Intro This will be my fourth Top 10 Dive list since I started the tradition in 2020. I honestly thought I would never top 2022 which included wreck diving trips to Croatia & Malta and discovering numerous new wrecks here in Southern California. Happily, I was wrong. 🙂 I'll say it again this year: I [...]
Tag: SBD Dauntless
Airplane Junkyard Part II & III (Pt Loma — 175-230 fsw)
WW II Airplane Junk Yard (Point Loma, CA — 200-240 fsw)
Background During my ill-fated trip to Bikini Atoll, we ended up diving quite a few WW II airplanes that had been dumped near Kwajalein Atoll. Tyler and I had seen some ROV footage of something similar off Point Loma and we decided to charter the Marissa with Lora and Chris to investigate and perform a [...]
SBD-3 Dauntless (San Diego — 195 fsw)
A tragic day August 24th, 1943 was a beautiful, clear, and typical sunny day in San Diego. US Navy radio man third class Richard Harold Moore's wife had arrived a few days earlier and they were on their delayed honeymoon. Everything should have been right in Richard's world at 10:30am that day, but it was [...]
Project : SBD “Dauntless” Photogrammetry Model — (Pt Loma, 200 fsw)
Background The Scout / Dive Bomber (SBD) was key in the Battle of Midway in June 1942. It was the main aircraft carrier-based scout/dive bomber from mid-1940 through mid-1944. It had the nickname of "Slow But Deadly." One of the distinguishing features of the Dauntless are the air brakes with perforated holes on the trailing [...]