Catalina Island: Drift Through an Underwater World

The waters off Catalina Island are rife with beauty and life: phantasmagoric kelp forests, silver rainstorms of mackerel, brazen (“We’re protected. We’re California’s state fish!”) orange garibaldi, gray swirls of pirouetting sea lions—a diver’s paradise.

Don’t dive? So what? Take the Santa Catalina Island Company’s Undersea Tour  aboard Starlight or Emerald, a pair of semi-submersibles that provide a 45-minute diver’s-eye tour of Catalina’s entrancing undersea life. The tour provides a fish-finder guide; you provide the wide eyes. Few things rival the sight of sunshine shining down into the kelp canopy, spears of light piercing through the greenish blue columns of towering seaweed, like floodlights on opening night.