Novy Svet Survey

As I write this quick post by dim lamplight, thunder is rolling over the cliffs, and frothing waves are throwing spray fifteen feet into the night sky. The scene is illuminated by the full, yet cloud-swathed moon, and lightning flickering over the sea. From our cliff-side command post I see it all, and think back on this afternoon’s foray to the bottom of the bay. Around me, comrades wrapped in warm camouflage and shadows swap adventures and anecdotes. All electricity has been shut down, but a dented pot merrily boils on the top steps of the bunker that serves as our kitchen and pantry, the smoky gas flame burning a cheerful orange in the darkness. Hot tea, thick with sugar is passed around constantly, the soft clink of metal and pewter cups a back drop to the murmured Russian and soft laughter.

I can pick up general concepts in the conversation, and share in a few of the jokes, but tonight my mind is on a far older story, a story two miles away and forty feet beneath the waves. This afternoon we opened a new trench near the center of our quadrant; there, 60 cm beneath the seafloor, lay a timber. It is 18 cm wide, and careful excavation revealed 60 cm of its length before it was time to surface, as well as associated nails and fragments. This is the largest timber that has been found since the beginning of excavation on the site in 1997 – and while this is only a preliminary report from the field, and much more analysis is certainly required, I am thrilled. Further excavation will reveal exactly what I was looking at today, but tonight my mind is filled with a still quiet, thinking back on the ancient vessel that we seek on the bottom of the Bay of Novy Svet. Tonight, in the rain filled, aromatic darkness, I feel closer than ever before to this place, to this land and sea, in my quest for the story of this shipwreck and the stories of the medieval sailors who manned her.

August 10th and 11th

The tenth of August saw a much needed “camp day”, and provided us with the time to take care of some necessities: repairing one of our compressors, modifying our Zodiac, manufacturing grid lines, washing clothes.

An interview with the site’s Director, Dr. Sergey Zelenko, made the news in the “Crimean Report”. A video of our team working is included, and you can view the article and film here: (Opening the page in Google Chrome will provide an easy option for a basic yet understandable translation of the page into English.)

Our efforts also made the local papers at the end of July, but I have just now acquired a physical copy which I share below!  The respective headlines read “How the Pisan’s fought it out on the Green Bay” and “Here in the Sudak – Liman coastal area, the ancient conflict ended in a shipwreck”.  ”Green Bay” is another name for the Bay of Novy Svet.

The 11th brought a return to the bay, prepared and ready for a good days work; I would lay the outlining marking lines while the rest of the team continued to work on the trenches. While simple in concept, this effort actually requires a lot of pre-dive planning and underwater coordination, because we are working off of a surface supply system. Our compressor supports four divers on 20 m hoses, as shown in the newspaper clipping above.
Normal procedure is for buddy pairs to swim out to the ends of their tethers, then descend to their pre-assigned areas and return to the reper and ascend along the anchor line to complete their safety stops before surfacing.

This way, the air lines don’t get tangled. With the movement required for perimeter work, however, everyone has to be aware of each other’s positions, and I had to be extra careful to exactly retrace my path so as not to compromise my buddies.

As it turned out, however, the position of the diving float didn’t give my air line enough length to reach the full outline of the quadrant: I retraced my route, stored the unused cables for use on the 12th, and joined Dr. Zelenko at our trench.

August 8th and 9th saw us back on your our normal diving schedule.

Excavation below 40 cm along the eastern edges of our quadrant revealed more and more wood fragments amongst the artifact spread, along with some slightly larger sections and well preserved wooden elements of tackle!

The nature of the seabed here, a thick mixture of small to medium stones and sand for more than the first meter of depth, makes manual excavation laborious and time consuming.  The edges of the site are lined with ever-rising walls of rocks removed from our excavation zone.  Penetrating to any significant depth will require an airlift, but moderate penetration (and extensively more than a team using only hand-fanning and manual material removal is capable of) can be achieved by the use of a DPV (Diver Propulsion Vehicle – pictured below) reversed and used as an excavation tool, with excellent results!

 
At the same time, I began preparations for making a basic grid on the site. Weather and water quality permitting, I’ll shoot the site for a photo mosaic during the upcoming week.

August 6th and 7th
One aspect of my efforts here in Ukraine is to look for and help create opportunities for collaboration in the future. To this end I joined a two day expedition to the eastern edge of Crimea, to a picturesque Nature Preserve named Nagora and an interesting formation in the sea called the “Ship’s Rocks” where we would visually survey for evidence of shipwrecks.

