First Dives

1:30 PM Mon 18 August

I am where I love to be. Behind me, the island of Corfu; before me, the coast of Albania. I am sitting on the shaded top deck of the Hercules, a quiet spot on this busy boat. In the wheelhouse (just forward of this deck), the captain steers us toward the afternoon’s sonar project; the entire ship throbs quietly on its engines. This morning’s excitement was that the deep thrusters (which keep the ship aligned on GPS coordinates) failed, but the crew is clever and handy enough to have made the repair and we chug cheerily along to the afternoon’s project.
Me, I had my excitement this morning. Our first official day of work on the wreck.
I know, I know, I have been silent for some days; I left you last just as the WID team arrived (Friday evening). WID = Waitt Institute for Discovery; the team =
• Joe, the DSO (“Dive Safety Officer”, responsible for dive plans, equipment, and safety); ex-Navy, no-nonsense when it comes to business but with a good sense of humor and perspective; calls me “Doc”;
• Liz, responsible for documenting (video, photography) and PR; a degree in astrophyics(!), intrepid (jumped in for her first dive of the season as soon as she finished throwing up from seasickness);
• her brother Derek, graduate student in marine biology, bringing extensive skills in diving and underwater photography; has already been invaluable in his excellent suggestions for how to approach this site;
The fifth member of our team is Adriani Anastasi, the Albanian government’s official representative in charge of overseeing all underwater archaeology projects and professor at the University of Tirana. I was greatly delighted at his greeting this morning: “We need to get the interpreter on board. I need to be able to communicate. I am not here to control. I want to be a working member of the team. I want to see how things are done. This is a beginning for underwater archaeology in Albania.” What a refreshing change from the overworked, jaded, or strictly bureaucratic government officials too often sent as representatives to archaeological projects.

Friday morning, my second day on the Hercules, George (Robb) invited me to dive on the wreck. It had been a year since I last dove (on the Roman shipwreck at Kizilburun, Turkey) and, honestly, the first dive was half about me adjusting and getting comfortable with the equipment. The first step is the most irritating: pulling on the stiff, tight-fitting wetsuit. Even skinny guys have a struggle, and it is definitely not a flattering moment for women – every curve is an obstacle, fat squelches into folds, spilling over the edges of the suit. On our RHIB (rigid hull inflatable boat) there are no corners of decency. Then you load on cumbersome equipment: a weight belt (mine weighs about 25 lbs.), the tank and its buoyancy vest (the latter is a misnomer outside the water). Fins further clutter any movement. Until you have a crew practiced in diving together, it is diffcult to gauge preparation time and so …

(9:30 PM — Did I say quiet place on the ship? My “office” did not remain private for long; a procession of conversations and then the wind picked up and we scurried home in heavy seas — no way to concentrate on the screen, and anyway it was much more fun to stand on the deck and get washed by the spray of the plunging waves. We arrived just as the sun washed the dinghy fishing boats in the quiet harbor with a golden tint. Various chores and dinner. Only now again a quiet moment. On Ani’s balcony; the family is out on the seafront promenade.)

… and so one is usually either hurriedly strapping on the last bits of gear while teammates encased in their wetsuits swelter in the sun, or the other way around. But eventually comes the welcome signal to roll over the sides of the rubber boat and fall into the cool sea, where one all that equipment finally has purpose and we gracefully transition from the sparkling, busy, cacophonous world of bright sun and noisy waves to muted blue.

One minute of kicking down and I am in my other world. Hovering over a seabed strewn with jars filled and loaded more than two millennia ago. I hang there and stare, looking to see the elements and patterns of the strew. Here a jar almost complete, there a shattered base, further down a collection of three, and over there a bowl, and much further something odd. I see then that many have collected along a ledge in the bedrock and perhaps there is a strange bulge in the sediment at the place of densest accumulation of objects?

It takes me through the second dive to feel familiar with the general outlines of the site. The third dive, this morning, was our first working day. The gentle easing in is over; it is time for me to step up. We met at the dock 7’ish: Liz, Derek, Joe, Dr. Anastasi, Ardiola (the interpreter), and I. The seas were beginning to build toward their afternoon rough and we had a bumpy half-hour’ish ride out to the site. Liz’ sea-sickness patch wore off; poor thing, she threw up just before her dive. Tough girl, she shrugged and dove anyway. The smile on her face when she surfaced erased all troubles. No matter how much footage of wreck diving you may have seen in documentaries or movies, it cannot prepare you for the actual experience of diving, or of diving on an ancient shipwreck. The cargo we examined today sank at a time when people who remembered Alexander the Great still lived. Today we dove on their debris.

We had two dives each and have managed to label most of the important groupings in preparation for mapping, and Derek has begun to photograph. Next step will be to produce a preliminary map; we start on that in earnest the next diving day.

The autumn winds are picking up and the easy daily dives of summer can no longer be assumed.

The timing for a weather day-off tomorrow is not so bad. The official in charge of the Albanian conservation lab is coming from Tirana tomorrow in order to find out more about what we expect to uncover and discuss the possibilities available in Albania for conservation of large quantities of objects raised from the sea. I will not raise a single amphora until I have facilities for conservation and storage. Archaeology does not end with discovery.