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Homer

Welcome to NJScuba.net, a website dedicated to exploring the New Jersey / New York region underwater -- "Wreck Valley". Here you will find information on dive sites, marine biology, artifacts and activities, gear and training, and many other subjects.

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I've been working on my slideshow WordPress plugin, and I think it is about finished. This took just a few minutes to do, with no problems:

The Mohawk

The port side of the hull near the bow. The lower part still stands, while the upper part has collapsed.
Fallen hull ribs near the bow.
A large winch and machinery, perhaps for the anchors.
Empty rivet holes on hull plates now lying scattered across the bottom. The curved opening at lower-left looks like it might once have held a porthole.
Rear axle, differential, leaf spring, rubber tire and wheel from a truck, near the bow. The cast iron differential casing has rotted away, but the steel spline gears remain.
An old flathead-six truck engine, with one of the front wheels just behind. You can make out the intake runner, minus carburetor.
Amidships, the front (north) side of the half-buried boiler. There is a second boiler in front of this one, collapsed.
Amidships, the front (north) side of the half-buried boiler. There is a second boiler in front of this one, collapsed.
The back (south) side of the remaining boiler, showing caps for fire tubes. The front side of the boiler is solid. Note the large crack in the corner.
Looking forward at the main reduction gears, just behind the boiler.

These huge gears converted the high-speed of the steam turbines to the much lower speed of the propellers. From the geometry of the exposed portion, I estimate that they are approximately twelve feet in diameter, with about two feet exposed. That places the prop shaft about four feet below the sand, and the bottom of the hull more than 10 feet down. These gears would be connected to the propeller shaft, and surrounded by a casing and smaller drive gears. See marine engines for details of such an installation.
Close-up, with some of the marine growth wiped away to show the diagonal teeth.
Moving aft (south) from the boiler along a crumpled framework. This reminds me of an overhead monorail, and is easily big enough to swim under.
More car parts, near the stern.
The aft port side of the wreck is collapsed inward. This is plainly evident in the side-scan image above.
Some kind of heavy machinery.
The Mohawk is mostly just an incomprehensible jumble.

It takes a lot of diving to learn your way around this mess. I've been diving it and studying it about once a week all season (2004), and it's starting to make sense. For the casual diver without such experience, a wreck reel is strongly advised. If nothing else, you can use it as an upline once you realize that not using it from the start was a mistake.
A scene at the extreme stern end of the wreck. For scale, the 'pipe' in the scene is actually a deck support, and is over a foot in diameter.

The Algol

The bow, looking down over the rail of the starboard 40mm gun platform.
Looking down from the forward winch house at a doorway on deck, starboard side. Railings and catwalks are rusting away fast.
The cut-off mid-ships winch house, from the port side ...
... and from some other side.
Looking down on ventilators while swimming aft. I'm not certain, but I think this is the small deckhouse on the port side near the mid-ships winch house. Marine snow streaks across these long exposures like driving rain.
Looking down into the #3 cargo hold.
Various things on the roof of the superstructure, more ventilators, I think. Many an AOW student should recognize this spot.
The cut-off smokestack, from the port side.
The cut-off smokestack, from in front. A small person could fit down the circular hole in the middle.
Looking down off the port bridge wing at the deck below. The leading cunner swam up and bit me a right after I took this picture. They really are little bastards.

After about a year of stable operation, I fixed a few minor bugs in my WordPress theme and plugins, mostly in the back end. The only thing noticeable is that I got the broken tide tables working again. Other than that, the system seems pretty mature, I can't think of any new features to add, and my code seems to be pretty resilient against changes in the WordPress core. In other words, try as they might, they have not broken my extensions in a long time.


Ha ha ha, I spelled its name wrong. But it caught it!

I've been using the browser extension Grammarly to check spelling and punctuation in the site. This is a big job that will take a week or two in small pieces, but is actually not difficult. In fact, it requires very little thinking, it is almost mechanical. I had the necessary functionality to do this quickly and efficiently already built into the WordPress back-end, this is the first time I am using it.


