Due to the distance to this wreck, and its location on a treacherous part of the CA coastline, this is only the second time I have been able to get some good footage of this wreck with my camera sled, after 5 attempts so far. Since this is filmed with a sled you can see the effect of the large swell this day. I have heave compensation to mechanically absorb a lot of the up/down action from the boat, but its still a problem at times. There was a 6-7 foot swell this day. Regardless, I was able to edit together some watchable video of this historic (and very interesting) ship wreck.
NOAA has good info on the wreck here: U.S. Coast Guard Cutter McCulloch | Office of National Marine Sanctuaries
Great video! There’s a few shots that I think that the swells might actually improve the video a little since it adds a little bit of action to the scene.
Do you ever worry about getting the sled snagged on something? It looks like you are extremely close to it and these a lot of jagged objects in the area.
Thanks! Yea in some cases the yoyo effect can add a little something, but usually it is just annoying when your trying to get a good shot of something. The sled was designed for towing slowly, and it works really good for that since it is not just hanging straight down, so the heave action from the boat is much less in that case.
I am pretty confident about not hanging up on anything down there because I actually have 7 cameras I can watch (5 at one time) so the situational awareness is much better than what you see in the one HD video. I have 2 video feeds, one screen is a quad view that can show any combination of my cameras, and the other is an HD feed of any camera (usually the live feed from the HD camera). I built special boards to mux the video inputs. When I started using this thing in wrecks that was a requirement since you need to know whats all around, above and below you all the time. I also am able to position my boat very precisely with my homebrew DP.
Im slowly getting a new system together to fly an ROV with the sled, where the sled will supply most of the light and the ROV does the filming.
