Shipwrecks and underwater mapping

Enough welcomers from my intro post expressed interest in the projects I'm involved with, and I think I'm okay with the "Guidelines for product endorsement and sponsorship or advertising", so please allow me to introduce a nonprofit that grew out of my hobby diving and research work: SCHUNRS, Sonoma Coast Historical and Undersea Nautical Research Society.  If you wanna know more you can check out our website www.schunrs.org. 

Our mission statement is to advance public knowledge and awareness of Pacific Coast Maritime Cultural Heritage through education, research, and exploration.  As I said in my intro, we work with UC Davis Bodega Marine Lab to help them train their scientific divers with underwater archaeology skills, and we work with Cal State Parks to discover, document, and coastal and underwater maritime cultural sites.  So we're looking for traces of shipwrecks and landings from late 19th C to early 20th C.

We're building a core of divers that work well in rough, cold, low-vis water, but there's not enough safe-diving days a year in many of these reported shipwreck sites to search the areas directly.  Also, with all the exposed and submerged rocks, most surface scan vessels will have some trouble getting in, especially towing extremely expensive scan equipment.  So I've got a Trident 13 Angler outfitted with a Humminbird Helix 7 mega side scan unit with GPS to get into all those somewhat sketchy areas.  The more days I can find someone to yak out there with me, the more days I'll be able to spend mapping out the underwater terrain where we might find shipwreck residue.

This is not treasure hunting!  We will not be disturbing or taking anything, and we will vigorously discourage any doing so.  We are working with archaeologists and we adhere to archaeological principles.  Non-destructive exploration and documentation only!  To the extent we can have confidence that we're not risking the historical "treasures" (brass and wood, not gold!) that still exist, we'll be sharing our discoveries with the public on our website, independent publications, and State Park or Cal State Lands Commission official reports.

So I thought this forum might be filled with cool people that are actively or even passively interested in what we're doing - people that might suggest places to look where fish are abundant and lines get caught often, maybe strange objects seen by others on sidescan or down imaging - people with which we're glad to share the coastal sites and who are knowledgeable about techniques and conditions, etc, etc.  We all know there's safety in numbers and you can't have too many ocean allies!

I look forward to getting to know as many of you as possible, and hopefully meet all the Sonoma Coast members like Tez.  Hey brother, thanks for letting me know about this group!  My yak is already rigged up and ready, so hope to see you out there soon!

Cheers,
John