Technical Scuba Diving
Background We are relatively confident that we have located and identified the wreck of the Mercator in Santa Monica Bay. At this point, we believe that we are the first people to dive and identify the wreck. After I did an initial dive to investigate and document the wreck and a second dive with Tyler [...]
After Tyler and I dove the Missile Tower, we headed over to a relatively unknown TBM/F Avenger wreck. It sits in about 105 feet of water and is close to the border near Imperial Beach. The wreck was originally located around 2002 by Roy Pettus, a local San Diego underwater archaeologist, during a survey for [...]
Background It was my second dive of the day aboard the Sundiver Express with Kyaa (more on the first dive -- which will be a whopper -- in another post). I had heard about the "Rigger 1" or "Rigger" or "Rigger One" a few times but didn't really know much about it so I wasn't [...]
We aren't the first to find or dive these two wrecks, but I believe that no information has previously been publicly released about them. Captain Ray Artnz first located and identified the wrecks back in the 2000s but the location isn't publicly available. On Thursday July 1st, I went with DJ Mansfield and Tyler Stalter [...]
The Missile Tower is a popular technical dive site down near the Mexican border. It has been on my list to dive for quite a while, but I just never quite made it down there. Or, when I was down there I was diving the USS Hogan or the relatively recently discovered Corsair. The structure [...]
Intro As a follow-up to the post about the photogrammetry model of the Yukon guns, on the same dive I took a series of photos of the props and rudder (given that it is deeper, I actually took these pictures first). Interestingly enough, the two features I decided to document for models BOTH turned out [...]
I won't spend time describing the Yukon wreck since it is probably the most famous wreck in California. I've dived it a number of times and there are a lot of cool features. Probably the most well known and most often photographed are the guns on the forward section of the ship. They are massive. [...]
(NB: experienced technical rebreather divers might find this post "boring" while beginning technical divers might find it interesting and provide you something possibly new to think about and non-divers will probably just frown and wonder what am I talking about). 🙂 I don't really know any technical divers who aren't also "gear hounds." I've lost [...]
Intro / Background I first read about the Grumman Goose at Catalina in an on-line article by Joe Dovala. It has been on my "hit list" ever since. I finally got a chance to dive it this past week. I have to admit, I think even with the increases in technology, Joe got better pictures [...]
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 [...]
