New airplane wreck (Hellcat?) off Pt Mugu, California (180 fsw)

[beldridg]

I've been trying to go out diving with Danny Graham at Triton Diving for quite some time. We are both wreck diving fanatics and he has an amazing boat for technical diving. We finally made that happen on Jan 9th during a short weather window. @California Diver had done some bathymetric research and we had about 6 targets to go scan. Many of them are definitely viable and will require follow-on trips to dive and investigate.

We dove the first target in 180 fsw which turned out to be an airplane. Current analysis makes us believe it is a F6F Hellcat that was possibly used as a drone. All of the details are at the post below:

Diving Targets in Oxnard, CA with Triton Diving

Summary Tyler “the magician” Stalter has done it once again – we found another airplane wreck based on his bathymetric research. Danny Graham operates the Triton out of Channel Is…

wreckedinmyrevo.com

We have a lot of "work" to do in that area. The deeper areas are relatively untouched and unexplored and are a new frontier for us.

Below is a picture of the 18 cylinder radial engine:

Regards,

- brett

 

[broncobowsher]

I need to get back to California diving.

 

[Cthippo]

What kind of sidescan are they using to verify these?

 

[beldridg]

What kind of sidescan are they using to verify these?

In this case, on this boat, we don't have sidescan.

We initially identify possible dive targets based on public bathymetry data and then we go look at each of the targets and use a "traditional" sonar to look at the relief, fish concentrations, etc. to determine if it deserves a dive or not.

He had a cool software GIS & mapping solution called TimeZero that we were using as well.

- brett