Dive Report: Wreck of the Santa Clara

Back in January, Nick put together a trip to an unknown schooner that no one in our immediate group had ever been on. As many people know, the weather and swell has been fairly uncooperative with regards to diving this winter, and the initial charter of 8 divers was canceled. Scheduling conflicts forced us to split into two separate charters, and the first of those two was canceled.

Yesterday, the final "and then there were three" of us (Chris, Kim and I) met up with Danny Howard to greet heavy fog but calm seas. We're finally diving this thing!

We descend down the anchor line and our hearts sink a bit when we see it flatten out onto sand at 160 feet. We follow the chain to the anchor, which is sitting no more than 5 feet from the wreck!

We find a wooden hull, fairly intact structure including ribbing, one deck above the hull but pretty squat (can't be more than about 10' relief on average) and pointy prow (almost like a clipper). I didn't see any masts, though it had a short bowsprit. It was surprisingly long. I was expecting a 20-30 foot wreck, but this was closer 200. It's full of large fish life (lingcod, cabazon and the like).


The viz on the bottom was a good 15-20 feet with temperatures in the high 40s.

Dive one we scootered up and down the length of the ship on the starboard side. Did about 25 minutes at 150 feet. I killed my stage bottle (Kim finished hers off about 6 minutes before me but was in larger doubles, Chris was using only double 130s) and we headed up for deco. There was substantial current on deco and the viz closed down to about 5 feet. Coming off the trigger we'd lose the line in a few seconds, so we were quite active the whole time.

After some of Danny’s famous surface-interval soup, Chris borrowed about 10CF of backgas from Kim and I so we were all matched for the second dive.

This time we scootered up the length of the ship on the port side. Current had picked up substantially on the bottom, and we let it carry us back to the anchor (no scootering or kicking other than for maneuvering). There's a lot of free floating rope, but no nets or other entanglement hazards.

To make things interesting, Chris thought it might be fun to do the second dive with no faceplate or diaphragm on his 50% regulator, so we ran a lost-bottle schedule with Kim and I taking turns donating. Fortunately we all had O2 bottles in addition to our 50%, and we ran a shorter dive (20 at 150), so deco was all good.

Chris shot video with his Sierra CSI body, and has shared it at Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/10336153