Salvage – Page 3 – Learn to Dive Today Blog

Article: The New Yorker on the biggest sunken treasure ever found

A lovely long read at the New Yorker, from 2008, describes an (then) incipent dispute between Odyssey Marine Exploration, the company featured in Treasure Quest and the Treasure Quest – HMS Victory Special, and the Spanish government, over a 17 ton haul of silver coins removed from a shipwreck located by Odyssey in the north Atlantic ocean.

Odyssey engages in “commercial marine archaeology”, a practice that (rightly) makes many people uneasy. Odyssey is a listed company and aims to profit from sharing in the treasure retrieved from the wrecks it finds and plunders. They make use of ROVs and sophisticated sidescan sonar technology to sweep the ocean floor for potential targets. The company’s founder and CEO, Greg Stemm, is extensively profiled in this article.

Interestingly, the article refers to exploratory work that Stemm did in the Dry Tortugas in the 1980s. Daniel Lenihan rants about the plundering of underwater resources in this area in his gripping book Submerged. He worked in the region at around about the same time as Stemm was working wrecks there… Later, James Delgado, a colleague of Lenihan’s and author of Adventures of a Sea Hunter, challenged Odyssey’s claim that they are more than just treasure hunters, interested solely in commercial gain:

“The issue is one where the flash of gold and silver obscure or overwhelm the type of careful work that yields treasures of a different sort,” Delgado wrote. “We base our opposition to treasure hunting on the track record of those years of lost opportunities and lost history, and the challenge we issue to Odyssey is to show how they are different.”

Read the full article here. There’s more on this tomorrow…

Newsletter: Getting it wrong

Hi divers

We spent a really great day in on and under the water working on a film shoot today without traveling more than 100 metres from Millers Point. The water was clean, the sun was out and about and the wind not too hectic. I could use about 6 such days a week, thanks.

Seahorse at the Miller's Point jetty — Seahorse at the Miller’s Point jetty

There hasn’t been a lot of diving otherwise this week, and the weatherman has been getting it wrong quite regularly, much to my annoyance. We did dive students last weekend, and while we were navigating the boiling pea soup at Shark Alley (no cowsharks at the moment – they’re on their annual hiatus) a radio controlled plane with a wingspan of about three metres crashed into the kelp near the boat. Brian did some heroic swimming, towed the plane to the boat, and we loaded it on board and delivered it to its owner at the Miller’s Point slipway. There were some tense moments when the electronics started smoking while it was on the boat!

Brian passes his swim test with flying colours

Weekend dives

Deciding on whether or not to dive on weekends has been a little difficult of late as the forecasts are so often way off the mark. It’s almost a requirement to go out and take a look every evening and early every morning. Yesterday the Atlantic – well, Hout Bay – looked appalling and False Bay looked marginal. Today it’s a different story and False Bay was clean.

Never mind, this weekend we have swell, wind, perhaps rain and maybe even sun. Tomorrow early looks good, and Saturday will be OK but really surgy, Sunday will be howling… If the forecast is right. I have students, tourists and local divers so I will dive somewhere at some point if the weather looks good enough… Totally confused? Good, so am I. If you want to try for a dive, let me know and I’ll notify you if and when we hit the water.

Esti, Brian and I ready to dive at Shark Alley

Courses

I am currently running Open Water, Advanced and Divemaster courses, and we are getting ready to run a Research Diver Specialty course using the wreck of the Brunswick as a case study. This is a site you can dive even in a southeaster!

Coastal Cleanup

21 September is International Coastal Cleanup day, and we will be joining OMSAC and FBUC at False Bay Yacht Club, a venue with which those of you who’ve boat dived with me will be well familiar. The event details are here; if you plan to come along, you must sign up as instructed. There may be a registration fee to participate. It’s a lot of fun – we’ve cleaned at Robben Island and Hout Bay Harbour in the past – and a very good cause to get involved in. Encourage your non-diving friends to join a local beach cleanup.

regards

Tony Lindeque
076 817 1099
www.learntodivetoday.co.za
www.learntodivetoday.co.za/blog/

Diving is addictive!