A thousand monkeys at a thousand computers would be guaranteed to produce WordPress. In fact, they already have.

In a WordPress site like this, the look and feel are determined by the 'theme'. Working on the theme seems to be a never-ending task. First, I keep thinking of new features, and almost everything is baked into the theme, rather than in a stand-alone 'plugin'. When a feature is built into the theme, it can't be accidentally disabled.


Featured

I started this site way back in 1996 for my new hobby. In all that time, I gladly carried the annual cost of hosting and domain name. But it's time to admit that my diving years are over, and my interest has waned.

I have kept the site up as a service to the diving community, but I don't know how much longer that makes sense.

If you would like to make a small donation to help defray that cost, it would be greatly appreciated, and help to keep the site online.

Simply click the PayPal button below or anywhere else you find it:


Fishing vessel Susan Rose was bound from her home port of Port Judith, Rhode Island to Manasquan to begin fluke fishing off New Jersey. Instead, just before 5AM * Friday November 17, 2023, she ran aground approximately 350 yards ** south of the inlet centerline. All four crew were safely gotten off. After de-fueling and de-watering, she was successfully pulled off the beach on the second attempt, at about 2AM Sunday morning, after rolling in the rough surf for almost two days. The vessel rapidly filled with water, capsized and sank, a few hundred yards ** off the beach, in approximately 50 feet of water. Again, everyone was gotten off safely.

* about 90 minutes after low tide
** news reporters said half a mile, but ... well, reporters


The Susan Rose has been raised and is presently at a dock in Point Pleasant. Hopefully it will be sunk on a New York reef, for all to use.

Dragger Susan Rose Raised One Year After Sinking

National Fisherman Staff
Mid-Atlantic Northeast News
November 22, 2024

Resolve Marine's RMG 400 lift barge raised the trawler Susan Rose from where it sank off Point Pleasant Beach, N.J. in November 2023. Jersey Shore Fire Response Photo.

The Rhode Island steel trawler Susan Rose was raised from the sea floor this week a year after sinking off Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., removed as a hazard to navigation.


I turned on the strictest and most verbose error reporting in both WordPress and PHP, and got a pile of non-critical error messages. It was pretty ugly. So I spent a while and fixed them all; actually, it didn't take that long. I don't like to be sloppy, just because the system can tolerate an error doesn't mean you should leave it.

Stubbed-in all the remaining extra files in Dive Sites and Artificial Reefs, and organized them, with Contents pages listing everything. Then I did the same for the Home section. Now up to 660 (blank) pages. Next - Biology.


Don't know how I missed this, but back in August, Stu retired and sold Dutch Springs to a developer who plans to put two warehouses on the property:

click to enlarge

As you can see, one warehouse fills the small wooded area (lower-left) that was basically unused, while the other obliterates the entire area between the quarry and the road. This leaves no room for parking or facilities. The property is approximately 95 acres, but more than half of that is water.

Sad, but Stu built the place and ran it for 40 years, and he has a right to retire. As we all know, anything having to do with diving brings insurance into the mix, and thus far no other solution has been found.

The quarry will be fenced-off, and Dutch Springs will enter the history books.


While looking over an old hard drive, I found this newspaper article ...

Secrets of the Deep

The Times [Trenton]
01/13/02
By JEFF TRENTLY
Staff Writer

Ed

They peel off their shoes, strip off their socks, their shirts, their pants.


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YP-389
Sister YP-389, built in the same yard at the same time to the same specs
Type:
shipwreck, patrol boat, U.S. Navy, converted trawler
Built:
1941, Quincy MA, USA, as Salem
Specs:
( 102 x 22 ft ) 301 tons, 21 crew
Sunk:
Wednesday May 20, 1942
collision with collier Jason - 6 casualties
Depth:
40 ft

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