The Utile’s anchor and in the background, two buoys placed on the site. Credit: Max Guérout

We resumed our activities after a sad Sunday off, due to a cloudy front alternating overcast sky and heavy showers.

The weather was fine again but the wind hadn’t decreased in intensity. However, the divers were so impatient that they decided to dive from the beach with cylinders, under the leadership of Joé Guesnon.

As usual, the swell was irregular and was supplying a series of waves breaking violently before reaching the beach.
We took advantage of quieter periods breaking that infernal rhythm to get over tens of metres, an area which is dangerous when you meet a breaker.

In that morning, we placed two other buoys in order to delimit the safety zone for our divers. This was a lifeline joining the buoys together and it would play the role of a protective rope if a diver had a problem..

Placing a marking plate in difficult conditions Credit: Joël Mouret

We put our dinghy on the northern beach in case of a problem.

However, we gave up the idea of using it systematically because any motor problem could be dangerous if the pilot didn’t find a place to throw the anchorage. Indeed, the seabed was going down very quickly so we may have been unable to anchor and we would have gone drifting off pushed by the wind, totally helpless.

Let’s go back to the Utile…
The remarkable objects we found on the seabed were anchors and guns. We began to label and measure them.

Marked gun Credit: Joël Mouret

In the meantime, on dry land…

We finished the search of the oven towards the end of the morning. The base we discovered last Saturday was the last one. All the bricks had been picked up on Saturday. We made a photograph of a hundred or so and entered them in a database.

Then we started to search the structure formed by a clump of coral blocks, situated near the supposed Malagasy camp area. It had a roughly rectangular shape and the weight of the big blocks surmounting it made us think that it was a gravestone. But after we removed the blocks of the upper layer and scoured two other levels of smaller blocks, we found a soil mainly composed of beach rock. So contrary to what we first thought, there was no gravestone but a built structure which use was still unknown. Would it be a cenotaph?