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The team hit the bottom for our first dive of Phase III today. On the way out, we had gloomy skies and an awesome water spout as we approached the barge over the wrecksite. The divers experienced 72 degrees on the bottom, 84 near the surface, and negligible currents. This was the first time that technical divers, surface supplied divers, and saturation divers had all worked side-by-side on an archaelogical project at the same time. Pretty cool! They team of four hit the bottom to video the massive hole where the engine used to reside. The armor belt has been blasted clean by the US Navy in the area above the turret, in order to reveal the rivet lines so they can determine where to cut. You can actually see the armor belt the way it used to look almost 140 years ago, though a bit rusty. The Navy divers are using a "hydroblaster", a nifty toy that shoots a water jet at 20,000 psi, to clean off the armor belt. Needless to say, they murked up the water a tad on their side of the wreck. There are some artifact baskets off to the side which have accumulated some of the brass plumbing of the vessel. While the Navy has not been particularly delicate or surgical, it looks like they are getting the job done. After running some video and still pics of the engine area and armor belt, one of the divers swam up to the saturation bell to knock on a port and say "hi" to the tender; it is definitely a unique experience on the bottom. I hit the water on deep support today. As soon as I splashed, I started spinning looking for bubbles, thinking I busted a hose or had a massive leak -- it was *THAT* noisy underwater from the Navy work. We all had a good laugh after the dive, as the majority of divers had the same reaction when they hit the water. Decompression was uneventful, as we had 100'+ of vis and seas calmed to less than 1' swells. Looking forward to hitting the bottom tomorrow and seeing the remains of the Monitor for myself. Sounds like we may be on artifact duty which should be a hoot. We are still plotting our attack on the Navy saturation chamber and surface supplied stage. If anyone has some good ideas, please feel free to submit them for possible implementation. Possible suggestions are to paste the chamber with "GO AIRFORCE" bumper stickers or to attach pink flamingos to it. Should be interesting. As always, stay tuned... Cheers Michael C. Barnette Association of Underwater Explorers Because it's there...somewhere...maybe. http://www.mikey.net/aue _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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