More airlift work and the other anchor stock weight

Thursday 1.9.2016

The project had success today as also the second anchor stock lead weight was found. The bow had four teams working on it, because it seems to give much promise now. Some teams exposed more of the hull. Jouni, Nick and me were excavating the new lead weight and its surrounding area.

Jouni excavating with his paddle-brush invention. It is kind of a spork. It has a excavation paddle on one side and a paint brush on the other side, all put together with always reliable duct tape. Robert found it innovative, and immediately took my 1st prototype  into use. This is the 2nd prototype.

We worked in a different way now. I was holding the airlift, and Jouni was excavating in front of me. Nick was trying to use the other airlift to clear some of the dust away. He first moved it on one side of the excavation, and when that did not really help, he tried another position. And then he put it away.

This way of excavation went very well. It is clearly easier with two than alone. Jouni first picked the spot to excavate, and positioned himself there properly. I then moved opposite to him with the airlift, and just laid down on bottom. We knew we were excavating a pretty small area, and the bottom around was free from finds. Jouni probably saw the excavation area well, but I was pretty much in the dust cloud most of the time. Every now and then Jouni picked up the airlift head, and moved it 20-30 cm to this direction or that. And then I just kept it there. We think that we were able expose the lead weight completely. Or Jouni thinks, I did not really see that much...

Finally Nick rang the 20 minute bell, I returned the airlift hose to its station, and we ascended to the three trapezes for deco. There is a separate trapeze for each deco depth: 12m, 9m and 6m.

Airlift hose station. The handle is there to turn the airlift on/off and the hose head is hooked to one of the metal handles.

There is a little bit melancholy in the air, as the fieldcamp will close tomorrow evening with final team presentations. Some of the divers had already today their last Mazotos dive, as Christos tries to give everyone 48 hours between the last dive and the flight out. Playing it safe all the way to the end. I will continue diving every day for two more weeks, except for off-gas days once a week or so.

Each trench team is working on their presentations tonight and tomorrow afternoons. Our team had to select a name for it (right!) and our's is aptly "Bow and Arrow", with a word play both on words. The latter defers to the North Arrow, which we use when making archive photographs of finds in situ. Clever, right!