The photo shows an underwater frame, which is one technique of surveying all or part of a dive site. The other technique we used…

… involves taking relative measurements from one or more fixed line/s (datum) that are set-up on the dive site.

Doing this type of thing was great fun, but also highlighted what you take for granted on ‘dry land’.

Underwater, you aren’t able to talk to your buddy other than through primative sign language, writing on a slate is harder, and you need to remember to breathe ;-)

Overall a very busy and interesting one-day course.

We all plan to do the next level course later in the year, so watch this space for a review of that.

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As part of these plans, five dive club members attended an Introductory course delivered by the Nautical Archaeological Society (NAS) on 28th April, at the NAS headquarters in Portsmouth.

The course was split into three parts:

• Firstly some classroom lectures about the scope of marine archaeology and the legal and social requirements;
• Secondly there was a practical exercise of surveying a mock dive site on dry land;
• Finally, the surveying exercise was transferred to a local swimming pool, and we had to try to repeat the measuring whilst remembering to breath ;-)

The first two parts of the day were very informative, and the two course presenters managed to get across the finer points of what could easily have been a very dry (no pun intended) course with a great deal of enthusiasm and fun.

The underwater part of the course will be covered in a future post.

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• The next article on this course