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August 20th 2004
Woke up by Krister
jumping on us shouting something about Grey Wales. When they get exited
Swedish people really sound like the Swedish Cook from Muppet Show. However,
by the time we got up they were gone. The position was N68 04.721, W172
30.222 (WGS84). The ship was moving at 14 knots and the weather was
absolutely perfect, what a miracle. This would hopefully be the day of our
first dive on the Tsjeluskin.
We arrived at the dive site at noon but the captain didn’t really seem to be
that experienced hunting wrecks, sailing strange patterns for an hour and a
half. At 13:24 (UTC+9) we finally got a sensible echo from the sonar why the
Lavrentyev stopped and dropped the anchor so the ROV team could take it from
there. After two hours we were honestly loosing faith in the ROV team as
well and began wondering if we would ever get to dive the Tsjeluskin. The
position at this time was N68 18.287, W172 49.173 (WGS84).
At 17:01 (UTC+9) the ROV had to surface in order to recharge the batteries,
still no sight of the Tsjeluskin, we were loosing valuable dive time and
waisting perfect weather conditions.
Until this point we had been waiting patiently for the crew on the
Lavrentyev and the ROV team to do their jobs, only monitoring the situation
from our laptop and a handheld GPS. When Max tried to explain our position
in relations to the waypoint we couldn’t help to protest. We later
discovered that they were hunting the wreck without a plotter but using the
GPS and a normal sea chart to plot the seek pattern. No wonder it had been
looking a bit strange. We were invited on the bridge to setup our “portable
plotter” and we also agreed on an efficient seek pattern for a ship of this
size. From here the search went smooth and we picked 9 sonar signals in the
area that the ROV team wanted to explore further, we wanted to keep trying to
get a solid signal by sonar or echo sounder but the expedition leader felt
strongly about one of the spots. The time was now 20:15 (UTC+9) and we were
desperately fighting to gain time. The ROV guys would be working all night
so we went to bed. |
