QUAST ROCK

Off the coast of la Jolla, in a hospitable kelp patch, lies Quast Rock, or, as I like to call it, Holger Quast Rock.  A classic dive site.  It bears my name, so I am glad that after a long quest to find out the origin of the appellation, Bert Kobayashi, local dive pioneer and oceanographer at Scripps Institute, told me the story.  Here it is:

    Jay Quast is a marine biologist who studied at SIO [Scripps Institution of Oceanography] back in the 1950s.  He was actually finishing up when I first started off at SIO in 1959.  He worked on the ecology of a group of fishes, and one of his prime study sites was Quast Rock.  Back then, Quast Rock was at the northern edge of a kelp bed, which made it much easier to find than when the kelp is absent (as in El Nino years).  As you know, if you have dived the site, it is probably the best dive site over rocky areas in the La Jolla area, and it is always a challenge to the driver of the boat to maneuver well enough to see if one can drop the anchor through the hole on top of Quast.  I don't know that anyone has ever done that.

    Another neat story about Quast is that Rick Grigg (who was the first surfer to ride one of those monster 30 foot waves at Waimea Bay in Hawaii's North Shore;  he went to high school in Honolulu, graduating from Punahou, same place that Steve Case, developer of AOL, graduated;  Rick also got his bachelor's degree at the University of Hawaii and then came to SIO in the mid 1960s.  While he was there, he acted as a consultant to several "beach" type movies) also used Quast as one of his study sites.  One day, while he and his buddy were at Quast, a gray whale came by.  Rick turned around to see it fairly close, probably in the vicinity of 10 feet.  At any rate, Rick's motions must have scared/alarmed the whale, and it gave a kick with its broad tail.  That little kick pinned Rick up against the vertical wall at Quast, ripped his face mask off, tore his regulator out of his mouth, and even pulled his watch off his wrist.  Rick got slammed up against the wall, scratching his face.  Almost immediately, his buddy, who was at some distance, came by and recovered Rick's face mask for him (Rick had already gotten the regulator back into his mouth), and after some search, found his wrist watch as well.  Quite an exciting story.

    Quast was the study site for several groups, back when I was teaching an underwater biology course during the summer for UCSD, back in the late 70s and early 80s.  It was an especially good study site, as not too many folks knew about it, least of all the fishermen (but the party boats knew the location but didn't really go there too often as it was simply too small for that many fishermen), so that it was left relatively undisturbed from dive to dive.  We have found Indian bowls all the way out there as well.

Well, enough info for now.
Aloha, Bert

Thanks Bert!
 

Here are the lineups from the UCSD Seadeucers' dive site page:
 

QUAST ROCK, 65'

Left edge of Bishop Golden Dome on the left edge of the pocket sandy beach just south of Casa Cove sea wall.  Flagpole over the midpoint between the two inner white columns on the La Jolla Financial Building (brown structure) -- actually, the flagpole should sit just a hair to the left of center. If you look at the top edge of the building, there are a bunch of short vertical columns. Put the flagpole in line with the 7th of these from the left. If you are going to err, do so in the direction of putting the flagpole dead center between the two inner white columns. This should put you slightly southeast of Quast, but you will definitely be on the rock in 65' or shallower, and not be stranded out on the sand a 80'.