Aurora Trust 2010 Season

The wind forecast for the afternoon started to blow much earlier than expected. By 0900 a decison was taken to postpone all offshore work due to the rough seas that built up around Salina and Panarea.

Craig & Timmy attended two press conferences, one on Salina and one on Lipari, to announce the discovery of four ancient shipwrecks off the island of Panarea. Three of these wrecks are in pristine condition whereas the fourth has been badly damaged by fishermen. To browse through photographs of our discoveries off the Aeolian Islands follow this link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/auroratrust/sets/72157624572835830/

Apologies for the silence. Our project here has been very successful and we have discovered no fewer than four previously unknown ancient shipwrecks. These sites vary in date from circa the 3rd century BC to circa 1st century AD. Over the past days we have been systematically recording them using our ROV, shooting both film and still photographs.
Yesterday, Roberto Rinaldi arrived on Salina and once all the pleasantries were over with it was straight down to planning for the next few days. The main event was the deep dive accomplished today. Roberto and his dive partner, who were supported by the Carabinieri divers from Messina, executed a dive to 110 meters on one of the sites we discovered off Panarea. The main aim of this dive was to obtain high definition video images of this site as well as to attempt a recovery of sample objects from this site. After setting the shot line from the ISIS, the AURORA team deployed the ROV to make sure that all was in place to ensure that the divers descended with the minimal amount of risk. The dive lasted approximately 20 minutes and two ancient cups were retrieved from the site.

What a day!! We deployed the ROV on five targets in water varying from 100 to 150 meters in depth. Four of these five turned out to be of major interest. These four sites are well preserved and of outstanding archaeological value. There will be a big press release this coming Saturday and we will be posting the results over the coming days. Kindly bear with us until we get all data sorted, processed and up on the web.

Today was the last day of side scan work of this project. We finished off Panarea and continued working off Salina Island, namely Pollara and Secca del Capo. Once we finished the area off Pollara we headed back to base to remove the winch and start setting up the ROV.
The crane at our home port was not available as the operator only visits the island on Saturdays. We made alternative arrangements and moved the ISIS to the commercial harbour where our hired crane was waiting. The removal of the winch went smoothly and ISIS was once again alongside Fortaleza and being loaded with all the equipment necessary for ROV work.
Tomorrow morning we have a few final touches to put into place before setting off to verify the targets identified over the past two seasons of side scan work. Things are looking promising and we’ll keep you posted via this blog and our website.

The biggest news of the day is that we have started to survey around the island of Salina. The seabed surrounding this island rises sharply from the abyss. These steep slopes are not ‘survey-friendly’ and we are thus limited to small pockets of seabed. We are trying to cover as much of these small areas as possible to try and detect any shipwreck remains on the seabed. Salina is the only Aeolian island without an official shipwreck site that is registered.We have until tomorrow to try and change this!

In the mean time, things are gearing up for the exploration of the targets we identified off Panarea. Our friend, deep-sea videographer Roberto Rinaldi, will join us on Thursday evening so as to plan what will hopefully turn out to be spectacular dives.