Surveys – Page 2 – Learn to Dive Today Blog

Bookshelf: The Log from the Sea of Cortez

The Log from the Sea of Cortez – John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was the author responsible for some of the best known works of American 20th century fiction – you may have read The Grapes of Wrath (or The Wrath of Grapes, as my sister is occasionally wont to call it) at high school, for example. The Log from the Sea of Cortez is a non-fiction work, recounting a marine specimen collecting trip that Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts made in the Gulf of California, in 1940. This extremely biodiverse piece of ocean has been the site of studies of Humboldt squid, Shark Men expeditions, and studies of whales.

Ricketts was a biologist, and inspired some of Steinbeck’s fictional characters. The two of them chartered a fishing boat, and sailed from Monterey Bay and spent six weeks making various stops in the Gulf, anchoring the fishing boat and using their unreliable tender to travel to shore and back. They concentrated chiefly on the intertidal zone, and collected samples of as many species as they could find.

To most modern readers, accounts of them trying to spear manta rays and eating dolphin will be upsetting, but in general the curious delight that Steinbeck and his companions took in their discoveries is infectious. More than this, however, I enjoyed the way Steinbeck evoked life on board the fishing boat, the warm evenings, the companionship of the crew, and the sun-baked, sleepy towns they encountered en route. Steinbeck was distressed by Japanese shrimp trawlers wreaking havoc on the ocean floor, and horrified by the tons of bycatch (specimens, to him!) that was thrown back into the ocean, dead and dying.

In between accounts of their life on board the ship, and their forays to shore searching for specimens, Steinbeck ruminates beautifully and gently on man’s connection to the ocean and to everything else, materialism, contemplation, politics, love, freedom, and any number of other lofty themes.

We have thought often of this mass of sea-memory, or sea-thought, which lives deep in the mind. If one asks for a description of the unconscious, even the answer-symbol will be in terms of a dark water into which the light descends only a short distance.

A group of scientists reproduced Steinbeck and Ricketts’s journey in 2004; while the website that recorded their voyage has disappeared from the internet, a description of their expedition has not.

This is a book to be read during a summer holiday, or when one wishes to invoke the feeling of summer, and with ample time to hand for slow-paced philosophical musing. It’s a travelogue that says much about the interconnectedness of things, and more.

You can get a copy of the book here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise here or here.

Article: Business Week on sunken Spanish treasure

It’s not often that an article in the business pages dovetails with my interest in the ocean, but once in a long while there is a connection. A 2012 Business Week article about Odyssey Marine Exploration, the company featured in Treasure Quest and the Treasure Quest – HMS Victory Special, relates the outcome of a protracted battle between Odyssey and the Spanish government over 17 tons of silver coins, retrieved from a shipwreck off the coast of Portugal. Odyssey spent $2.6 million retrieving the coins; the only compensation it received from the Spanish government was $20 apiece for the white plastic buckets in which the coins were transported to Spain.

Yesterday’s article (written in 2008) describes in more detail the events that led to the conflict between Spain and Odyssey, and profiles both the company and its founder and CEO, Greg Stemm. Today’s one provides a good introduction to what the company does (if you’re not in the mood for a long New Yorker read), and fills in what happened since 2008 – and things did not turn out particularly well for Odyssey.

The Odyssey share price (OMEX US Equity) hasn’t really gone anywhere since the company listed, which suggests to me that they still haven’t had their big break yet. That said, it must be remarkably interesting work, finding and researching long forgotten wrecks. Plundering them… not so much.

Read the full article here.

Article: Slate on ocean salinity

Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, writes briefly about images released in June 2011, taken by the earth-observing satellite Aquarius.

As Plait points out,

Observations like this are crucial for us to understand just how our fiendishly complex planet works. Especially now, when our climate is changing, and those changes are evident even year by year.

See the full article here.

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.

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.

A tour of the SA Agulhas II

When the opportunity arises to go aboard a ship, we like to take it. Our most recent ship tour was of the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior vessel. In celebration of World Oceans Day on 8 June, the Department of Environmental Affairs opened the SA Agulhas II polar research vessel to the public, and we popped down to the V&A Waterfront to see her.

The SA Agulhas II replaces the SA Agulhas, now in use as a training vessel by SAMSA. The SA Agulhas has been in service for many years, and was recently chartered by the organisers of The Coldest Journey to transport the personnel and machinery to Antarctica before the winter.

