Well, you won't hear of my most frequent dive spots in most dive logs
The local river is the Kings River, just about five minutes from my house. I go there and claw my way along the bottom of the river because it's usually too shallow for anything else. It's a great workout and you never really know what you're going to find. I also dive at Hume and Shaver lakes. Those are both manmade lakes. Hume has better visibility because motorized boats aren't allowed there. That one is fun, because tourists drop stuff into the lake all the time. You end up finding keys, toys, swimming gear, and money
Not bad hunting if you ask me. They also have a healthy population of bullfrogs, and chasing the tadpoles is a blast.
Shaver is a storage and recreation lake. It's fairly cold and has smallmouth bass, catfish, rainbow trout, German brown trout, Kokanee, carp, bluegill crayfish, and bullfrogs. The wildlife biologist encourages carp-shooting, because the carp are non-native and harmful. Shaver used to be a storage pond for a logging operation, so every once in a while you come upon trees that were felled over a hundred years ago that sank in the lake. They have an otherworldly look to them. I've also been diving in Monterey off of Del Monte beach and the Breakwater, and at Catalina. Those were nice, especially Catalina. The viz was quite good.
It's actually pretty rare to see a shark. My scuba diving instructor has been diving for over 10 years and has never seen a shark in California waters. Usually the attacks involve surfers. The worst spot for diver fatalities is Monastery Beach, near Carmel. That's not a shark issue, though.
