Chasing Dreams & Targets (San Diego, CA)

Intro

Tyler and I have been searching for new targets on the Marissa recently.

This past Friday, we had a dive plan for the day: look at a few targets on the sonar and side-scan, jump in on anything that looked interesting, and then possibly head south to the Missile Tower with the goal of building a photogrammetry model if we got there.

Given the potential depth of a couple targets (170-ish) and/or the Missile Tower (165-ish) and the possibly extended bottom times to get enough good photos for a model, I took along my rEvo, a deep bailout, and a pony of O2 instead of a set of doubles. However, most of the targets were shallow.

Results

We ended up looking at all the targets with Lora’s new system on the Marissa.

We got into a good rhythm. We would pass directly over the target and take a look on the sonar and then do a few passes using the side-scan. If anything looked interesting, Tyler would jump in with his doubles given how easy that was (vs. my rebreather with bailout, camera equipment, etc) and see what things looked like.

Out of the twelve targets, Tyler splashed on four:

• The first was some debris that was interesting and had some relief but not what we were looking for
• The second was a pile of rocks
• The third was a sailboat (more on that below)
• The fourth was an anchor and some kind of metal rectangular container

Sailboat

I figured I would jump in on the sailboat and take a quick look and maybe take some pictures. I spent about 10-15 minutes cruising around and taking pictures.

There wasn’t anything special — except that I saw white-plumed anemones inside the ship. This is really interesting since the sailboat was about 65 feet deep and I have never seen those at that depth — ever. Unfortunately, a setting on my camera for focus had been changed and some of the photos were not perfectly in focus but the photos below will give you an idea.

Below are a few other photos of the sailboat just for the history. There were some nice strawberry anemones on the stern section. There was also a massive male sheepshead on the wreck but I didn’t manage to capture a picture of it.

Next up

The hunt continues….