Technical Scuba Diving
There has been a lot written about the Valiant and it is a pretty common wreck dive to do at Catalina. It is at recreational depths and so it has been dived a lot. The short version is that it was a 162 foot luxury yacht that was built on the east coast in 1926 [...]
Background Back in October 2020, Tyler and I were diving on some unknown targets out of Dana Point on the Marissa (Lora had taken her on the proverbial "road trip"). On one of those dives, we were excited to find a Corsair engine and landing gear. I spent a few extra minutes on the bottom [...]
Strobes are a useful (I would call them essential) tool for divers. I never conduct a dive without at least one strobe and I usually have 2-3 on a dive. I think of strobes as the proverbial "bread crumbs" to find your way home. I almost always put one on the "down line" to a [...]
Background Justin Judd, Ben Lair, and I were out for a day of diving in San Diego with Lora & Chris on the Marissa. We had planned a couple of exploratory dives on "deep-ish" targets that Tyler Stalter had. The first was very promising. It looked to me like a crane. It had a huge [...]
I have 5 sets of rebreather tanks (4 x 3L steel, 1 x 2L carbon fiber) and two drysuit inflation bottles. They used to just be strewn all over the place, usually shoved under my workbench cabinets: Tanks, tanks, and more tanks Custom tank racks My brother's hobby is to build "stuff" out of wood, [...]
Justin Judd at the prop of the San Vito Intro This wreck is not visited very often as far as I can tell. Most references to the site are generically as the "Tuna Clipper." However, the actual name of the vessel is the San Vito. It sank on Feb 18, 1985 on the West End [...]
I published the story and photos for the "Sub Tower" dive a little over a week ago. Docking ring on the sub tower I just published two GoPro videos of the dive along with a photogrammetry model of the docking station portion of the structure: Sketchfab Photogrammetry Model: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/beaver-iv-sumbersible-test-tower-5b88a7b8ce8f42418039ddc3e5bb0b62 Sub Tower Photogrammetry Model Vimeo GoPro [...]
Tyler Stalter and I are very confident (99+%) that we have identified the origins and name of the un-identified wreck site that I dove back in July 2020 with Ray Arntz & Kyaa Heller on the Sundiver. We believe that it is the fishing vessel Nightingale that sank on Sept 9, 1930. The identification is [...]
The "Sub Tower" is a classic deeper Catalina dive. It isn't a big site and I personally believe it is under-rated, but we'll "dive" into that... USS Thresher The submarine USS Thresher (SSN-593) was created to find and destroy Soviet submarines. It was the fastest and quietest submarine when she was launched on July 9th, [...]
My initial "photo plan" on diving the F4D was to see if either wing was intact and, if so, get pictures of the shape of the wing since it is such a unique and iconic feature. Fortunately, one of the wings was intact enough to get those photos and then I started to move around [...]
