More Shipwrecks at Lake Coeur d'Alene

Adventure Log
1

I have been really tired after work for the last 2 weeks, so I haven’t been too motivated to do a lot of video editing and I forgot to keep everyone updated on my adventures, so this is a dump of my last 2 weekends of shipwreck hunting.

I just placed an order for a DeepVision DE680D Side Scan towfish, so hopefully my underwater exploration capabilities will be exponentially increased in a few weeks. Right now I’m finding these shipwrecks just by scuba youtube videos, so it’s a very slow and unreliable process with very little information.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I now use the “Rainbow” custom gradient for the Ping360 made by @EliotBR. You can download it here: Ping Viewer - Custom Gradients - Blue Robotics Products / Ping Sonar Devices - Blue Robotics Community Forums
I recorded a quick demonstration video going through most/all of the gradients: Blue Robotics Ping360 Custom Color Gradients Testing/Demonstration - YouTube.

Shipwrecks: Colfax and Bonanza

The GoPro had an SD card error so it’s not used. The ROV was accidentally in manual mode for the first part of the dive so that’s why it was so hard for me to control, and it took me a few minutes to figure out why it felt weird. I’m not sure about the the names of the wrecks and am basing my information on the video listed below.

Highlights:
0:00 Start
3:19 Arrive at bottom
8:06 Colfax
17:54 Bonanza
33:51 Tether almost snagged
35:37 Exploring back in the other direction to see if there’s any other wrecks
44:14 some frame object on the right side of the screen. I didn’t see when piloting
45:35 Water pump
47:25 Dock bumper strip
48:31 Avoiding the rope entanglement hazard
1:00:00 Section of steamboat? I didn’t explore it too closely since visibility wasn’t great and I didn’t want to get the tether snagged on it.
1:06:27 Playing with sonar while the excess tether gets spooled back in.

Found these wrecks from a dive video that someone made: Steamboat Graveyard, Lake Coeur d'Alene, ID - YouTube

Shipwreck: Georgie Oaks

Looking for the Georgie Oaks. There was a ton of deadheads floating around. There was one right under the boat when when I was pulling the anchor up.

Highlights:
0:00 Start
5:55 Start to see what’s left of the Georgie Oaks
8:43 Group of bass
14:38 Looking at cable hull bracing
16:44 Bow
17:53 Steel plating
23:00 Exploring around to see what’s else is there
37:06 Big bass

Shipwreck: Cougar 2

Trying to find a wreck that was supposed to be here. We think it’s called the Cougar 2. I didn’t explore too much since the visibility was ‘bad’ and silt was getting stirred up very easy. I’m still paranoid about the tether or ROV getting snagged on something. This was the first time that the Ping360 could see a shipwreck before I could, probably because the other wrecks were sitting on a slope.

Highlights:
0:00 start
1:31 Big Fish
5:02 Bottom of cliff
7:50 Chair
8:59 First sonar contact from the wreck
11:00 Find the ship
13:08 Bow
15:31 Stern
17:22 Attempting to look in the hole
29:09 Surfacing to see the position and end the dive.

Shipwreck: Sand Star

We knew about it from this video: Dive on Sunken boat Sandstar, Lake Coeur d'Alene ID - YouTube
We finally found it after 2 failed attempts. I think we were a little too far North East on our other attempts. I haven’t uploaded those videos since I was just driving around looking for a sonar return. I had the ping duration maxed on this attempt to put as much sonar energy into the water to get the best return, and it seemed to work since it picked it up around 120’ away.

Highlights:
0:00 Sonar contact bearing 246
1:57 Switching to Sector Scan
4:15 Visual confirmation
6:07 Lights off to test ambient light levels
8:37 Inspection sticker, looks like 1979
18:41 Name badge
28:04 Ending dive to check the real location of the wreck
28:33 external view of the ROV driving back to the boat

Little Bass Cam

I put my tripod down to watch a group of little bass swim around. The ROV makes a few appearances in the first couple of minutes

Exploration: Outside 11th Street Marina

There was supposed to be a shipwreck in the area, but I didn’t find it.
My boat location was roughly 47.664126, -116.771698

