| P-MAN XVI Update # 11 - Flip's notes on 23 March 23 March 2014 Sunday was an interesting day. As we were briefing in the morning for our mission, Scripps/UDel called and asked if we could contribute two divers to their investigative team. So at 0930, we dispatched Sean and Casey to join them as they dove on targets in Malakal Harbor. The rest of us finished our briefing and prepping and headed out. Our mission today was to continue looking in the Aimeliik area. We dove the wall yesterday. Now Scripps/UDel wants us to swim around the margins of a coral head, again at the bottom where the coral head meets the sea floor. The AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles) can't get all that close so that area was assigned to us. That was target number one. Target two was to continue north along the wall that we worked yesterday. Target three was to snorkel the top of a coral head in the general area as the LIDAR (from a combination of Light and radar) data set showed some large stuff on the top that might be manmade. As we headed up north to the assigned area, we could see we were going to get rained on. And once the rain started, it really did not stop. Okay, I know what you're thinking. They're going SCUBA diving. They're planning on getting wet already. What's the deal? Mostly it's about visibility. At 80 feet, it was hard to see much detail on the bottom and keep the reef wall in sight. By going lower, we reduced the time we could stay under. What we did see, didn't have much color as well. We started at the northern tip of the coral head and sent a pair of divers counterclockwise, and three divers clockwise around the coral head. The plan was to dive as long as we could, and if we met up somewhere around the southern end, we would have covered the entire circumference. We did not meet up so we would need a second dive which we did later in the day. On this second dive, we started at the southern end and sent our teams to complete their circumnavigations. We did see a lion fish, eagle ray and lots of pretty fish while doing our safety stops. But other than a tire that was below the boat, we did not see any manmade objects. In between the dives, we ate lunch and snorkeled the top of a coral head that had some interesting LIDAR returns. What we found were some very large coral outcroppings sticking above the nominal top of the coral head. Someone said they saw a pipe, but that certainly didn't come from an aircraft. At 1730, I picked Casey and Sean up at Neco. They said they had had a great day. But we told them to get cleaned up and turned around so we could go for our first Taj outing. The Taj is quite possibly the best Indian restaurant on the planet. We debriefed the day's missions there over dinner. Then headed to Scripps/UDel and debriefed with them. 24 March - morning And now it's 0515 on the 24th. Casey and Sean told us about their dives. They looked at some of the SSS targets that Scripps/UDel developed and did not find any airplane parts. Mostly just metal junk that fell off ships: pipes, railings, gun mounts etc. Really hard metallic targets that give really good echoes on the SSS equipment. They did get to see Scripps/UDel use their handheld sonar equipment, what we call the "Alien Finder" (See the movie Aliens and you immediately visualize this underwater device). And of course the areas that we had poor visibility in a few days ago were much better for them. At Scripps/UDel central (the Coral Reef Research Foundation, next-door to Neco Marine), we went over the day's SSS findings, deciding which targets were "interesting" enough to dive on. I think we have over a dozen new targets to look at. So in a couple of hours, Sean and I will go with Scripps to help the investigative process. The rest of the team is taking either half or full admin days. We have things that have to be accomplished, one of which might even be an interview with someone who found a new potential crash site. More news on that later. I realized I did not take a single photo yesterday. However, Sean is a picture-taking machine. In Progress Report # 10, sean posted a ton of photos from the 23rd.
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