The SA Agulhas II was built in Finland at a cost of R1,3 billion, and is state of the art as far as safety features and redundancy is concerned. She has two completely separate main engines, and is capable of continuing underway if one engine room floods. The decks and outdoor staircases of the ship are heated to prevent ice build up, and her hull is capable of pushing through one metre thick ice at a speed of nearly 10 kilometres per hour. She will service Marion Island, Gough Island, and the SANAE IV base on the Antarctic continent.

View from the bridge, showing helicopter pad and cranes on deck

Department of Environmental Affairs headquarters in table Bay Harbour

Table Mountain seen from the rear lower deck of the SA Agulhas II

Penguin on the Antarctic continent adorning the side of the vessel

The ship has room for two helicopters, with a large helipad and a hangar in which the choppers can be housed with their blades folded down. The hangar’s walls are heavily fire proofed, and look like a couch or quilt. The ship can carry 100 scientists and a crew of 45. The accommodation is lovely, with every cabin having natural light. I was ready to run away to become a polar explorer after seeing the cabins, but when we stepped out on deck into the freezing wind (remember, the ship was still at her berth in Cape Town) I changed my mind.

There are eight permanent laboratories on board, and six containerised ones which can be lifted on and off the ship depending on what experiments are to be performed. Members of the scientific personnel spoke to us about some of the work that is done on board, including sampling the carbon dioxide content of water at various depths and locations (the levels are affected by global warming), and collection of plankton in special devices that enable the scientists to measure the fecundity of a particular part of the ocean. Tony and I kind of hoped that the intern who told us that they give that information to fishing company I&J was joking or wrong, but sadly I suspect he wasn’t.

The side of the ship opens up to enable instrumentation to be deployed

Garth the chemist explaining some of the research done on board

Plankton gathering equipment for research

Containers on the dock at the Department of Environmental Affairs building

A CTD water sampler hanging over the moon pool

In the centre of the ship is a moon pool – just like a James Bond movie – through which instrumentation can be lowered into the ocean. It’s essentially a hole all the way through the hull, surrounded by the ship. The advantage of this is that it won’t ice over, and there is no chance of a heavy piece of machinery hung over the side of the ship causing problems of balance. There is a large door in the side of the ship through which instruments can be sent, a feature shared with the old SA Agulhas, but during long experiments it’s possible that the ship gets iced in and the instruments crushed. The device hanging over the moon pool in the photograph above is a CTD, or conductivity, temperature, depth water sampler. It measures those three variables at different depths by taking water into the cylindrical Niskin bottles that make up the array. These close at predefined depths, and the water thus obtained can be analysed on board.

Standing on a piece of the bridge that overhangs the edge of the ship

Diagram of the ship's watertight compartments

The ship has thrusters and multi-directional propellors that enable her to move in almost any direction, rotate on the spot, and hold a position with incredible accuracy for hours on end, even in unfavourable sea condtions.

I was amazed by this ship, but also worried by her, half waiting for something to go wrong. We have a very sad habit in South Africa of completely dropping the ball environmentally (I’m thinking of the fisheries patrol boats gathering dust at the quay in Simon’s Town while the minister of agriculture, forestry and fisheries goes on fraudulent trips and accepts bribes), and squandering technology that could otherwise be used for great good. My hope is that the recognition from other nations that this is a special, one of a kind ship with capabilities unmatched by many other vessels will apply a form of peer pressure to keep the powers that be from wasting the SA Agulhas II’s capabilities. The scientists and crew who we spoke to on board are passionate, dedicated people. I hope they will be well served by those who set the maintenance budgets, scheduling and priorities of this special ship.

Bookshelf: Sea Hunters II

The Sea Hunters II – Clive Cussler

I must be a real sucker for punishment, picking up the second Sea Hunters book for another dose of self-proclaimed raconteur and all round self confident guy Clive Cussler. The first Sea Hunters book was filled to the brim with tales of how magnanimous and characterful Cussler is, interspersed with his trademark reductionist views of women as pairs of breasts with ambulatory organs attached.

Nonetheless I did read this book. It concerns the further searches and discoveries by NUMA, the organisation created by Cussler to search for shipwrecks, and funded by his book royalties. I confess I enjoyed it considerably more than The Sea Hunters, as several of the wrecks sought by Cussler and company were slightly familiar to me. There is less focus on Civil War ironclads and paddle steamers (although they still feature), and more on wrecks outside the borders of the United States.

