Two years ago, a group of divers from Los Angeles area (LAUE: Los Angeles Underwater Explorers) started a project to clean up the wreck of the Infidel at Catalina. Their goal was to remove all the fishing nets which covered the wreck and regularly trap marine life (seals, sea lions, and even birds). The wreck is located in 150ft of water, which makes the cleaning work challenging and requires lots of caution. Strong dive teams are a must, and it’s a very rigorous process.

While the Infidel lies in only moderate technical diving depths, it’s still considered an advanced dive. The wreckage happens to be just the right distance from the island to at times have a veritable freeway overhead. Because trolling fishing boats, jet skis, charter and sightseeing boats all seem to track overhead, this is definitely not the place to surface without a down line.

The encounter of a lifetime

On Aug 23, 2014, new missions were set to both continue removing the nets (and a lot was removed again), and to document new life on the wreck. They conducted two dives – one to document the wreck in photos and on video, followed by another cleanup dive.

Heather Hamza explains: “Karim Hamza and I were on CCR. Landyn Froehlich & Cyrille Rio were on open circuit. In order to give them the best chances at decent footage, we staged the dives so that they could get photos before we started working and trashed the visibility.”

Cyrille continues: “The visibility wasn’t very good on that first dive, and we had to put a line from the mooring to the wreck. There was a lots of silt, but it was possible to circle the wreck and get some video footage of the marine life. After 30 minutes of bottom time, we headed back to the line, and just when we were leaving the wreck, Landyn saw a massive great white shark swimming around, 30-40 feet from us. He (Landyn) flashed his light and I looked back. What an excitement. The dream of every scuba diver coming true. It is so rare. That would make it a day and let us forget the poor visibility.

We looked at the great white female heading towards us, thinking she would not be staying for long, and we’d have been super happy with just a glimpse of her anyway. But just at the point we were reaching the ascent line, she started to swim toward us, getting closer and closer. Still under excitement, we set up for the ascent, but getting closer to each other than usual, and looking at the shark carefully. We started the ascent very slowly (slower than usual) and she was following us, circling around with smaller and smaller circle. The shark’s attitude was not aggressive at all. She was certainly curious about the bubble makers, and probably also wondering why these 2 sea-lion wanabees were so slow and carrying so much gear!