Coming from Wisconsin, I’m used to the contrast of white on white, for example snowfall against the snow-covered corn fields, or black on black, like leafless branches against a midnight winter sky; but stark on stark is something else again. After several seasons coming here to the Crimean coast around the resort towns of Novy Svet and Sudak, the tremendous majesty of the bare, ancient reefs that jut hundreds of meters out of the earth here is a daily pleasure, but an old appreciation.

The gnarled junipers that cover the landward slopes and sparsely, yet tenaciously grip the sheer seaward faces, and wend their way to the rocky slopes that spill in mammoth chunks into the sea, bear witness to the raw gravity and strength of this place and its people. Climbing Sokol, the mountain pictured to the left and below, is a tradition of mine whenever I arrive here!

It is a starkness brightened by the bloom of civilization, by the barbecuing fish that my companions DSO Nikita Zelenko and Master Diver Olec Vorobey spear on the last dives of the day, by the laughter of children and good friends. The starkness of the Steppe, on the other hand, the endless miles of truly empty land and rolling hills to all horizons, the colossal ruins of Soviet community farms and factories, is a wild wind-blown feeling that I cannot describe, save that I feel the shadows of a thousand thousand lives and loves and struggles passing before my eyes, and as I blink fading into the silently waving grass. I read once, in a fortune cookie, that the value of a cup is in its emptiness; a friend of mine speaking one snowy night in New York City stated that silences are the most powerful speech elements humanity has at its command. As our land rovers rumbled over the rough, empty terrain to the beach where we would make camp, my Commander had only one word to say: “Perestroika”.

The Ship’s Rocks themselves are iconic and history laden, having served as military outposts in various invasions; we spent two days diving around them.

Conditions were windy, and due to the moderate waves I was unable to conduct a Sonar survey of the area.

Strong currents gave us a challenge, but were nothing to put our seasoned divers in a bad mood!

At the end of the day, hot soup cooked over a driftwood fire helped take the chill off the evening!

August 5th saw another early morning, though the sun was already high in the sky when our diving platform chugged away from the pier at 7:30. Our second day of survey was successful as well, topped off with an evening lesson in Sonar analysis from our Russian colleagues. In the scan of the seabed below, an old excavation quadrant (marked with a star) and the metal pyramid described earlier can be clearly seen!

6 A.M. came quickly on August fourth, yet I was surprisingly refreshed. A cloudless sky and steaming mugs of tea saw us off and on our way, and we got our gear set up and were on the water by 7:30! We wanted to get out to sea relatively early since the bay has a lot of activity after about ten o’clock, and stronger winds kick up daily around noon making accurate travel more difficult for our small platform.

Our initial course took us 3.5 km north east along the coast to Sudak fortress. We made several sweeps and by noon had completed a path 400 m wide with few mishaps.

Returning to Novy Svet Bay, I loaded a new set of navigation points and we began to survey. The Sonar tracks of the bay were finished quite quickly, with great results! Officer Slavi and I had practiced in his zodiac during some off hours a few days prior, and we had our steady navigation down pat.

Combined with our experience from the morning, an hour’s effort gave us great visuals of our site and a 400 m x 400 m block around it!

The photograph below was shot from a helicopter, looking southwest along the Crimean coast towards our site. The city shown is Sudak; Feature A is the Bay of Novy Svet, with the apex of the letter pointing approximately to where the wreck lies, and feature B is the Sudak fortress. While the fortress site has been occupied for nearly two thousand years, the current fortifications were constructed by the Genoese during the 13th century.

The fortress was served by two working harbors close by, but the Bay of Novy Svet was a natural shelter that could serve in bad weather – and possibly as a refuse yard for disposing of unwanted material or vessels, as the report of the Genoese Crusader-chronicler Obertus Stanconus indicates the Novy Svet wreck might have been.
Its more contemporary service as the harbor of what is commonly called “the most beautiful place on the Crimean coast” may allow us easy access, but is also the cause of a great deal of problem solving. Not only is the artifact spread vast and jumbled, the detritus of modern wrecks and civilization litter the sea-bed above and around the medieval artifacts. Items ranging from ship parts, fishing traps, countless meters of metal cable, even an I-beam, are present around and on the site of the 2011 survey quadrant. One of the most interesting features is a large pyramid made of steel girders – a remnant of an old fishing operation that now serves as the Reper for our quadrant.

My dive buddy, dive master Sergey Spluhin and I addressed this issue.

On August first, we unrolled our Surface Supply hoses and hit the sea floor for an air and energy intensive couple of hours of metal detritus removal. I first applied myself to the pieces lying in plain view, while Sergey began sweeping for pieces beneath the seafloor with our Minelab Excalibur II underwater metal detector; half-way through, we switched roles.

