Technical Scuba Diving
Background Tyler and I first dove the PBM Mariner a couple weeks ago. During that dive, we had very limited visibility so taking pictures was challenging and I built a photogrammetry model based on those photos. It came out relatively well but was incomplete and I didn't get all of the pictures needed to "link [...]
Background I had first heard about a PBM Mariner wing section from Steve Lawson last year. Since then, Tyler Stalter and I had spent quite a few days and dives trying to find the elusive wing and ended up empty handed on all of those dives. Tyler had been at it a lot longer trying [...]
Background I dived the Cape Charles a few months in July 2021 on the Marissa with Lora & Chris. I had dived the wreck once before but it was one of my early tech dives here in SoCal so I only took a GoPro and didn't get any photos. I had a chance to return [...]
The Tale of the Tail Code This is a tale of hope, frustration, and persistence during our dives to find and identify a new helicopter wreck off Imperial Beach, California. The final identification was the result of a LOT of research and a somewhat obfuscated tail code that we uncovered on the second dive. We [...]
Background I was out diving with Ben Lair on the Marissa with Lora & Chris yesterday. We had two days of diving planned and we were diving mainly new targets based on some findings and data from Tyler Stalter. On Monday, we dove a helicopter (more on that later) and yet another new "abandoned" airplane [...]
After Tyler and I dove the Missile Tower, we headed over to a relatively unknown TBM/F Avenger wreck. It sits in about 105 feet of water and is close to the border near Imperial Beach. The wreck was originally located around 2002 by Roy Pettus, a local San Diego underwater archaeologist, during a survey for [...]
The Missile Tower is a popular technical dive site down near the Mexican border. It has been on my list to dive for quite a while, but I just never quite made it down there. Or, when I was down there I was diving the USS Hogan or the relatively recently discovered Corsair. The structure [...]
Intro After spending most of the day looking at targets south of Pt Loma and finding a sailboat, an anchor, and some other miscellaneous debris, Tyler and I decided to go dive the PC-815. The visibility was amazing on some of our shallower target dives and Tyler figured that it would also be good on [...]
Douglas A-1 Skyraider The Douglas A-1 Skyraider was designed as a carrier-based, single-seat, long-range dive/torpedo bomber and as the next generation of the TBM/F Avenger. Interestingly enough, the TBM was a 3-person aircraft and the Skyraider was a single pilot aircraft (some later variants were widened considerably and had two seats side-by-side). The Skyraider continued [...]
Background Justin Judd, Ben Lair, and I were out for a day of diving in San Diego with Lora & Chris on the Marissa. We had planned a couple of exploratory dives on "deep-ish" targets that Tyler Stalter had. The first was very promising. It looked to me like a crane. It had a huge [...]
Wrecked in my rEvo 