P-MAN XV Update #17 - Underwater oddities

7 April

Well, we sure know some more of where not to look now.

We had two interesting targets to investigate today. The sphereoid was going to be conquered today and so was another unknown item of interest. Side scanning sonar is great for helping decide if something is natural, or man made. If not natural, you have to get a set of eyes onto it to determine if it can help you locate an aircraft. We have over 200 items of interest right now to investigate. If we had an ROV here, which we don't now, we would be able to send it down to take a look. But we only have us so down to 100+ feet today. In potentially bad visibility.

The first target was the sphereoid. This is something that Scripps saw briefly last year out in Western Lagoon. We could convince ourselves it was a turret off a B-24. Or a mooring ball from the Japanese anchorage out here. Could go either way. To knock it off our list, we'd have to take a look.

Fortunately, we had a signpost to lead us to the object. We would just have to locate a Daihatsu landing craft, go the to the bow, then head 271 degrees for 13.5 meters. Joe hooked the landing craft with a small buoy. Then he dropped anchor. Turns out the buoy was on the bow and the anchor on the stern of the craft.

Anchor line on stern.

Joe lead us down. Then he attached a line to the bow and we swam out 300 degrees, creating some separation between us along the line. Then we commenced a circular search in our quadrant of choice. A couple of minutes later, Casey put eyes on the target. Okay, not aviation, let's get out of here.

Mooring ball and Casey.

Back to the Daihatsu's bow, then to the stern and up the anchor line for our safety stops. One crossed off our list, one to go.

We broke out leftovers from last night's Taj meal and had some lunch. Then we moved 0.7 miles to the other target. This was a very bright return on the SSS equipment with a good sized shadow. The shadow means it has some elevation off the sea floor. We threw a buoy, Joe anchored and we went down without much of a search plan. WE found a bunch of nothing. Except I saw a very large jelly fish with an entourage of small fish around it.

Jelly with fish.

So up we came, threw the buoy on our lat/long and swam a real search pattern. On the crosswind leg, we found this object:

We have no idea what it is, but it sure isn't aviation related. Unless of course it's an aerial torpedo.

So not much in the way of progress toward our goal, but we did eliminate items from our list of items to eliminate. A quick debrief at The Drop Off, then dinner out at Bem Ermii. This was Casey's choice tonight.

Tomorrow, we hope to do more elder interviews.

- Flip Colmer

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