Technical Scuba Diving
Intro I first dove the Bearcat back in June 2022 and it is an amazing wreck. It is very rare to find an almost completely intact single engine airplane wreck. When I first dove it, I was concentrating on getting photos for identification and documentation and not for building a photogrammetry model. I was alone [...]
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 Sorry about the bastardized Beatles song, but the title of the post was about a recent day diving (Halloween - 31 Oct 2022) and I thought I would do some plagiarization of the famous song. "Woke up, fell out of bedDragged a comb across my headFound my way downstairs and made a mug And [...]
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
Original post is here: F8F-1 Bearcat (Point Loma, CA -- 230 fsw) When we first found the wreck and identified the airplane as a F8F-1, we started working to identify the specific aircraft. In the post, we stated that we had "high confidence," based upon some specific characteristics of the wreck site, that we though [...]
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 [...]