Technical Scuba Diving
Background Steve Lawson had invited me to go looking at targets with him and Chris Gilmartin on the Sunday of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. We set out from the boat launch at Huntington Harbor and had some great conditions that morning. Steve had a list of about 7 or 8 targets he wanted to check [...]
Background Tyler had recently gone out diving with friends for his birthday. While they were heading to the dive site, he saw something on the sonar that looked interesting. After diving their original planned dive site, they jumped in to see what was at the target. They ended up finding a steel hull boat that [...]
Background Tyler had a few targets that we wanted to look at. They were all in the 170 foot range and so we arranged a day on the Marissa to go take a look. We weren't sure what conditions were going to be like so we had a few different plans but ended up going [...]
Background Due to all my travel and target diving in San Diego, it had been a LONG time since I had gone diving with Ray & Kyaa @ Sundiver. We arranged a day to go dive some targets in Santa Monica Bay that Tyler had and then also check out a few things Ray had [...]
Background Tyler and I got a tip and GPS location from some friends at Scripps who are also involved with Project Recover. They said there was a wreck near Scripps Canyon that they found and they had a good side scan image. Side scan image from Scripps / Project Recover When I saw the side [...]
This is an update to a post back in September 2021 about a "WW II Airplane Junkyard" off of Point Loma. As we have been looking for new targets in the south Point Loma area, we are "plagued" by finding and diving more dumped airplanes. They show up on the sonar similar to real airplanes [...]
About six months ago, Tyler sent me some bathymetry data of a possible target off Solana Beach and said "I've been looking at that target up there off Solana Beach. It's in 180 looks aircraft or some weird rock reef but I was researching if any planes went down off the area." One limiting factor [...]
This is a short post to document another new wreck target we dove recently. On 10 June 2022, while searching for targets (which ultimately led to finding the F8F Bearcat) one of the targets turned out to be a sailboat. Based on the condition of the wreck, I believe that it was probably abandoned and [...]
Background We have located the wreck of a rare F8F-1 Bearcat airplane deep in the waters off of Point Loma, California. This post details the discovery of the wreck, identifying the type of airplane, and background information on the F8F Bearcat. While we haven’t yet conducted a follow-up dive to confirm the identity via a [...]
Background Sounds like a band name, doesn't it? It somewhat reminds me of that 80's band "Hootie & the Blowfish." People often think that diving new targets is sexy and exciting and always results in finding a cool new WW II era airplane. Well, it isn't always that easy and this is a short tale [...]