Random Jottings
Antalya, the new graveyard of ancient ships?
Regular readers will know that I have long posted updates on the Antikythera mechanism, well another wreck has been found just off the coat in Turkey which may be just as interesting!
Before I press on a brief re-cap, the Antikythera mechanism was found by divers who excavated the shipwreck at the same place way back and conducted the investigations within the limitations of the time, so hammers, jacks, big crowbars and the like and to be blunt they were looking at obtaining museum quality artefacts rather than an investigation of the vessel itself.
Excavations on this vessel may be different, why? Well to be honest because the museum value of copper or tin ingots is not so great as copies of great and famous Greek sculptures. So for that reason I feel that the excavation will be more measured with less pressure to lift artefacts to deal with the issue, real or imagined of looters.
It is strange that the first inkling that I received on this discovery was on an article on Divernet.
https://divernet.com/2019/04/09/divers-investigate-worlds-oldest-shipwreck/
However there was a link to a very interesting peer reviewed paper written by a more 'august organisation' which contains some more interesting details.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00310328.2019.1579467
Reading through the details there are some interesting snippets with a side-scan showing what you could expect to find on an 'old' wreck in relatively shallow water, useful the world over. Also the photographs show quite clearly the ingots on the unexcavated sea-bed again showing as any diver knows that once you get down to 40m or greater there is very little marine growth and unless there is a strong current and sand/mud sea-bed where a wreck will bury itself over time you could expect to see man made objects, in this case some 3500 years after they were lost, quite amazing.
The R&D article details that there will be more excavations to follow and it will be interesting to see what is found and documented over the next decade or so, providing the crew didn't manage to grab any navigational items maybe the wreck will throw up another early astrolobe which will further increase our knowledge of how our ancient forebearers navigated on the open sea!
Dive safe
RichW
Latest Photographs


A common Hermit crab (Pagurus bernhardus), this one seemed to have a load of eggs around the outer edge of the shell
There are 'odd' sections of phosphor bronze pipe dotted around the site, I have put a fishing weight on this one to give some sense of scale. I may be forced to attack it with a hammer and chisel in 2017!
Toby and Lucy starting to surface, it was 'odd' to do a three minute safety stop.......
Along part of the site there is a definite step of maybe a meter, a very good spot for picking up lost weights but note the general lack of life here in 10m of water!
If you look carefully at shots of Yewglen you will see that she had a pair of rubbing strakes welded onto the side of he hull, another positive bit of identification!
A grey seal pup (Halichoerus grypus) on a rock almost saying come closer........
Not too happy at all!
Paddle boarders, didn't know that during this dive a paddle would be found
The joys of a 'professional-hobbyist' (?) lathe is that you can carry out tweaks, in this case off-setting the blank so that I didn't need to set the lathe up to taper turn, rather the work-piece was off-set.
Lumpsucker eggs, not normally as common as the washed up fish and once used as fake caviar
Work over the site and you will see odd bits of iron jammed into cracks and fissures on the sea-bed
To have a swim and try to........
A Short Spined Sea-Scorpion (Myoxocephalus scorpius), a nice 'easy' fish to get nice photographs of, as you can probably tell if you go through all of the albums.
Not sure what these parts are, they are inside the broken up boiler
A Snakelocks Anemone (Anemonia viridian), most at Oban are quite small when compared with the monsters you see at Babbacombe and other South Coast sites.
Concreted crap like a plum pudding of rust, brass bits and stones. Every year more is broken up as the sea gets 'underneath' and frees the brass. That's why those early dives are important, lots of bits freed and available to be picked up.
The engine block, the shot-line is tied to this
A typical north east wreck dive, plates, boilers n bits. In this case probably Jan Van Ryswyck although a few vessels have foundered so the bits are somehwhat mixed!
But get near the engine room and it is all a bit of a buggers muddle of blasted bits