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More about the wreck of the Brunswick

I attended a talk about the Brunswick, which is wrecked off the end of Long Beach in Simon’s Town, at the Institute for Maritime Technology (IMT), in August. It was given by Jake Harding, who has just completed a thesis on the wreck for his Honours degree at the University of Cape Town. Considering that all I know about the Brunswick (even with reference to Shipwrecks and Salvage in South Africa) can be summed up in two sentences, it was extremely interesting to hear from someone who has researched the ship, and examined the wreck for further information.

The ship

The Brunswick was an East Indiaman, a merchant ship that transported goods between Britain and the East Indies. She was captured by the French vessel Marengo in 1805, and brought to Simon’s Town as a prize of war. She was captured on her sixth voyage and was in quite poor shape. Five or six voyages was considered a good lifespan for an East Indiaman. They travelled very long distances on each voyage and were away from their home ports for over a year at a time, sometimes much longer. During the time she was at anchor in Simon’s Bay, strong winds caused her anchor cables to part, and she ran aground. She was carrying a cargo of sandalwood and cotton, which was sold along with the wreck in an auction. Most of it was salvaged, although archaeologists have spotted the odd piece of sandalwood on the wreck site.

She had 30 guns, which is apparently quite a small number – warships of the time would have had hundreds of guns. At the time when the Brunswick was constructed (late 18th century), iron was used instead of hardwood for the braces or “knees” that held the hull of the ship out in its characteristic shape. She was about 40 metres long and 13 metres wide with three decks. Her hull was sheathed in copper, and the drift bolts holding the parts of the ship together are copper and iron.

The wreck

The wreck was officially discovered and identified as the Brunswick in 1993, although her rudder was found and salvaged in 1967. It can be seen in the courtyard of the Slave Lodge in central Cape Town, formerly the South African Cultural History Museum. It used to be covered with copper sheets, but those were mostly stripped off. It’s huge – over 4 metres long, but with all the original fittings it was likely over 5 metres in length.

It’s clear when you dive the site that there’s quite a lot of wreck hidden under the sand, and even in the few times we’ve dived her we’ve been able to see how the sand shifts and covers and uncovers various parts of the ship. The Simon’s Town harbour wall has led to a lot of sediment build up in the area. When the wreck was surveyed in 1994-1995 for Project Sandalwood, a survey done by IMT and the South African Cultural History Museum, they recorded pieces three metres high sticking out of the sand. There’s nothing like that today. Longshore currents also cause periodic sediment build up and removal, and the cryptic little fish called steentjies annually uncover huge areas of the wreck during their mating displays.

According to Jake, the keelson (like a keel strip), part of the copper strap attaching the rudder to the boat, and a large number of iron knees (we have only seen a couple), and one or two pieces of sandalwood are still on the wreck site. We will be looking carefully for these elements next time we dive there.

Newsletter: Mellow and mild

Hi divers

Mellow and mild aptly describes the weather for the weekend. Day time temperatures of around 17 degrees celcius, water temperatures of around 14 degrees and viz of 5-6 metres or as Facebook will have you believe, anywhere between 3 and 12 metres… There is not much swell, very little wind and more sun than clouds (in the forecast) so the diving should be good.

This week’s dives

We spent some time in the pool (the visibility was good) and yesterday we had 5 metre viz at Long Beach. The bay has patches of clean and dirty water and the cage diving and whale watching boats report clean and dirty water scattered around the bay. This is most likely the rainwater runoff that has not moved too far as there has not been all that much wind. The fishermen report very clean water south of Miller’s Point.

Weekend dives

I have a lot of student dives to get through this weekend for both Open Water and Advanced courses so if you are keen to dive we can slot you in. We are launching tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday and will only decide the sites once out on the bay and we can see where the water is clean. Text me or reply to this email to book a spot.

