[spaghetti]

Bill your pic is perfect to show how high is your californian kelp. definitely nothing to compare with our mediterranean weed (Poseidonia) whose bushes come up short. That's why our kelp technique (in italian: pesca nell'alga) is completely different.
It's a mix of agguato and brief aspettos around the bushes, that we end crawling into the kelp bush to try a longer aspetto, hoping for some corvina (brown meagre) to get annoyed by our presence and get out of the bush where's it was hidden.
There's just one trick that might be somehow comparable to your californian techniques, because it involves being neutrally ballasted: we dive head down feet up into the weed, and look through it with a torch, hanging upside down half meter above the bottom without touching it. But still I don't think this could be useful in SoCal, where you said WSB bottoms may be very deep.