Technical Scuba Diving
As the saying goes "I"m hard to shop for." This Christmas, my wife was creative and very thoughtful when she arranged for a Gyotaku art class -- with a world class artist who happens to live very close to us. I've always really enjoyed the look of Gyotaku art and admired the prints during my [...]
Farnsworth Banks are a series of underwater sea-mounts about 1-2 miles off the shore of Catalina. They are a relatively famous dive site in Southern California but are a bit "out of the way" since they are on the backside of Catalina and about mid-way which means you need to go all the way around [...]
Background As part of my "lemonade" week, we were with Lora on the Marissa looking at some targets pretty far south of Point Loma and needed a second dive at a reasonable depth. I had dove the Corsair in that area a while ago and thought it would make a good target for a photogrammetry [...]
As they say, "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade." We had reserved a 2-3 day window to dive the USS Perry which is the pinnacle of wreck diving in Palau. Unfortunately, the wind and weather were not cooperating so we considered a few other options (BTW, the team eventually was able to dive the [...]
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 [...]
Background The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) Iro was an oil tanker built in the early 1920s in Osaka, Japan. It is a relatively large wreck with a length of 470 feet and a beam of 58 feet. Unlike some of the other wrecks in Palau, the Iro was NOT a merchant ship that was converted [...]
Palau has some fantastic reefs and walls. Below are some of the sites I visited during my Mar/Apr 2022 trip to Palau. One of the great aspects of Palau diving is that there is something for everyone, including wrecks, caves, shallow reefs, steep walls and a wide variety of sea life. This is a long [...]
Temple of Doom is a cave that is within the "Blue Holes" site on the outer reef in Palau. You first enter one of the blue holes and then there is an almost hidden entrance into the cave. You would probably never know it was there unless somebody pointed it out to you. The Blue [...]
Chandelier Cave is an interesting dive that is located very close to the dive shops in Koror, Palau. The entrance is a small opening that is only about 10 feet from the surface of the water in an unassuming location along the shore near where boats are moored. Entrance to Chandelier Cave The cave consists [...]
Intro It has been a little over two years since my last big, international dive trip (Grand Cayman for a KISS Crossover Course and some deep wall diving in Feb 2020). I had originally planned to dive only wrecks in Palau but I have the opportunity to return in August for "once-in-a-lifetime" rebreather speciality wreck [...]