Off-gas day

Monday 29.8.2016

Today is off-gas day. That means no diving, so that Jouni and me will completely recover from earlier dives. This is playing it really safe, because of the conservative decompression procedures and only one dive per day we have usually recovered completely before the next dive - according to our dive computers. However, we do not mind at all playing it safely with our health.

Initially we were supposed to go to MS Queen Zenobia and help out there with dive and other operations. Then we were offered to help out Irene in the office. That sounded much more fun that spending all day on top of the wreck site and not being able to dive it.

Well - then it turned out that Irene was off today, but someone else would be at the office, and we could be of some use that way. Finally Andri came around at 10:30, and said that we can help her out when fetching more sea water for the amphorae in desalination. Then she was off to somewhere, and we just waited loitering by the pool. Not a bad way to rest on your 1st day off in the project. The logistics are quite large, and every now and then things seem to be not so well organized. But eventually everything gets done.

In the morning I needed to get laundry detergent, because this seemed like a perfect day to do laundry. There is only one detergent box somewhere, and finally I was able to get some of it in a small container. There was only one such container available, and so I had to be careful to return it, because otherwise nobody else could do laundry. A very complex protocol just get your laundry detergent! You could simply place a detergent box in the office, and everyone could get it from there when needed.

Andri came back around 11:30 with two new amphorae. It turned out they (Andri and the students helping her with amphorae) did not need our help getting the sea water. They have only a few 20L canisters, and so they have to make many trips to the Alaminos harbor to get enough sea water. This is another example on not so perfect logistics. For the price of a few water canisters you need to spend hours of time to get the sea water needed for desalination. Gas and volunteer time is cheap...

We ended up walking to Mazotos village for lunch. The project is paying for lunches, and we were allowed to have a sandwich or hamburger at the same Mazotos tavern, where we eat all our dinners. We found a backgammon board there and played a game while munching our cheeseburgers. We did not quite remember the rules, but the tavern owner was kind enough to show us the starting position. The rest of the rules were decided during the game. Most were correct but close enough. Better player won, with one piece left in the home board.

In Mazotos it is customary for older men to spend their afternoons in taverns playing local board game. We fit right in.

Once we got back to the accommodations, people were already coming back from the wreck. So, in practice we ended up doing nothing useful on our off-gas day. Well - I did get that laundry done.

The afternoon/evening program started at 1600. Rachel gave us a very nice introduction to archaeological illustration. We covered different illustration types and what advantages illustrations have over photographs. For example, you can unwrap any given structure, or you can emphasize on salient aspects of the find which might not be so visible in a photograph. We discussed the conventions used in illustrations ("the light comes from up-left", etc), tried out different ink pens and then we practiced for more than an hour doing simple illustrations with shading done on different methods. We all understood that this was just an introduction, we were not masters yet, and it showed in our work. At the end we went through today's trench work with Stella and planned for tomorrow. Exciting day coming again.