The previous evening saw a some laughs when Sergey and I realized that the Russian and English versions of the instruction manual that we were comparing told us completely different settings for determining proper calibration of the Discrepancy control. In light of this, we set up a test course comprised of coins, scrap iron and steel, lead fishing weights and some of the girls’ jewelry and determined the proper settings for ourselves! The evening was topped off with a delicious barbecue of marinated chicken with lots of Russian salad and potatoes with dill, and a delicious dish of sliced tomatoes with eggs done in a way I have never seen before.

Our work on August second saw similar efforts, save that we dived with tanks due to the greater mobility they allow – our surface supply hoses keep us on a 20 meter tether. I awoke at five A.M. to a glorious sunrise – and smiling at the indescribable glitter of the sun on the sea that never fails to mesmerize me, promptly fell back to sleep until my cheerful alarm summoned me to coffee and waking life at 6:30.
Morning reports general camp duties brought us to a breakfast of preserved plums and thickly sliced bread, and at 9:00 we were on the road to the dive shop where we store the catamaran that we dive from. Friends of ours run it, it’s conveniently located next to the sea and has a large pier we can launch from.

The third thru the fifth have been spent obtaining Sonar data of our site. On the evening of the third, some colleagues arrived from Moscow to help take Sonar scans of the Bay of Novy Svet, as well as 3.5 km x 500 m tracks north and south along the coastline. To date we have been using a Humminbird 997c SI Combo Sonar system; Dr. Victor Lebedinski from the Russian Academy of Sciences and his associates Alexander Opolovnikov and Gleb Tarasov brought a Hydra Lite system, and we wanted to compare systems. The readout of the Hydra system would be constantly monitored, while I would program the Humminbird’s chart plotter to make sure our Sonar sweeps were properly executed.

At 2:30 in the morning and endless cups of tea later, I finished the route programming. The sky was a brilliant display of stars, the Milky Way vast and distinct with a million points of light as I gratefully made my way to my old, thick U.S. Army sleeping bag. The night air is chill here, and there is a light breeze off the sea; the prospect of a few hours of warm rest felt like paradise.

Sunrise from base camp!

Welcome to the Novy Svey Wreck Blog!  A glorious sunrise soaked the wine-dark Euxine this morning, and painted the sky a bright vermillion as I sipped from my worn ceramic mug of coffee, and began composing this first Post.

Here on the southeast coast of the Crimea, the Centre for Underwater Archaeology (hereafter referred to as CUA) founded and directed by Dr. Sergey Zelenko of the National Taras Shevchenko University of Kiev, has been recording and excavating the material cargoes of several medieval shipwrecks in the Bay of Novy Svet.  One of these, a 13th century ship tentatively identified as Pisan, has been the focus of the majority of effort, and is known as the Novy Svet Wreck.  More detailed information concerning earlier excavation seasons can be found here.

Already having a long history of collaboration with INA and Texas A&M University, CUA and INA are again working together this field season, this time on preliminary efforts to determine the potential presence and location of the hull timbers of the Novy Svet Wreck.  For the 2011 season we will focus on three tasks: gathering and plotting of detailed bathymetric data for the 170 x 150m area under survey, running SONAR tracks along a 300 x 400m section of the Bay of Novy Svet, including our survey area, and the selection of a new excavation quadrant where we will probe, survey with a metal detector, and dig trenches with the help of an airlift.

Writing to you on this first day of August, I have already been on site for twelve days, and much has already been accomplished.  Scattered internet connectivity has prevented my reliable communication until now, but henceforward regular posts should be coming every second evening until the end of the month!  I will also post a backlog of our activities since my arrival on July 19th.

At the moment, our team is gearing up and getting ready to head to the dive center in Novy Svet where we store our catamaran, the platform we use to dive from in the bay.  Fortified with an early breakfast of hot Kasha (a multigrain porridge) mixed with fresh honey and condensed milk, and endless cups of steaming tea, my dive buddy, Divemaster Sergey Spluhin and I are preparing to make a preliminary sweep of a new survey quadrant with our Minelab Excalibur II underwater metal detector.  Unlike yesterday, when the sea was crashing along the coasts and undulating through the bay in long, heavy swells, this morning’s sea is calm and serene, promising decent visibility and a good day of diving!

On behalf of INA, CUA, Texas A&M University, Taras Shevchenko University of Kiev, myself and all our team members here on the Bay of Novy Svet, welcome to the Crimea!