Highlights:
0:00 start
3:27 Group of fish
5:22 Tons of fish
9:24 Fish again

Exploration: Northeast of Kid Island

Seeing what was there. I kept getting confused on the ROV position so I surfaced a few times. It felt like I was going in circles.
Highlights:
0:00 start
0:47 Anchor on rock shelf near edge. It slid off and the boat started drifting.
2:51 North tip of Island
12:59 Big bass
17:02 Boiler that sits on the East side of the Island
21:42 Cable

Exploration: Beauty Bay

Exploring somewhere around 47.613366, -116.684034 just to see what was there. I’m not sure what happened to the GoPro video files. I think I accidentally deleted them.
Highlights:
0:00 start
3:48 Concrete road barrier
5:49 Visible thermocline silt layer
9:37 Mud stirred up from catfish swimming away
10:59 Catfish
12:42 Sonar contact (It’s a log)
13:15 Catfish running away again
14:19 Catfish sitting
19:40 Little Bass
25:00 Bass intercepts me

5 Likes
2

Super cool to see some more dives - looks like you’ve been pretty busy! :smiley:

Cool! Do you feel like it made a particular difference in use compared to the inbuilt “Thermal blue” theme?

I’m curious, was there a particular reason you kept the Thermal blue for the altimeter display? Maybe the midpoint intensity is generally a good indicator of the lake bottom in which case the bright yellow midpoint makes it act kind of like a diverging scale. I might have to try a few of those to see how it goes…

I’d be interested to play around a bit with the display of the data if you’re happy to share some of it. It’s stored as .bin files in the Sensor_Log folder, which should be in the same PingViewer folder in your documents as the Waterfall_Gradients :slight_smile:

Nice - keen to see this :slight_smile:

I’ve been looking a bit more into the whole colour schemes rabbit hole and it seems like the perceptually uniform/linear ones that I’ve been using were made using a slightly sub-par colour space. There’s a more recent one that fixes some of the issues in that one, so I’m planning to at some point try recreating the existing ones and making some new ones with that colour space to see if it’s possible to get even better differentiation displays (although I imagine there won’t be a heap of difference - it’s mostly just a bit of fun in my own time at this point).

On this, @patrickelectric had a play recently with adding some processing to Qt video components, and found he could do something similar to the processing I mentioned in your previous post, but which runs faster. QGC is built using Qt, but apparently doesn’t use the default Qt video component so it might not be easily transferrable, but it would definitely be cool if we could make a real-time setting that can help improve the camera stream visibility for everyone :slight_smile:

I really enjoyed seeing the water motion in the Little Bass Cam video - it’s super interesting to see the fish interacting with the water as it flows. Was also cool to see the ROV appear at 2:18, and again with lights on at 5:00. Did the tripod get knocked over at 32:30, or was that just you back to collect it? :slight_smile:

The lake must be huge, there are so many shipwrecks! Always fun to see the interesting structures and the plethora of fish.

3

I like it since it seems to have a little more contrast than the Thermal Blue and can make some returns ‘pop out’ a little more in a busy area. I haven’t gone back to Thermal Blue since I tried it.

I did try to use Rainbow for the altimeter, but went back to Thermal Blue because I thought that Rainbow was too colorful and could become distracting. I only use the waterfall to back up the estimated number. I might try it again. It’s probably going to be a couple weeks before I use the ROV gain.

You are welcome to have whatever data that you want. I’m getting ready to go to work right now so I can upload some from my laptop when I get home later and have more time.
@EliotBR Are there any dives in particular that you want the files from, or should I choose a couple?

The camera was knocked over by a wave. The water motion was throwing the ROV around, so I didn’t do as many ‘action shots’ of the ROV exploring around as I was planning.

I liked the little bubbles from the thrusters at 5:45 when I was trying to use full vertical thrusters to ‘blast off’ and attract the fish by stirring up the bottom.

Wikipedia says that it’s roughly 25 miles long and 3 miles wide. They used to disposed of any unwanted ships by removing anything valuable from it and then burning it, so there is a ton of stuff to look at. Right now I’m limited by either random exploration or youtube videos that show the locations of stuff, which is why I decided to invest in a nice side scan system so I can find my own wrecks.

