Technical Scuba Diving
To bring you this important announcement... Just in case you have been wondering what I have been up to and why there has been a dearth of postings in the past couple months. There will be no diving for the foreseeable future. I think I've had 3 days of diving in the past 70+ days. [...]
Background We have had absolutely horrible conditions since Christmas. Between the large swells, wind, rain and resulting run-off, diving has been non-existintent for weeks. I snuck in a couple dives to teach a photogrammetry class, but that is about it until this week. Dive 1 - 275' Target (South of Pt Loma) Tyler found a [...]
Intro I published a Top 10 Diving Recap in 2020 and then again in 2021. This year I am making it a "Top 10 Dives and Projects" list since quite a bit of my diving this year has been working on more longer-term projects that involve multiple dives on the same wreck. It has been [...]
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 The Ruby E was the second vessel intentionally sunk off of Mission Beach, San Diego as part of "wreck alley." She was built in 1934 and sank on June 18, 1989 so she has been down for a while. This post will give some history of the ship, pictures from a recent dive, and [...]
I have almost the entire photogrammetry model of the Yukon complete -- in fact, I had it almost complete after dive 5. However, I'm still facing the ongoing problem with the moving seaweed and not being able to align photos for the starboard side hull. Below is the "state of the project" after the "Seaweed [...]
Intro The "Butterfly Effect" is part of chaos theory in physics. The theory is that a small change in one state can result in large differences in a later state. The prototypical example is that a butterfly flapping its wings can result in a tornado. I ran into a "Butterfly Effect" between building the model [...]
This is my 200th post and I wanted it to be somewhat special so I am posting what I consider one of my best photogrammetry models of one of my favorite wrecks. Background Many might not understand why the USS Hogan is so appealing to dive -- after all, there is little left of the [...]
This is my 199th post. This post along with the 200th post will be about the USS Hogan. Background The USS Hogan is one of my favorite wrecks in the Southern California area. Many might not understand why this wreck is so appealing to dive -- after all, there is little left of the structure [...]
Summary I conducted Dive #4 for my Yukon photogrammetry project on Sunday, 6 November. The model is now close to 5,000 photos. I spent all week working on the model build process. I went down a lot of rabbit holes and my computers were working overtime. I'm definitely pushing the limits for the current hardware [...]