![]() Here you can hang mid-water, practicing your buoyancy skills, and peer into the deep horizontal crevices. They are at every island and they are always covered with marine life.Īfter 35 feet the wall drops vertical to 55 feet. You’ll find them on beach dives and boat dives. A mini-wall is a rocky underwater vertical drop-off of 8 to 20 feet. What we do have are a lot of fantastic mini-walls. We do have walls they are just not as common. We have to rely rather on geological features to provide us with the vertical drops that excite us so. Because we don’t have coral reefs in California, walls are not as common. Much of this feature in coral reefs is owed to how the reef grows in a vertical fashion over many thousands of years. It also allows us to approach reef life in a different posture that is often more comfortable for the diver and the marine life.Ī true wall dive is a vertical drop of a hundred feet or more. Wall diving gives us a humbling look into the abyss. Wall diving has become popular on coral reefs throughout the world with just reason. Photography: Good wide-angle and close-up. Charter dive boats from Oxnard, Ventura and Santa Barbara frequent this spot. Location: Scorpion Anchorage, Santa Cruz Island.Īccess: Boat only. Because of the wreck's location in Scorpion Anchorage, the waters are usually calm. The bow of the wreck points out to sea and the current, usually mild, runs from bow to stern. The hull still rises quite a distance off the sand and is pocked with holes, some of which once held portholes. It is a several-legged metal structure that resembles a large barstool and is covered with life, including sea stars, chestnut cowries, nudibranchs, and club tipped anemones, tunicates, barnacles and bryozoans. Today, the top of what's left of the Peacock is about 40 feet below the surface. So, all we really know is that a ship that is most probably a WW II minesweeper sank in 60 to 70 feet of water off Scorpion Anchorage, possibly in December 1979. When I followed up with people who were said to be eyewitnesses to the sinking, burning or attempted salvage, they didn't know what they were said to know. Neither one of them, pardon the pun, holds water any better than the Peacock does at present. ![]() Another story is that she had somehow gone aground at Scorpion and when salvagers tried to refloat her, she sank. One said she was being used as a bordello when she burned and sank one night. I heard two tales about the sinking of the Peacock. ![]() How did a ship seized by the Dominican Republic, in the Caribbean, end up off California 10 years later? That's not the only mystery. Although she was said to have been seized by the Dominican Republic in 1969, somehow she supposedly sank off Scorpion Anchorage 10 years later. She was sold again eight years later and renamed the Peacock. In 1960 the ship was bought by a Texan, who renamed her Los Buscaderos. She was reclassified again in 1953 and decommissioned in 1955. In 1947, she was reclassified and named the Hornbill. Launched in 1943, this Peacock earned two battle stars in World War II. In the late 1980s, while researching the book Shipwrecks of Southern California, if the real name of the wreck that sank in Scorpion Anchorage is the Peacock, she may have been a 136-foot long World War II minesweeper with a composition hull. Seventeen species are seen on a regular basis over the course of a year. Out of the 80 species of Whales and Dolphins in the world today, 28 species Have been documented in the Santa Barbara Channel and Southern California Bight. Diablo Anchorage offers one such example at the Diablo Point Cave, which is a good cave divers and is ideal for Introductory cavern diving classes. Unknown to many, this island is home to a very extensive system of underwater Caves and caverns. To the east lies Santa Cruz Island, which offers a bit milder diving conditions. Both parts of the island are available for day trips with certain limitations. The East End of Santa Cruz Island is owned by the National Park Service. The West End of Santa Cruz Island is owned by the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit international membership organization that preserves the plants, animals, and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on our Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive. Santa Cruz is divided up into the West End and the East End. Santa Cruz Island is approximately 24 miles in length and encompasses 77 miles of pristine coastline, including two mountain ranges, a pastoral central valley, ten plant communities, and numerous endemic plants and animals. Santa Cruz Island is the largest and most topographically diverse of the eight Channel Islands.
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