I’ve had students with me all week so there are no underwater photos this week (no camera allowed), but Clare tracked down the rudder of the Brunswick at the Slave Lodge in town – there’s a photo of it above. It’s huge!

regards

Tony Lindeque
076 817 1099
www.learntodivetoday.co.za
www.learntodivetoday.co.za/blog/

Diving is addictive!

To subscribe to receive this newsletter by email, click here or use the form on this page!

Bookshelf: Submerged

Submerged – Daniel Lenihan

Until his retirement, Daniel Lenihan had a dream job, combining diving and archaeology, at the US National Park Service’s Submerged Resources Unit (formerly the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit or SCRU, and renamed in 1999 to include natural resources). He cut his teeth diving during the heydays of the sport, and became a skilled cave diver working with Sheck Exley in Florida in the 1960s and 70s, and deployed many of the principles of that sport when penetrating historical shipwrecks in the United States and around the world.

Submerged, a memoir of Lenihan’s time in the National Parks Service, is a cracker of a book – Clive Cussler wishes he could write like this, and it isn’t even fiction. A competing volume (if you will), Adventures of a Sea Hunter, by James Delgado – a sometime colleague of Lenihan – covers some of the same ground, but with far less impact and immediacy. Lenihan is clearly a doer, and has the requisite ego and charisma to make things happen, even in a bureaucratic setting.

The SCRU team dives and maps wrecks all over the world, from freezing, rough conditions in the Great Lakes in the United States, to a war grave in Pearl Harbour, Micronesia, the Aleutian Islands, and Bikini Atoll, where the US conducted multiple nuclear weapons tests. The chapter that made the greatest impression on me, however, was Lenihan’s account of a body retrieval that he and a buddy did of a diver who had gotten lost and drowned inside an old building that is now submerged in a dam. His account of diving in visibility measured in centimetres, trying to figure out where the diver could have gone in that confined, dark space, is riveting and terrifying. I was also very interested by the tests his team did on submerged motor vehicles, to determine how quickly a car fills up when it is driven into water. Lenihan himself drove a car into a dam, with scuba gear on the seat beside him, and his team attempted a rescue. Because of the air pockets in the vehicle, it was far less stable and much harder to access while submerged than the team initially expected.

The toughness, rigour, safety awareness and innovation that the SCRU team brought to their work is marvellous to me, particularly as they were technically part of an arm of the US government. None of the arms of government are particularly effective in South Africa! This is a fascinating, wide-ranging read that will interest divers and those fascinated by history, particularly its relics that lie underwater.

If you’re in South Africa you can get the book here, otherwise try here or here. For a kindle copy, go here.

Boat aground in Kalk Bay harbour

The boat is aground on the beach next to the railway line

Who doesn’t love a shipwreck? The Kalk Bay and St James Ratepayers’ and Residents’ Association, for one. This fishing boat ran aground inside Kalk Bay harbour over two years ago, and is now apparently a drug den and source of a variety of illicit activities that plague the residents of Kalk Bay. Predictably DAFF, who must make the final call on dismantling or removing the vessel, have failed to act, probably because they’re too busy awarding illegal tenders and going on overseas trips.

Tony and I visited Kalk Bay harbour in a gap between a series of winter storms, and popped down to the beach (right next to the main road) where the ship is aground. It is not in good shape, with the bow half melted after a fire. The vessel is obviously inhabited, with a small laundry line in place on the superstructure.

We would love a new wreck dive, if permission could be obtained from the relevant parties (DAFF, basically) to tow this boat out of the harbour and sink it in deeper water. The example of Malta in this respect is salutary.

In addition to these photos, I also walked partway around the boat and took this video:

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=os1fKBRAyOk&w=540″]

If the quality looks totally horrible, please adjust your youtube player to show it in HD or at a higher frame rate… Helpfully, youtube reduces the quality at which it plays back video based on how fast it detects your Internet connection to be. In South Africa, that’s not very fast.

