Black Sea 2007, Day 27
It seems we have a new friend. This is the Turkish version of our Coast Guard. They haven’t threatened us. They asked to board us a one point for an inspection, but the wind picked up and they decided it was too rough. It’s a good thing they don’t work for our Coast Guard!We had a great watch. Now that we have our bow-thruster working to maximum capacity, we have DP (Dynamic Positioning). This allows us to stay in one position, no matter what the seas are doing, within reason. We started by finishing our mosaic, which is about the most boring thing to do during a watch.
Basically Hercules is positioned about 2 meters above the wreck and does a lawn-mower pattern over the wreck. This means the pilot tells the vehicle, “Go forward 6 meters, at .1 meters per second”. After that, they lateral (slide, without changing heading) left 1.2 meters. Then they move aft 6 meters, at .1 meters per second. All the while, specialized cameras are taking pictures every 10 seconds.
The whole process, depending on the size of the are you are trying to cover can take hours. Once the process is done, the pictures are digital “stitched” together to make one large image of the wreck. What used to take days, now takes hours. It’s still a pain-staking process, but if you mess up, there’s always “Undo”.
The whole time we’ve been to Sinop D, we’ve had one rule, “DON’T knock over the mast!” This is the only wreck known in existence, of this age ship, with a full, free-standing, mast. We don’t want to be the people to knock it over. When we didn’t have DP, because of the broken bow-thruster, we were able to start the mosaic. Any time we got too close to the mast, we’d back off and mess up the mosaic.
Now that every thing’s working appropriately we can finish the mosaic. This meant our pilot, Todd Gregory, had to get mere inches away from the mast, to get the best pictures. I’m pretty sure he held his breath the whole time, and was VERY happy when the mosaic specialist told Todd it was OK to back away from the mast, he had his pictures.
After that was done, we needed to get a full view of the mast. This meant we had to rise up, and follow the mast. The other thing that’s unique, is the fact the mast isn’t standing straight up. It actually leans bow-port. Which means if you’re looking at it from the back, it’s leaning forward and to the left. Again, no easy task, but Todd (holding his breath, I’m sure) flew Hercules like the expert he is. The mast stands 15 meters high, about 45 feet. At the base, it’s about 40 centimeters, or 16 inches. That’s wider than most telephone poles.
Once we got the full view you can see the top of the mast has a square hole on it. Supposedly, this is where the flag or insignia would have rested to declare the family or land the ship came from. Of course now there’s no flag, but it makes you wonder what was there before. At the top, there’s a piece of rope. It’s about an inch think, and you can still see the braids. This is also an aspect of this wreck that makes it interesting that some of the rope has survived.
posted by DaveandBrian @ 6:05 AM
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