Wonders of Underwater Park Brought to Surface via Video

Much of Crystal Cove State Park is underwater, off the Laguna Beach coast, where golden coral, red sea urchins, bright plankton, lobsters and garibaldi and sheepshead fish thrive. It was a resource not used--or seen--by much of the public, unless they were divers.

But Friday, state Department of Parks and Recreation officials brought that world to the surface, sending live video images shot by divers to monitors in one of the historic cottages at the park. The show will continue today at a Crystal Cove Conservancy fund-raiser from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The video images also can be transmitted live to other locations and on the Internet, making the park, in a sense, available to students, educators--anyone--around the world, said Joseph Valencic, a professor at Saddleback College and president of a company that worked on the project.

Thanks to microwave and bandwidth telephone lines, the public can not only see what the divers see but also talk to them while they swim among the fish and reefs, Valencic said.

As parks department lifeguard Ken Kramer--wearing a special full-face dive mask with microphones, headphones and digital camera--swam through the 1,100-acre park, Valencic described what the public was seeing.

“That’s a kelp fish. See how its color matches the brown algae?” he said as the spotted fish seemed to disappear, blending in with the algae.

The $26,000 project, funded by the conservancy, the parks department and its nonprofit foundation, is a major part of the plan to increase public access to the park. State officials want the crowds to visit, explore and experience the park; the goal is to ensure its preservation through public participation.

“We see this as another way for us to do what we have been doing for decades: bring the interpretation of the resources to our visitors,” said Mike Tope, district superintendent of the parks department. “But this technology enables visitors who cannot become divers to take a journey through the wonders of this underwater park.”

The cottages at Crystal Cove make up the last intact example of a Southern California beach colony, with some buildings dating to the 1920s.

The historic district was to have been converted to a $35-million resort, but activists persuaded the state to buy out the developer and find a public use for the cottages.

Friday, a second team of divers from Long Beach City College went underwater to search for an old Corsair airplane that crashed off Laguna Beach in the late 1940s.

The divers, who work with the state at its 14 underwater parks as part of a cultural resources project, hope to find the wreck and map its coordinates as an archeological resource.

“Our job is to make it more accessible and preserve the environment,” said Laurel Breece, a professor at the college.

As Sheli Smith, an instructor at the college, prepared to go into the water Friday, she said the project will “bring attention to a really wonderful resource in the state. We get to share our underwater world with the public.”