NUMA engages in a search for the Mary Celeste, a ship I’d read about as a child as a great unsolved mystery. She was found floating in the North Atlantic in 1872, deserted, with the appearance of her crew and passengers having left in a great hurry. Cussler presents a plausible theory (one of the more widely accepted ones) for the disappearance of the crew, related to the ship’s cargo of barrels of alcohol. He claims to have located the remains of the ship, which had several years of service after her crew’s disappearance, on a coral reef off Haiti. The identity of the wreck discovered by NUMA has since been disputed.

The other wreck I enjoyed reading about was the SS Waratah, which went missing off the South African Wild Coast in 1909, while travelling from Durban to Cape Town. The reason for her disappearance is unknown – Cussler favours a freak wave theory. The vessel was inherently unstable, and possibly further destabilised by her cargo. The NUMA team did not find the Waratah (they did find another wreck in the general vicinity, though), and the man who led the search from South Africa gave up the Waratah search in 2004 (after this book was published). For the mean time, we may never know what happened to her.

As in The Sea Hunters, Cussler dramatises the sinking of each vessel, imagining dialogue, thoughts and motivations for the crew and passengers. You may find this distracting, or entertaining. More of the wrecks discovered here are under water than in the previous volume (most of them were under mud), so a little more actual diving and examination of artefacts takes place.

South Africans can buy a copy here, and if you’re in the US go here, or here if you’re in the UK.

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.

Preparing a chart table

Tony’s nautical charts are a source of much joy and fascination to both of us, as well as, on occasion, the cats. We’ve been looking for some kind of suitable surface to use to display them and examine them on for ages. I was delighted to locate this old newspaper copy desk – decades old – made of teak, in December last year.

We sanded it using a mouse sander, and applied some light varnish to finish it off. If you visit us, you’ll see it in the corner of the lounge, complete with charts.

Article(s): Newsweek on the future of ocean exploration

Newsweek recently published two articles on the exploration of the ocean.

The first concerns Sylvia Earle and Robert Ballard, both pioneers of ocean exploration. Ballard favours unmanned Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) allowing so-called “telepresence” in the deep ocean by humans, while Earle favours putting actual humans in the ocean as opposed to robots. Aside from the deeper issues it raises, it’s an excellent potted biography of both these eminent ocean explorers, as well as an introduction to the mechanisms available to us when plumbing the sea’s greatest depths.

Ballard’s thoughts on the subject of exploration – and the trajectory of funding – are explained like this:

“The body is a pain,” says Robert Ballard, the marine geologist who discovered the Titanic, striking a common note about the problems with manned travel. “It has to go to the bathroom. It has to be comfortable. But the spirit is indestructible. It can move at the speed of light.”

For two decades, he’s been arguing the virtues of “telepresence” technology: remotely controlled subs and rovers, pumping video to an unlimited number of researchers worldwide. This year he seems to have finally closed the conversation. While the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA) pulled money from manned exploration, Ballard’s telepresence efforts comprise “the only federal program dedicated to systematic exploration of the planet’s largely unknown ocean,” according to NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research.

The second article is a response by director James Cameron to Robert Ballard’s assertion that unmanned submersibles are the future of ocean exploration. Cameron visited Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, nearly 11 kilometres deep, in March 2012. His view is that

No kid ever dreamed of growing up to be a robot. But they do dream of being explorers. And inspiring young minds and imaginations is one of the most important things we can be doing if we want a future supply of engineers and scientists insuring our lead in innovation.

Andrew Thaler of Southern Fried Science (the best ocean-related blog I read) wrote an eloquent summation and response to both these articles. His assertion is that there is actually very little distinction between manned and unmanned ocean exploration, particularly at the extreme depths that the Deepsea Challenge expedition operated at (and at depths much less than that, too). Cameron did not look out of a viewport or window in his submersible; he viewed the output of an array of 3D cameras, on a screen, from inside the sub. Thaler makes his point convincingly:

Technology doesn’t create explorers, explorers create technology. Any tool, from Wormcam to Alvin, that provides a glimpse into the wonderful unknown, is a tool worth having.

It is the ocean that inspires us. Everything else is hardware.

His point is that to get caught up in what is very nearly a purely semantic discussion over which form of exploration has greater virtue and potential is to miss the point that funding is lacking and political will to explore the ocean is low. Perhaps one day, when we’re knee deep in ROVs and manned submersibles, we can have this discussion again. For now – anything that assists people to see what’s under the sea is a good thing.