I just took an Underwater Archeology class. We met Tuesday & Thursday nights this past week for some of the class room work. Learned how to measure stuff :)
We had Jason Burns, the Georgia State Underwater Archeologist, a group from M.A.R.C (Marine Archeology, Research & Conservation) and one guy from M.A.H.S (Marine Archeology & Historical Society) as our trainers... I was dooly impressed by these guys...
Saturday 24 July 2004
We headed to Rome, GA to check out 4 sites right at the confluence of the Oostanula & Etowah Rivers forming the Coosa River. There were four sites to check out. We dove 2 in the site on Saturday.
Site 1: A wharf on the Oostanula right at the steps down to the river from the park between 1st and 2nd streets in downtown Rome. All that is left of the wharf is some timbers that stick out from the bank. They were interesting, but with < 1 foot of vis, not much to look at.
Site 2: A sand bardge that was beached to help with erosion where an old storm drain dumps into the river. This "wreck" was interesting... We measured it by standing in the river (We actually did get under water to "look" at it). Vis at site < 1 foot.
After the dives we headed back to the Days Inn in Rome to do more class work on the construction of ships.
Sunday 25 July 2004
We headed back to Rome to continue the class and dive the other 2 sites.
We started today in the "classroom" and learned about where to research, and how to fill out a site report.
Site 3: Another wharf, this one on the Etowah River. This one was far more interesting and had a lot more structure to it that the one we looked at Saturday on the Oostanula . We had good vis too. It was 5 feet :) We could actually see what we were looking at. There were some really interesting timbers and structures to the wharf. We did some survey work and measured part of the structure.
Site 4: The Dixie, a steamship, that caught fire, burned to the water line, and was left in the river. The story has it that the cook caught the ship on fire, they cut it loose from the wharf to keep it from burning up and let it go down river to where she lies today. Sometime in the 80s they used a claimshell craine to get some of the shi pout of the water and destroyed most of it. You caould still see some of it and once again, it was in thigh deep water. Vis was bad from the people walking around in the river rather than swimming.
Spent 3 hours in the water on both sites, hit a max depth of 6 feet and my bottom timer register 2:10 (mins:secs) of time deep enough to turn it on. I did spend a lot of time with my head underwater looking at stuff, & breathing off of my reg :)
All said and done, I had a great time, and learned a lot!