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 [...]
After our ill-fated attempt to dive the caves of north Florida, we needed a Plan B if we were to salvage our trip. Armed with cell phones and hope, the three of us piled into our go-kart of a rental car and started the nine-hour drive north, making calls to dive shops and charter boats [...]
Yesterday, Marissa crew and friends went out to the Point Loma kelp beds to clean up the wrecked sailboat. Armed with lift bags, they were able to remove a ton of hazmat and debris from the sea floor, including sails, batteries, engines, and a bunch of trash. The vessel Pants: not an integral part [...]
I spent Memorial Day diving with my friends at San Diego dive boat Marissa Charters in Wreck Alley and the Point Loma kelp beds. It’s always nice to be out on the boat, but Monday was amazing! We had great weather topside and pretty good visibility out on our dives! HMCS Yukon HMCS Yukon is a Canadian [...]
Our last dive day in Nassau brought sunny, tropical weather once again. However, the ocean had not yet recovered from the storm, and strong currents, coupled with compromised visibility, made diving a little bit difficult. The David Tucker was donated by the Royal Bahamas Defense Force to become an artificial reef. It sits in [...]
Bahamas BBC Wreck In September of 2007, the BBC, with assistance from Stuart Cove’s, purchased and scuttled an old tugboat to study the colonization of artificial reefs for their series “Life.” A contest was held to name the boat, and the winners (a couple from Arizona) won a chance to dive on the newly-sunk wreck, [...]
The Steel Forest is a set of three wrecks that were scuttled between 1997 and 2002. They orient to form a triangle on the sandy bottom in 40-120′ of water, right on the edge of the Tongue of the Ocean, a 6000′-deep ocean trench. The “fake hand on/under a wreck” thing seems [...]
The Anthony Bell is an old Bahamian tugboat, about 90′ long and in about 50′ of water. Care must be taken to avoid not only rusting metal, but also some of the inhabitants of the artificial reef, such as the long-spined sea urchin… … And the lionfish. The Willaurie is a [...]
One of the first dive sites on our Nassau trip was called Twin Sisters. These two smallish oil tankers were donated by Shell and sunk in 2000 to create an artificial reef. They sit in about 80′ of water. We were the first off the dive boat, so we decided to get into the [...]
