Technical Scuba Diving
An unidentified WWII Corsair rests off Turtle Bay, Espiritu Santo — and figuring out whose it was turned into a real research rabbit hole. Eleven candidate aircraft, a missing propeller with no good explanation, and a mystery that's still open.
Introduction Shortly after my dive on the USCGC McCulloch, Steve Lawson texted me and asked if I wanted go out with he and Chris Gilmartin for an easy dive on his boat Deep Six over the weekend. I was a bit tired, but we were having great conditions so I knew I had to take [...]
Background For quite a while now, we have been finding and documenting various "dumped" WW II airplanes off of Point Loma, California. They are Corsairs, TBM/F Avengers, and SBD Dauntless aircraft. The original post back in Sept 2021 and then the follow-on post (Part II and III) in Aug 2022 identified over a dozen of [...]
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 the saying goes, "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade." The Lemon As I wrote about in my previous post, the plan was to spend 4 days diving the amazing USS Oriskany aircraft carrier off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. I was going to be diving with Ben Lair and Justin Judd and we [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Tyler recently "re-identified" the Corsair that we dove last October. While we cannot be 100% sure, we are pretty sure based on accident reports that the original team mis-identified it (newer accident reports were released in 2012). In the search for more clues, Tyler started reviewing the photos I had taken. The "version" of the [...]
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 [...]
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