Technical Scuba Diving
Background We believe that we have located, dived and identified a new WW II TBF-1C Avenger (Bureau Number 24272) airplane wreck in Southern California off of Point Loma. A couple months ago, Tyler had a "breakthrough" on how to combine and overlay a few different disparate data sources in order to locate potential new targets. [...]
After the dive on the Pipe Horse last week, we went to go look for some new targets. Tyler had a few areas to scan and we found something very promising: Now that looks like something worth diving! The problem is that we are in winter in Southern California and conditions can be completely unpredictable. [...]
This was my first dive in 2022. I had planned on doing more research to identify the wreck before publishing but I have quite a few other projects I'm working on so I decided to publish it without an ID. I was with Ray and Kyaa on the Sundiver Express for my first dive of [...]
Background Tyler has been doing a lot of research by reading through old newspaper archives looking for potential new wrecks to locate and dive. He recently came across some articles about a P-51 Mustang that crashed off the coast of Laguna Beach. He started looking through some bathymetry data and came across a small anomaly [...]
Background This is another case where we had seen some ROV footage of a large "yacht-like" vessel and had an approximate location but hadn't been able to pinpoint it. After multiple attempts to locate it, I went with Lora and Chris on the Marissa for another attempt -- but this time we had the sonar [...]
Dive Plan Tyler had been looking at an anomaly in the data for a while but it was pretty deep and looked to be about 50 feet long. He had been planning to dive it for years but it just never worked out....until a couple days ago (15 Nov 2021). We weren't sure what it [...]
Background During my ill-fated trip to Bikini Atoll, we ended up diving quite a few WW II airplanes that had been dumped near Kwajalein Atoll. Tyler and I had seen some ROV footage of something similar off Point Loma and we decided to charter the Marissa with Lora and Chris to investigate and perform a [...]
The Tale of the Tail Code This is a tale of hope, frustration, and persistence during our dives to find and identify a new helicopter wreck off Imperial Beach, California. The final identification was the result of a LOT of research and a somewhat obfuscated tail code that we uncovered on the second dive. We [...]
Background I was out diving with Ben Lair on the Marissa with Lora & Chris yesterday. We had two days of diving planned and we were diving mainly new targets based on some findings and data from Tyler Stalter. On Monday, we dove a helicopter (more on that later) and yet another new "abandoned" airplane [...]
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 [...]