Technical Scuba Diving
It has been another interesting year. Last year I posted a Top 10 Diving Recap so I thought I would do the same for 2021. I started private pilot lessons near the end of this year and I started reading Fate Is The Hunter which is a memoir by Ernest Gann about the early years [...]
Background After we did our dive on the UB-88, we moved to another close-by wreck site that has traditionally gone by the name "Yesteryear." If I remember correctly, according to Ray Arntz, the moniker is based upon what fisherman used to call the site. This specific wreck is a bit of a mystery that we [...]
Yeah, I'm runnin' down a dreamThat never would come to meWorkin' on a mystery, goin' wherever it leadsI'm runnin' down a dreamTom Petty I've dreamed of diving the Vammen and the Burns for a very long time -- just not both on the same day! This is a story of what is probably the most [...]
Background The UB88 team first located and dove the UB88 sub in 2003. They did multiple dives on the wreck and produced both still pictures and videos. At some point, Gary Fabian took frames from the videos shot by John Walker and created a photo mosaic of the wreck: UB88 Sub Photo Mosaic (Copyright 2007 [...]
Background It has been a long time since I dove the UB-88 and I had definitely missed it. I think it is one of the coolest wrecks in Southern California. My previous dive on the UB88 was December 10, 2020 and the visibility was soooo bad at depth that Justin and I couldn't even find [...]
Background We are relatively confident that we have located and identified the wreck of the Mercator in Santa Monica Bay. At this point, we believe that we are the first people to dive and identify the wreck. After I did an initial dive to investigate and document the wreck and a second dive with Tyler [...]
Tyler Stalter and I are very confident (99+%) that we have identified the origins and name of the un-identified wreck site that I dove back in July 2020 with Ray Arntz & Kyaa Heller on the Sundiver. We believe that it is the fishing vessel Nightingale that sank on Sept 9, 1930. The identification is [...]
History The Olympic II started life as the Star of France which was a 258' long, three-mast sailing ship built in 1877 by Harland and Wolff of Belfast, Ireland. I won't detail the entire history since the CA Wreck Divers site does an excellent job of that. Interestingly enough, just like the Santa Clara ship [...]
Background The Ace 1 name can be a little confusing. It is also known as the "Upside Down Wreck" or by the original ship's name which was the LCI 735. There is also the "A.C.E." wreck off Dana Point which is a fishing vessel which has a similar name but is completely unrelated. So, when [...]
After we dove the Santa Clara, we headed north to the Jenny Lynne. In many ways, it is the exact opposite of the Santa Clara wreck. Instead of a disintegrated, wooden ship that sunk many decades ago, it is a steel hulled fishing vessel that sank in 2003 and is largely intact. Background The Jenny [...]