Millawanda moored over the wreck. Photograph by Ryan C. Lee
Back to work! We were able to leave Karaöz yesterday morning, and have been busy setting up equipment to get fully up and running. Yesterday we assembled the airlift pipes on the deck of the Millawanda (each of our four airlift pipes is made of two sections of plastic pipe, coupled together). The completed lengths needed lines tied on for both weights and floats, in order to both anchor the airlift to the seabed, and elevate it at the proper angle for it to work. The airlifts were lowered to the seabed using a line, and Emre Savaş of the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology and Mine Bozkurt of the Antalya Archaeology Museum, along with Ryan Lee dove to untie the airlift bundle, and move each one to the designated weights. The dive finished early, so they were able to test out the now fully-assembled ‘phone booth.’ It is remarkably loud in there, and the air pressure significantly raises the pitch of divers’ voices, but it is an invaluable safety feature and communication device, as it allows divers to speak to each other if necessary, rather than relying on hand signals or written notes on dive slates.
Ania Kotarba-Morley prepares to dive. Photograph by Ryan C. Lee.
Today, most divers began working on familiarizing themselves and working on specific areas of the site. Some teams are working at the base of the Boulder, while others are working on a promising-looking area we are calling ‘the Platform,’ and still others are working on a stubbornly-concreted pithos base that defied all attempts at recovery during two brief visits to the site during the Uluburun excavations.
Already some suspicious-looking coppery-green lumps are showing up after hand fanning the sediment away, but nothing we could definitively identify as a specific cultural object. But things look promising!
The other big event of the day was Dr. George Bass’ first dive of the season, and his first at Cape Gelidonya since the late 1980s. Only a few people here on the 2010 project have been privileged to dive with Dr. Bass before, and we all hope to get the opportunity by the end of the season. When he came to Gelidonya in 1960, Dr. Bass was a newly certified diver, who had only dived once in salt water before the project started. Fifty years later, he has many many more dives under his belt, though the equipment of 2010 is significantly different from what was available in 1960.
John D. Littlefield, Matthew P. Dames, Susannah H. Snowden and Dr. George F. Bass prepare to dive on the site. Photograph by Ania Kotarba-Morley.
The daily routine aboard Millawanda is busy, but well organized. Each day, two people are assigned a task, such as timekeeper, or barge chief. Timekeepers are responsible for keeping an accurate log of each dive, and keeping track of how long each dive team is down. Generally our dives are thirty minutes, morning and afternoon, with ten minutes of decompression at 6 meters (20 feet) for ten minutes in the morning, and fifteen in the afternoon. We breathe pure oxygen during our decompression stop, based on dive tables developed by Dr. Richard Vann of Divers Alert Network (DAN). Each tank of oxygen is fully used up, so we must have someone watch to see when each tank is dry, and to then switch tanks. The divers on the decompression stop pull on a line, which rings a bell tied to the side of the ship when they run out. They then breathe their regular air mixture in the 10 seconds or so it takes to switch the tanks.
Mine Bozkurt monitors the oxygen tanks. Photograph by Ryan C. Lee.
Our airlift pipes are down on the site, but the air hoses that run from the Millawanda down to a manifold on the seabed are still being assembled. We seem to have temporarily misplaced a few of the connectors, but after a discussion we are fairly confident that we will find them in the morning.
Dr. Cemal Pulak and Onok Bozkurt assembling airlift hoses on the Millawanda’s starboard deck. Photograph by Ryan C. Lee
Millawanda’s captain, Ali, in front of the four low-pressure compressors we will hopefully start using tomorrow for the four airlifts assembled on site. Photograph by Ryan C. Lee