2003 Diving Season - Page 2 of 3

On Board the Dive Vessel Terschelling

We are now into the third week of diving on the site - and very glad to be out on the water while it is so hot ashore. There are seven or eight divers working each day sometimes starting as early as 7.00 am and continuing until 10.30pm. At any one time there are one or two of them underwater, with one other acting as a stand-by for safety.

Meanwhile another member of the team is monitoring the screen linked to the cameras mounted on the divers’ helmets and supervising through voice communication. They stay underwater for up to an hour and a half, going down in a diving bell that they return to at the end of their dive for decompression if necessary.

All of the divers are very experienced. Four of them are commercial divers with experience of working on oil rigs and laying underwater pipelines. For them this is a much more exciting job - more the sort of thing they would do for pleasure! One of the divers, Berit Mortlock, is on holiday. She was involved in the original excavation 22 years ago and couldn’t wait to be involved again.

On deck, a massive sieve is at the receiving end of a long hose, feeding the debris from the spoil heap. In amongst the mud and shell of the heap may be small objects sucked up by the air lifts when the site was being excavated in the 1970s. And what have they found? So far 80 objects have been recorded: items such as lengths of rope and tiny pieces such as the latch from a panel and a piece of rigging.

Not all the finds are Tudor. In a busy seaway like the Solent, things have been lost - or thrown - over the sides of ships for hundreds of years! Recent discoveries include a French coin of Louis XIV, dated 1655, and beautifully decorated fragments of eighteenth century Dutch pottery.

Work continues

Diving operations started on 23 July. To date diving has taken place every day, with a total of 60 dives undertaken. On some of these two divers have been working together. This is a total of 120 hours underwater.

The acoustic positioning, sponsored by Sonardyne International, is working well and we are able to track the position of the crawling vehicle and selected locations around the site. We are also using this to guide the divers to areas which we expect to contain buried items, as there are so few visual markers left on the seabed.

The site has changed dramatically since we last investigated it in 1998. There has been a dramatic build up of mobile sediments over the site, with all but the largest items of hard wear (for example the old diving platform lost in 1975) completely buried.

We had not expected this since the routine monitoring undertaken between 1983-1991 (and sporadically after that) suggested an extremely slow rate of burial, confined to specific areas around the site, not all over. This has meant that we have had to excavate a further 450mm over the entire 40m length of each side of the site in order to gain access to our spoil mounds.

The remote excavation of these spoil mounds with the underwater vehicle ‘Monica’, is providing the team on deck with a lot of work to do. A heavy mixture of silt, mud and shells rattles its way noisily up the shute and is deposited in a large sieve on deck. The team manning it have been working until it is too dark to see, sorting through the wet and muddy mixture. They are finding a large number of objects, both new and old, some of which are Tudor

 

Back to top