November 3^rd, 2006

Measuring the open-sea anchor Credit : Max Guérout

Early in the morning, we took advantage of a tide with an increasing coefficient to take photographs of the anchors and guns standing near the beach. They had been measured the day before in particularly acrobatic conditions.

Then, we made the most of the beautiful weather and launched our dinghy. The sea was a lot quieter, so the manoeuvre was quite easily done. But in this kind of operation, we always have to be careful not to place the dinghy in the critical zone when a wave train is coming. Landings in Tromelin included a lot of capsizing and critical situations.
The aim of this operation was to take measures of the open-sea anchor and to film it for the first time with our diving chamber which we hadn’t used before because the conditions were too difficult.

The guns near the beach Credit : Max Guérout

After we filmed the anchor, we went to the Utile site and filmed the wreck for the first time.

Meanwhile, another team was recording and taking photographs of the objects; then they entered the whole information in a database.

On dry land, Thomas Romon and Sudel Fuma started to scrub the three layers one by one. On that day their findings were more modest, including numerous framework nails suggesting that the wreck wood was used to maintain the fire, a lead gun bullet, a copper piece which had served to repair a container and two pierced shells. The latter could have been part of a necklace but they were not numerous enough to confirm that hypothesis.

Getting the dinghy back Credit : Max Guérout

At the beginning of the afternoon, we tried to dive in the eastern side of the island, where the ballast stones of volcanic origin were observed by Pascal Cohu, one of the meteorologists of the station. But we finally had to cancel it, because one of the two divers didn’t achieve to overcome the breaking waves and lost a fin in the operation. The East coast was directly exposed to the trade wind and the rough sea made it particularly difficult to dive with cylinders.

At the end of the afternoon, we got back the dinghy which remained attached the whole day    on a buoy we had anchored off the island.