If you have spent years racing through Los Santos leaving a trail of wrecked cars behind you, there is a good chance you have driven straight past one of the calmest but creepiest side jobs in the game, a perfect excuse to try out GTA 5 Modded Accounts while you are at it, because this whole thing is all about Michael De Santa and his solo dive work under the waves around San Andreas.
Getting The Submarine Hunt Started
The game will not let you near the submarine parts right away, so you need to push the main story through "The Merryweather Heist" first, then the pieces quietly unlock and the real prep starts. After that mission is done, head up to Paleto Cove on the far north coast and look for the Sonar Collections Dock, which goes for $250,000, and by this stage you have probably got enough cash from heists and side jobs to cover it without hurting too much. You can technically buy that dock with any of the three characters, but only Michael can progress the actual mission line, so once the sale goes through, swap over to him and walk down to the dock to trigger the "Death at Sea" Strangers and Freaks mission where you finally meet Abigail Mathers and hear her story about her dead husband and the missing submarine pieces.
Abigail, The Dock And Your Gear
When you talk to Abigail, the tone is pretty different from the usual GTA chaos, as she is clearly upset and pushing hard for answers, and you quickly realise this is not just a throwaway collectible grind. From that point on the dock gives you a permanent Dinghy to use, parked and ready every time you show up, which is handy because it comes with sonar built in and Michael gets unlimited scuba gear for the whole activity. Hop into the water from the boat and he auto-swaps into the wetsuit and tank, so you do not have to stress about timers or running back to the surface, and that small change makes it feel more like a proper exploration mission instead of a chore.
Diving With Sonar And Trackify
Most of the actual hunting is done by juggling the boat's sonar ping and the Trackify app on Michael's phone, and you quickly learn to drift the Dinghy around until the signal tightens up and then dive when you are almost on top of it. Some of the 30 parts are simple, lying in open sand in shallower water where you can see clearly and just swim over to grab them, but others are way more annoying, stuck down in deep gullies or wedged into twisted wrecks where the light drops off and the water goes properly dark. You start checking every gap in the metal, every bit of coral, because some fragments are half buried or almost the same colour as the rock, and that mix of tension and slow searching feels totally different from the normal firefights up on land.
The Payoff Of Finishing The Job
As you tick through the parts one by one, the whole ocean space around San Andreas opens up in a way most players never really see, with fish drifting past, wrecks scattered across the seabed and that heavy silence you get when the sound of the city disappears. It is a grind if you go for all 30 in one sitting, but if you break it up and lean into the mood, the submarine hunt turns into a strange little mystery about what really happened to Abigail's husband and why she is so desperate to control the story, and it gives Michael a rare chance to feel like a reluctant investigator instead of a blunt hammer, especially if you already decided to buy GTA 5 Modded Accounts and want something slower and more atmospheric to balance out the usual explosive chaos.
