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2003 Diving Season - Page 3 of 5 - Saturday 9 August |
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| 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. |
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