Monastery Beach
Monastery Beach is a beautiful place for a picnic and there seems to be an endless train of weddings, tourist buses and visitors who come to enjoy the scenery. It's a pretty incredible spot under water too, but it is far more dangerous than it looks. First, there's the topography. Monastery Beach lies on the Eastern rim of the Carmel Canyon which means that a 200 yard swim from shore in some places will put a diver floating in 200 feet of water. Since the beach has a nearly due West aspect, it faces the Pacific with little protection from large waves or swell from the open ocean and the wave energy quickly piles up and dumps directly onto the beach in a very narrow strip of surf zone. The entry itself is very steep and made even more exhausting by course, gravelly sand that moves a great deal under foot and even then the strong waves and slope produce an undertow and washing-machine effect that can make it very difficult for swimmers to exit the water. There are abundant warnings against swimming here because of waves and powerful rip currents and experienced scuba divers shouldn't dismiss those signs as not altogether applying to them. A handful of fairly high profile dive accidents have earned this site the nickname "Mortuary Beach." If this is your first time here, bring a buddy who has experience here and be familiar with "the Monastery Crawl."
With those precautions understood, this is one of the finest dives in all of Monterey with clear water, abundant fish and startling topography to challenge even advanced divers. This is as good as California diving gets, just remember to:
- Go with an experienced buddy
- Only get in the water on a calm day
- Enter and exit from the edges of the beach at the north and south, not in the middle
- Be familiar with the Monastery Crawl and save enough air to crawl fully out of the water with your regulator in
Contents
Access
Monastery Beach is about a 5 minute drive south of Carmel-by-the-Sea. Parking is free along the highway and in a small pull-out parking lot near the beach.
Amenities
Downtown Carmel has a variety of options for quick food and there's a Safeway and gas station just a few minutes away.
Restrooms
Two restrooms with flush toilets are available on the south side of the beach. (Monastery Beach Public Restrooms).
Showers
None.
Diving
One a good day, Monastery Beach is as good as Monterey diving gets. The water tends to have more upwelling from deeper depths so it has a tendency to be cooler and clearer than other sites. For days that are not ideal, find another place to dive.
This site provides access to the following water regions and points of interest:
Nearest Emergency Medical Facilities
Community Hospital of Monterey Peninsula 23625 pacific Grove-Carmel Hwy, Monterey
EMS activation by boat: Notify Coast Guard boat crew on channel 16 or call 911. Patient transfer at Fuel Dock or at sea.
WARNING! OpenDiveSites.org is a community-run site. While we do our best to keep information up-to-date, no content on this site should be construed as authoritative, complete, or correct. Scuba or free diving and other aquatic activities are inherently dangerous and can pose a risk of injury or death; the information on this site will not mitigate that. We hope you find our information helpful, but we must never be your sole source of navigational information, awareness of dive conditions, site hazards, or legal restrictions -- it is a repository of community-submitted content, not a divemaster.