Friday photo: Viking ship in a museum

One of the Viking ships inside the museum at Roskilde

Five Viking ships were scuttled in Roskilde Fjord, Denmark, in the 11th century, to protect the city from attack. The ships were discovered during dredging activities in the 1960s, and have been salvaged and restored for display in the beautiful Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde. The museum sits right on the fjord, with huge windows overlooking the greenish water. The displays are stark and simple, which lets one see just how beautifully these ships were put together. The Danes are rightfully proud of their Viking connections!

Article: Wired on lightweight deep sea diving suits

We’ve already seen something about one of the US Navy’s recent requests for new research: a device to monitor divers’ vital signs, and – if necessary – counteract incipient decompression sickness.

Exploring the deep ocean requires immensely complex, robust technology, as the human body is powerless against the forces found there. Wired.com reports on another US Navy requirement. It wants someone (anyone!) to develop a flexible, lightweight (under 400 pounds/180 kilograms) one-man deep sea diving suit to replace the mini submersibles and extremely bulky, unmanoeuvreable one man suits that they currently use. A flexible suit would make salvage of items and travel on the ocean floor a cinch.

Read the full article here.

Bookshelf: The Sea Hunters

The Sea Hunters – Clive Cussler

Clive Cussler is best known for his entertaining yet wildly misogynist novels about Dirk Pitt, the man who men want to be, and whom women cannot resist. Apparently he used some of the money he made from the Dirk Pitt series to set up an organisation (it may be an exaggeration to call it that) called NUMA, the National Underwater and Marine Agency, named for NUMA in his novels. Also, he named his son Dirk.

NUMA has embarked on many searches for lost shipwrecks (and the occasional train and cannon) in expeditions spanning a couple of decades. In The Sea Hunters, Cussler recounts not only the details of the searches undertaken, but also a dramatic version of the sinking or wreck of the ship in question. He takes great liberties with dialogue and speculates, in many cases, as to the sequence of events, but these reconstructions are entertaining and add colour to the shipwreck story.

I was frustrated that in most cases, once the wreck was located, the action was over (the cover of the book is deeply misleading). NUMA does not salvage anything, and usually doesn’t even dive on the wreck or uncover it from beneath the mud. Most of the time no human eyes are laid on their findings. Many of the wrecks Cussler finds are from the American Civil War, and are lying in rivers under nearly two centuries of silt, or completely outside the existing course of the stream. There were one or two instances when I wondered why he was so certain to have found the wreck he sought, as a more or less right-sized reading on the magnetometer was deemed sufficient to confirm its identity.

The book is illustrated with a map for each shipwreck, which assisted with my reading of the tales of the sinking of some of the Civil War ironclads and other boats, because the locations of enemy combatants and land fortifications are also marked.

There is a connection to a National Geographic series of which Cussler is a presenter. Adventures of a Sea Hunter by James Delgado also attempts to ride this wave.

If you’re in South Africa you can buy the book here, otherwise try here or here.

Article: Der Spiegel on salvaging the Costa Concordia

While on the subject of cruise ships, let’s turn to an article in Der Spiegel about the salvage operation that is to be undertaken on the wreck of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, currently aground (on her side) off the island of Giglio, Italy. The ship ran aground in January 2012; a year later, salvage teams under the leadership of a South African, nogal, began work on her.

Briefly, the salvors plan to roll the ship upright, refloat her with air-filled containers, and tow her into harbour. There’s an illustrative graphic that acoompanies the article. It makes it seem a quick and simple process, but the salvage is expected to cost US$300-400 million and will take months. It’s the largest salvage operation ever attempted. The ship is not being dismantled in place because it is lying in the middle of a marine sanctuary with sensitive populations of cetaceans and other creatures. According to the Christian Science Monitor, to protect the whales and dolphins from the noise of the drilling associated with the salvage, the salvors create curtains of bubbles around the drill sites by blowing compressed air into the water. These curtains absorb much of the sound.

If you want to remind yourself of how surreal the cruise ship looks, and looked in the time after she ran aground, there are photos here, here, here, and some terrifying ones taken inside the ship here.

Read the full Der Spiegel article here.