On November 25, 1968 the M/V TRIPLE CROWN sank off the coast of Santa Barbara while handling anchors for the offshore drilling rig BLUEWATER II. Sixteen of the twenty-five crew were rescued. The next day divers recovered seven bodies from the sunken vessel, and the two remaining crew were never found.
I used my towed camera sled to film this. The sled uses a handful of BR parts, including a couple thrusters to control the heading. This wreck is in about 280’ of water, and the area it is located in usually has very poor visibility, but this day was very good so I put together a video since you can actually see a good deal of the wreck.
Do you feel like controlling the camera makes you able to better appreciate being there, or is it something of a distraction until you can sit back and watch the footage afterwards?
I get a pretty good feel for what I am seeing from the live video feeds. I have 7 cameras running on the sled that I can watch live. I have 2 screens to watch, one is usually set up with a quad view showing forward, left, right, and down or rear cameras for situational awareness. And the other screen shows the live feed from the go-pro camera. There is a forward and downward facing go pro. The downward one I usually set up to take stills at a 2 second interval.
Of course I always see new things when I watch the 4k footage after the work is finished. Actually in this video, there are 2 parts where I can barely make out the the ships name on the bow, and on the stern, but only when watching the raw footage on an actual 4K monitor.
While filming I am pretty focused on maneuvering the camera around the obstacles and getting as good of a shot as possible. The boat is positioning itself with DP when I drop on wrecks like this, so I was actually able to film all of this solo on this day, but I prefer to have a deckhand or two in case things get weird for some reason.
