This is our series of supplemental logs that were taken from our scientific research expedition to RMS Titanic earlier last month. I hope that you enjoy!
'Dive Day 4' and everyone is excited to be back in the saddle again! As for me, I will be spending a relaxing day reporting on the dives via this weblog and preparing my lecture tomorrow on the Empress of Ireland. Today's divers are quite the characters and having them all down on Titanic during the day will make for a very quiet Keldysh. In MIR I will be my original dive partner, Trevor Montgomery AKA Monty from Melbourne Australia and the other diver is Steve Wickens, a UK engineer currently working in the Middle East. Fresh from 'walking' last evening's "red carpet", Anatoly Sagalevitch will be piloting MIR I. Once again, we have had excellent weather and MIR I launched around 9:50 am followed about 30 minutes later by MIR II with Victor Nescheta at the helm. The divers in MIR II are two of the Arizona boys named John Lennon and Chris Vinger. Both of these fine gentlemen brought with them pictures of their wives, children and pets. All throughout the expedition, these great guys talked very fondly of their families and it was nice to see pictures of their home life.
As MIR II was launched, a large pod of pilot whales were seen off our bow. There must of been over a hundred whales that were seen jumping through the water. Following the launch of the submersibles, our resident deep sea organism biologist, Dr. Peter Batson gave us another fantastic lecture about the deep-sea animals that reside at 12,000 feet and include many of the 'critters' that we routinely encounter while down on Titanic. Following lunch, we had some videos of Deep Ocean Expeditions trip to French Polynesia and a viewing of James Cameron's documentary on Bismarck. Bismarck is a wonderful dive and the battleship is in great condition. For those into doing things to the extremes, Bismarck is even deeper than Titanic by almost 1000 meters. I look forward to the day that I get a chance to visit this wonderful remnant of World War II.
Hi, I'm a Dutch student and I'm following the whole project with a great interest!
Amazing what you guys are doing and seeing, enjoy every part of the stunning enterprise!
I'm looking forward to the next update.
Good luck,
Matthijs
Posted by: Matthijs | August 19, 2005 at 05:44 PM
Hello Matthijs,
I am very pleased that you are enjoying our Shipwreck weblog. Over the past few weeks, we have been publishing our supplemental logs for our expedition out to RMS Titanic. There will be much more new materials to publish on Titanic and many other shipwrecks in the coming weeks. The photographs and video that Nautical Research Group captured from the two lost liners, Empress of Ireland and Titanic are stunning and will be released exclusively to this site over the next eight weeks. Please continue to come back to this weblog as we are not just reporting the news, but we are CREATING the news with our diving research expeditions.
Regards,
David A. Bright
President
Nautical Research Group, Inc.
Posted by: David Bright | August 21, 2005 at 09:50 AM