Everyone bought scooters and dives from shore now, and its hard to even afford fuel and moorage and maintenance on a bigger charter vessel here. So there are 2 commercial boats left now, the skippers are older, were never serious tech divers, and don't have the knowledge or experience to do our 250ft+ sites.
There are a few private boats, but they're mostly small and not capable of supporting people with giant doubles & bottom stages or even CCRs and 3 BOs. Plus lots of people are into photogrammetry and its not really plausible to do photogrammetry on a 300ft deep, 280ft long ship wreck that is only diveable 6 tides a year. I did a few of them years ago, they were $1000+ dives for 18mins of bottom time back then (2008-2014). Nowadays its hard to even get someone to take a weekday off to dive, nevermind spend that kind of money to do the workup dives.
Pretty much all our 250ft+ sites are all in extreme currents, and can only be done a few times a year. They were mostly dove on OC in the late 1990s and early 2000s. AG moved away to California, and then his successor GUE group leaders continued for a decade but eventually retired and moved to FL. Another group of CCR guys continued diving them from ~2005 to 2018. Their main instructor-leader died of an O2 tox event in about 2016. The rest of that CCR group dissolved thorough deaths (2 /10 are poor odds), the loss of their organizer (their 3rd death), had medical issues, or finally hung up their fins.
The experience and judgement to know the exact time to splash, coordinate with the Coast Guard to shut down a shipping lane for diving operations at 9:38am on some very specific weekday in July, a skipper who works with the divers as part of the team, all that is fading from this area fast. There's always tons of talk here on SB about gear choices, and sometimes classes, but the talk about charters is mostly whining about how exorbitant they are. There's a persistent assumption that a charter will a) exist and b) actually know how to put divers on the harder sites. That's not a good assumption.
The dives /wrecks are still out there, another generation of divers could set them as a goal. They would need to work up to them and find a regular motivated skipper & boat willing to learn how to do it with them. I don't see that happening anytime soon however.
