Tag: oil rigs
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Getting Riggy on Eureka
The silence of my rebreather allows me to hear every hydraulic hiss, every crash as steel collides with steel, the sounds of industry happening above the surface. I catch myself wondering whether the fish are anchovy or sardine, realizing that I have been contemplating the question for several minutes, lazily resolving the taxonomical conundrum with…
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13 More Photos from Diving the Oil Rigs and the Wreck of the Olympic
Another dive trip to the oil rigs off Long Beach came and went recently, with the typical trifecta of sites: the wreck of the Olympic, the Eureka rig, and the Ellen-Elly twin rigs. The swell prediction leading up to the trip was not encouraging, and surface conditions the day of the trip did not bring…
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Tech Diving Catalina Island and the California Oil Rigs
Southern California Tech Diving with Ocean Research Group This past weekend, I attended my first Ocean Research Group technical dive trip on the Sand Dollar out to Catalina Island, California. As a fledgling SoCal tech diver, it was pretty cool to do some “big kid” deep dives under the guidance of experienced divers and instructors. I’m also…
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Diving the California Oil Rigs, Part 3
(See Diving the California Oil Rigs, Part 1 and Diving the California Oil Rigs, Part 2) Above is a male sheephead, a common game fish in California, and below are a pair of females. Fun fact: all sheephead are born female, and eventually change to males later in life. Here’s a Lingcod: A scorpionfish:…
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Diving the California Oil Rigs, Part 2
(See Diving the California Oil Rigs, Part 1 here.) This is the Spanish Shawl, a nudibranch (type of sea slug) common to Southern California. It’s tiny, only about one or two inches long. The orange appendages on its back are called cerata, which assist both in respiration and in digestion. They also store the stinging…
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Diving the California Oil Rigs, Part 1
(This is a continuation of my previous post on the California oil rigs.) The platforms are formidable structures both above and below the water. The water was green and murky at the rigs this weekend, with visibility in the 15-foot range. The vis did start to open up below about 100 feet (our maximum depths…