Ghost Diving USA

Website

Ghost Diving USA Ghost Diving USA is an official 503(c) charity located in Los Angeles, CA.

That yellow line is what brings the net up.One end gets tied into a bundle of cut net on the bottom. The other end goes ...
10/16/2026

That yellow line is what brings the net up.

One end gets tied into a bundle of cut net on the bottom. The other end goes to a lift bag. Between them they move something that four people could not drag across a deck. It gets coiled by hand before every dive so that it runs clean when somebody is a hundred feet down waiting on it.

Most of this job is rope and checks and the same conversation about who is going where. The diving is the short part.

Thank you . The shirt gets a lot of wear around here.

Follow along if the unglamorous half is the half you like.

📸Photo by Angie Biggs

Everything in this picture is alive except the net.Those red gorgonians growing off the wreck, Leptogorgia chilensis, to...
10/13/2026

Everything in this picture is alive except the net.

Those red gorgonians growing off the wreck, Leptogorgia chilensis, took years to reach that size. So did the sponges, and the low turf you can see across everything behind the diver. The Midnight Hour went down in 2011 and the ocean has been quietly turning her into a reef ever since.

That is exactly why the net has to come off slowly. Cut it wrong and you have taken the reef with it.

So it goes in pieces, one section at a time, with somebody watching what is underneath before anything moves.

Save this for the next person who tells you a wreck is just junk on the seafloor.

📸Photo by Daniel Pio

Look closely at this one.That is a piece of net we pulled off the Midnight Hour last month, and the pale coral and the b...
10/10/2026

Look closely at this one.

That is a piece of net we pulled off the Midnight Hour last month, and the pale coral and the brown sponge growing through the mesh have been there long enough to settle in properly. Give a lost net enough years on the bottom and it stops looking like gear and starts looking like structure.

It is still a net. It is still catching things. That is the hard part of this work, and it is exactly why we go through every section by hand for anything alive before it leaves the dock.

The life comes off and goes back in the water. The net goes to a facility to be recycled into new material.

Tag someone who would want to see this one up close.

Photo by Angie Biggs

This is the whole job, in one frame.A diver a hundred feet down with a saw in his hand, working through a wall of net th...
10/07/2026

This is the whole job, in one frame.

A diver a hundred feet down with a saw in his hand, working through a wall of net that has been hanging on this wreck for years. There is no machine for this part. Somebody has to get down there, find where the net is holding, and cut it loose without bringing the rest of it down on top of himself.

Bottom time is short and the list is long, so you take the section in front of you and you take it slowly.

We have been at this on the Midnight Hour since February and we are still not finished.

Save this one. There is a lot going on in it.

📸Photo by Daniel Pio

This is what came up on Saturday the nineteenth.We went back out to the Midnight Hour, the squid boat that went down off...
10/02/2026

This is what came up on Saturday the nineteenth.

We went back out to the Midnight Hour, the squid boat that went down off Catalina's West End in 2011 and has been letting go of net ever since. That pile on the dock is one day of cutting, and those are the people who went and got it.

It came to about 200 square feet and roughly 75 pounds. That is a light day by our standards. Conditions were difficult on the nineteenth, so the team cut what it could cut safely and left the rest down there for next time.

That still puts the Midnight Hour at somewhere around 3,700 square feet and about 1,875 pounds since February. She is not clear yet. Every piece of it goes to a facility that turns it back into new material.

The red ski is not ours and it did not come off the wreck. The team spotted it floating on the way home and brought that in too.

Thank you Healthy Seas, and thank you to everybody who gave up a Saturday for this.

Share this with someone who thinks the ocean takes care of itself.

📸Photo by Angie Biggs

The part nobody films.A dive ends and the net still has to come off the boat, get laid out on the dock, and get gone thr...
09/28/2026

The part nobody films.

A dive ends and the net still has to come off the boat, get laid out on the dock, and get gone through by hand. We pull out the rope and the hardware, check for anything still alive in the mesh, and send the rest off to be recycled into new material.

It is the least dramatic hour of the day and it is the reason the whole thing counts for something.

Share this with someone who thinks the cleanup is the easy part.

📸Photos by Juan Torres

We are on the water right now.Today we are back on the Midnight Hour, the squid boat that sank off Catalina's West End i...
09/19/2026

We are on the water right now.

Today we are back on the Midnight Hour, the squid boat that sank off Catalina's West End in 2011 and has been shedding net ever since. We have taken roughly 1,800 pounds off her since February and there is still more down there.

No idea yet what we will find. That is most of the job.

Photos in about a week. Follow along.

📸Photo by Jung-han Hsieh

This is a net doing its job with nobody holding it.Look closely and there is a fish in the mesh. That is the whole probl...
09/16/2026

This is a net doing its job with nobody holding it.

Look closely and there is a fish in the mesh. That is the whole problem in one frame. Gear that was lost or cut loose years ago keeps catching, and what it catches draws in the next thing, and that draws in the next.

Nothing about it stops on its own. It stops when somebody swims down with a cutting tool and takes it off the wreck, piece by piece.

We are back on the Midnight Hour this Saturday. Share this if you did not know lost nets keep fishing.

📸Photo by Jung-han Hsieh

The dive ends and the work does not.Every section we cut off the Midnight Hour rides back to the dock, gets laid out, an...
09/14/2026

The dive ends and the work does not.

Every section we cut off the Midnight Hour rides back to the dock, gets laid out, and gets gone through by hand. We check it for anything still living in the mesh, pull out the rope and the hardware, and get it ready to be recycled into new material instead of sitting on a wreck for another decade.

It is slow, it smells, and it is the part nobody films. It is also the part that turns a pile of dead net into something with a use again.

Share this if you did not know a net had a second life in it.

Photo by Juan Torres

Address

Pasadena, CA

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Ghost Diving USA posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category