I recently headed down to the Keys to hit some of the wrecks down there. I was shooting with an Olympus SP-350, a jerryrigged Sea&Sea MMII lens and a Sealife DC350 Strobe. A few shots my girlfriend took with a Sealife DC800.
All told we did 4 dives over two days on the Vandenberg. We had pretty good conditions all around. There were very light seas so the ride out was pleasant and visiblity was good on the wreck. However, there was a bit of current. If one let go of the wreck you cold be blown off pretty easily. However there were plenty of places to hold on and it's possible to use the wreck to block the current if you've planned your dives correctly.
Enough of my BS here's the photos
The wreck sits at about 140 feet but you can reach the top of the superstructure at 50 feet or so.
The first dive we tied in just forward of the bridge on the large lookout post. It's pretty clearly visible from the above photos. After that we descended down to the bridge itself and entered through the collapsed roof. The explosions which they used to sank the boat caused some plate buckling. Now I'm not really doing deep wreck penetration in here. We pretty much stayed in the daylight zone that way we always had an easy way out of the wreck in case of an emergency. If I did not see ambient light and an exit in a room I did not go in.
I just like this shot. You can see the air pockets created by divers bubbles in the ceiling and the reflection they are creating. This picture actually shows off the deficiency in my photo abilities. I could not make the camera see what I saw with my naked eye
You can actually see some of the Cyrillic writing used as set dressing for the B-horror flick Virus. Coincidentally we had two Russians onboard our dive boat that translated for us. Most of the writing says things like Caution and Restricted Area in really bad grammar.
On the next dive we decided to head a bit more to the mid-ship area and check out the decks around the first satellite dish.
I had strobe trouble the whole trip so I had to photoshop the hell out of this photo to make it turn out.
All told we did 4 dives over two days on the Vandenberg. We had pretty good conditions all around. There were very light seas so the ride out was pleasant and visiblity was good on the wreck. However, there was a bit of current. If one let go of the wreck you cold be blown off pretty easily. However there were plenty of places to hold on and it's possible to use the wreck to block the current if you've planned your dives correctly.
Enough of my BS here's the photos
The wreck sits at about 140 feet but you can reach the top of the superstructure at 50 feet or so.
The first dive we tied in just forward of the bridge on the large lookout post. It's pretty clearly visible from the above photos. After that we descended down to the bridge itself and entered through the collapsed roof. The explosions which they used to sank the boat caused some plate buckling. Now I'm not really doing deep wreck penetration in here. We pretty much stayed in the daylight zone that way we always had an easy way out of the wreck in case of an emergency. If I did not see ambient light and an exit in a room I did not go in.
I just like this shot. You can see the air pockets created by divers bubbles in the ceiling and the reflection they are creating. This picture actually shows off the deficiency in my photo abilities. I could not make the camera see what I saw with my naked eye
You can actually see some of the Cyrillic writing used as set dressing for the B-horror flick Virus. Coincidentally we had two Russians onboard our dive boat that translated for us. Most of the writing says things like Caution and Restricted Area in really bad grammar.
On the next dive we decided to head a bit more to the mid-ship area and check out the decks around the first satellite dish.
I had strobe trouble the whole trip so I had to photoshop the hell out of this photo to make it turn out.
