Reef Cam

While sitting around the campsite at Leo Carillo this weekend, the topic of underwater webcams arose. The thought was that it would be neat to have an underwater "visibility detector" installed at various dive sites, so divers could check on the web the realtime viz at the local dive sites.

Here is the link to a detailed history of possibly the only UW webcam, installed at a depth of 60 ft. in Bonaire.

http://www.bonairewebcams.com/BonaireWebCamHistory.php

There is also a link on the left to the realtime image.

SBDiver was ruminating that we could do something similar, and install marked signs in the distance along the sea floor. So if you can see the sign marked "20", which is located 20 ft. from the camera, you know the viz is at least 20 ft. All this less than $10,000.

See? That's what happens when we sit around a campsite for two days, not diving.

good thing for u guys i could not stand diving with out a wet suit even for a great joke

Thanks Jim!

That was a good read.

Whereas, I thought that this would be impractical when we talked about it at Leo Carrillo, I think I've come up with a way that this would work.

The main problem I was having with it had to do with placement/protection of the camera and cabling. If you were to attach a rugged mounting system to a pier and have the signs with distance from the camera placed on the pilings this would allow you to run a cable protected by the piling back up to a building on the pier for capture and rebroadcast or live streaming. It would also have no impact on the environment over and above the impact caused by the existing structure.

You could put the camera in a spot where a pier was in 40 feet of water at low tide and place the camera in about 30 feet to keep it protected from shifting sands.

This could be done at the Santa Barbara Pier, one of Catalina's piers, Malibu Pier, Santa Monica Pier, Redondo Pier, Newport Pier and Scripts Pier just to name a few. That might be a great way to get a general report for vis in some areas.

Fun to think about. I'm not sure what it would take to convince someone to actually do it. I imagine that it would have to be supported by an advertising model for business viability.

The concept would probably also work well on oil rigs.

Christian

mccabejc:

Here is the link to a detailed history of possibly the only UW webcam, installed at a depth of 60 ft. in Bonaire.

http://www.bonairewebcams.com/BonaireWebCamHistory.php

There is also a link on the left to the realtime image.

Click to expand...

Hey cool webcam link! There a couple of ladies getting drinks at the beach bar. :dazzler1:

dlndavid:

Hey cool webcam link! There a couple of ladies getting drinks at the beach bar. :dazzler1:

Click to expand...

Correction: A couple of lady divers gearing up.

Semi coincidentally, I saw a show on the tube last night (PBS) talking about laying the first telecommunications cable across the Atlantic Ocean. Very simple operation. Two boats, each carrying 1/2 of the total length of cable, meet in the middle of the ocean, splice their two cables together, then head in opposite directions for something like 8 days. The cable is just laid on the floor of the ocean. Pretty common procedure for power cables nowadays, too.

I think you could lay it along the bottom out to Deadmans, for example. Just need to find some ducts between the beach and Laguna Sea Sports to lay the cable.

You can use a camera that operates on a single Cat5e cable.

We currently use a Cat5e wire that is gel filled and is rated for this application, cost is about .30 per foot.

I've used this wire underground to connect building for LAUSD's network system and most recent overhead connections including CCTV(camera's).

Not sure what camera enclosure would be used, but one of our vendors makes a camera housing that is rated for 50' depth for less than 1K.

I see this project costing less than 4K per location.

Hey this is awesome, I didn't even think of that Christian. Put the cameras on pilings, duhh.

And you could probably guage the vis by if you can see the next piling.

mccabejc:

Semi coincidentally, I saw a show on the tube last night (PBS) talking about laying the first telecommunications cable across the Atlantic Ocean. Very simple operation. Two boats, each carrying 1/2 of the total length of cable, meet in the middle of the ocean, splice their two cables together, then head in opposite directions for something like 8 days. The cable is just laid on the floor of the ocean. Pretty common procedure for power cables nowadays, too.

I think you could lay it along the bottom out to Deadmans, for example. Just need to find some ducts between the beach and Laguna Sea Sports to lay the cable.

Click to expand...

There was an hour long show on this on the History Channel.

The first line cost millions in late 1800's $$$ and they failed 3 or 4 times before they finally got it done and working. It was pretty interesting show.

who is going to scrub the algea off and keep the lens from fouling with all sorts of critters, just like the rest of the piling?