba gear in your car, and snorkel in 2–4' of water directly in front of the restaurant. Odds are pretty good that you will see a lot of leopard sharks, shovelnose sharks, and stingrays, especially in the late summer. They are often there in some number, but come into the shallow water in huge numbers in late summer. Lie very still in very shallow water and you could have half a dozen leopard sharks crossing paths beneath you. It's awesome... and, no, they are not going to bite you.

Option 2: Put on your scuba gear, go out into the water, and go around to the left (south) into the shallow rock reefs you'll find in the "corner" between La Jolla Shores and La Jolla Cove (the absolute back corner there is called "Devil's Slide"). You'll find lots of the same life that you would find at La Jolla Cove, in shallow reefs ranging from 5 to 30 feet deep. You will also find large schools of fish, including Pacific barracuda if you are lucky.

Option 3: Put on your scuba gear, and go out straight and a bit to the right. Go out about as far as you would go out for La Jolla Shores. Look for a white 5 MPH buoy, and go out about even with the buoy. Drop down into 20—30' of water and head west until you hit the canyon. You may cross the eel grass beds on the flats just before the slope increases towards the canyon. If you then turn left and don't dawdle, you can actually round the corner at the inshore end of the canyon and will end up going back out into the ocean (west), to surface on the southwest side of the canyon out in the middle of the ocean. If you turn right, you can work your way along the canyon towards the same walls you would encounter doing a La Jolla Shores South Walls dive.