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2003 Diving Season - Page 2 of 5 - Wednesday 6 August |
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| 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. |
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