Lemonade

As the saying goes, “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

The Lemon

As I wrote about in my previous post, the plan was to spend 4 days diving the amazing USS Oriskany aircraft carrier off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. I was going to be diving with Ben Lair and Justin Judd and we had all spent a lot of time preparing for the trip. I had visualized our routes and had planned each day. This was my second planned trip to the Oriskany. The first was with Pete Mesley in April 2020 but that was canceled due to the emergence of Covid.

Unfortunately, the one thing we couldn’t “plan” for happened – a hurricane.

About four days before my departure date, the captain of the boat send me a “heads up” message about a storm developing far south of Florida but it was projected to gain strength and head towards Pensacola.

We tracked the storm daily and I kept checking in with Ben/Justin and the captain of the boat.

We decided to call the trip on Friday 9/23 which was the day before I was supposed to fly. As it turns out, it did develop into Hurricane Ian but it ended up veering to the East and not to the West. Either way, it was a good idea to cancel.

I went about some last minute planning to do some local diving and work on some “projects” that I had deferred. Planning exploratory dives with little notice is not very easy, but I had a great week here in Southern California.

The Lemonade

It has been a bit of a dry spell on posts — but fear not — this week has been very productive.

I had three days of diving and a day at the Midway Museum in San Diego. Here is a brief list of what I got to do in a period of 5 days and a preview of upcoming posts over the next few weeks.

Yukon Photogrammetry Model	This “project” has long been on my list and finally got started! It will take quite a while to finish but you have start somewhere.
Boys Club	New wreck in Santa Monica Bay. Tyler and I first dove it with Ray & Kyaa on Sept 7th and I needed to get a positive ID on it and build a photogrammetry model.
Wilshire	This was another wreck that Ray had in his system and I’m not (yet) sure of the history.
Target dive off Pt Loma	Tyler jumped in on this target and got some video. We think it is a tail section from an airplane (or maybe something else) but we aren’t sure (yet). Very strange shape / structure.
Corsair south of Pt Loma	We were looking for a second dive in the general area and I had thought it would be cool to build a photogrammetry model of that wreck. Voila!
Midway Museum	Given all the airplanes we find/dive and the fact that I was supposed to be diving an aircraft carrier, I thought it would be fun to go visit the Midway Aircraft Carrier Museum with Tyler. We were not disappointed! Don’t worry – Tyler didn’t end up in the “real” brig!

Stay Tuned – I’ll be writing up detailed blog posts on my recent “lemonade” trip!