4

Alright, cool - it should make differentiation more equal across all levels, so glad that seems to be the case :slight_smile:

Fair enough - rainbow is perhaps more useful for estimating bottom material/density rather than just a distance number estimate. Possibly worth using an option with fewer hues, like BGYW or Fire.

The most important component for checking display option effectiveness is variety. If possible it’d be good to have some scans of different materials/surface types, at different scales/distances, and ideally some with multiple types in the same scan, although that comparison can also be done by comparing some separate scans that were using the same settings.

No need to spend too much time searching for files that match that though - if there are a couple of dives you remember being relatively diverse then that should be more than fine, especially given real data can be predominantly used as a ‘realism check’, after which simulated data with similar properties can likely work just as effectively :slight_smile:

Haha, almost like a cute underwater version of a jetpack :slight_smile:

Ahh, that would make sense I suppose.

Fair enough.

Have you been keeping track of the GPS locations of the wrecks you’ve found so far? Could be cool to make a map with pinpoints, known information, and video links or something as you find and explore more. I’d be happy to help with that in some free time if you were interested - could grow into a decent project that others can either build on or replicate for places they inspect :slight_smile:

The size, temperature, and depth data may even be of use scientifically, along with other sensor data that may get measured down the line, like salinity or whatnot.

1 Like
5

Looks like I have 172 files going back to last October. I could upload all of them if you are interested. It’s a little bit of work figuring out which file goes with each video since there’s a lot of days that I have done multiple dives.

Here’s a few Ping .bin replay files from the above videos:
Sandstar wreck video: 20210821-131017195.bin - Google Drive

Colfax and Bonanza wrecks: 20210806-082127877.bin - Google Drive

Beauty Bay: 20210806-172717521.bin - Google Drive

Edit: Here’s the folder with all of my files: btrue BlueROV2 Ping Data - Google Drive

1 Like
6

Nah, that’s likely too much to work with in a meaningful capacity, and not worth your time/effort to determine what they correspond to.

Thanks! I’ve downloaded and labelled them, will have a play over the next week or two in my own time :slight_smile:

Haha, well, hopefully someone can make use of them for something - it’s quite a lot of data…

7

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Ping Viewer - Custom Gradients

8

My dad is interested in the steamships and did a lot of research, which is hard since no one was interested in keeping records during the time period that the steamships were active. We can’t even find information on the techniques to build them.

Here’s some of his quick notes so far:

Georgie Oaks:

image

image

Name: Georgie Oakes
(Though of as the queen of Coeur D’alene lake)

Date built: probably 1890 could have been 1892. Built by Sorenson and Johnson for the Northern Pacific Railroad. Construction supervised by Capt Irwin B. Sanders. The cabins and superstructure from the Coeur d’Alene were used on a new hull.

Size: probably 163.5 feet long and 30 feet beam. 150 feet long not counting the fantail and 28 feet beam. Three decks with wheelhouse on top.

Capacity: 100 tons of ore

Propulsion: Stern wheel twin steam engines 16 inch bore, and 72 inch stroke coal fired in 1903. (probably changed to coal) Capable of 18 MPH. Boiler relief valves were 150 PSI. on account has it burning wood

Modifications: rebuilt in 1908, removed from service in 1917, operated intermittently until 1920. Possibly rebuilt and modified several times.

Owned by: Northern Pacific Railroad. 1908 NPRR condemned the Georgie Oaks as unseaworthy. Bought by White Star Navigation and was rebuilt.

Active:1906-1938

Uses: ore, supplies and passenger/ excursion boat.

Sunk: Burned at Fourth of July celebration in 1927 at City Beach. The burning vessel drifted to close to the Winton Storage Dock and had to be put out. The blackened hull finally sank.

Location: 47.667681 -116.799178. around 25 feet what is left is badly damaged possibly from log salvaging in the area.

Colfax

image

Date built: 1902

Size: 100 feet long shallow draft steamer built by the Johnson Boat works. Sister ship to the Spokane.

Propulsion: Propeller

Owned by: George Reynolds and E.D. McDonals

Uses: could carry 50 tons of ore. Built to serve the flourishing white pine trade

Bonanza

(Unknown picture probably similar to Bonanza)
image

Date built: In service March 1908

Size: tug boat

Owned by: Red Collar Lines

1 Like