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 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 [...]
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 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. [...]
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 [...]