Diving Seward

I just talked to a friend's landlord who used to do salvage diving around Seward in the 70s.
He told me where exactly to find the stuff that went under in the 1964 earthquake.
However, unlike the stuff that I was imagining, these are just those huge crates like you see in docks today. He drew me a map pointing to the bend. Apparently the are 50 - 60 feet out. I don't know whether that's low or high tide.
What he also told me was that diving is best in the winter because the fresh water isn't coming down into the bay mixing up silt. The best time to dive is when everything is tied up in the snow.
The water difference only gets to be about 2 degrees so the winter/summer dive wouldn't make that much of a difference.

He also pointed out a spot where you can see sea lions and walls of shrimp. He said there are also coral sharks under there that can get up to 7-8 feet long.

He said he's been back up into a bunch of rocks that he had to somewhat hide in to keep away from sea lions that were nipping at him.

In his place I've seen on his wall a walrus skull complete with two long tusks about 2.5 feet long. At their points they slightly cross.
There was no mandible but I checked the maxilla. There was only one molar present, the others had fallen out (That is an example from the Alaska Sealife Center in Seward). The tooth itself was very sloped toward the outside of the mouth. The crown itself had a wide parabolic shape with a long vertical distance. The crown itself was completely smooth and barely stuck more than a few millimeters up from the bone.

Even the Alaska Sealife Center doesn't have a sample like that. They only have the snout.

Squeeze

Another passage from Into the Deep (as quoted in the previous post) by Marx.

Background: The Royal George sank in 1782 and was a nuisance in Spithead, a southern England port, sitting there for 50 years. After the advent of the "standard helmet diving suit" (This was a "closed suit" where a tube with compressed air came in from the surface to the top of a brass helmet that entered and filled the entire canvas-covered leather suit with air. Exhaust air was fully regulated by a valve s0 the amount of air in the suit could be specifically controlled.) removal of the Royal George could finally be done by means demolitionists placing several metal-encased, watertight explosives around the ship that were electronically detonated from the surface. This made the ship turn into manageable pieces for removal from the port. The process took 5 years...

Miraculously, there had been no fatalities among the divers working on the wreck of the Royal George. But there were quite a few accidents. The most serious occurred when a diver's air hose broke and the air instantly rushed out of his helmet. He said afterward that he felt as though he were being crushed by the water. Luckily, those on the surface saw what had happened and pulled him up immediately. His face and neck were swollen, and he was bleeding from the ears, eyes, and mouth. That diver spent several weeks in the hospital. He never dived again.

Nevertheless, the diver was fortunate. He had survived the first recorded case of the "squeeze," a disaster feared more than any other because it's nearly always fatal. The squeeze occurs whenever there is a sudden drop in the air pressure inside a suit and helmet. If it happens in deep water, the enormous pressure pulls the diver's skin off his bones and jams it into his helmet. (Once the flesh of a Japanese diver was not only forced into his helmet but through his air hose as well.) Today the danger has been reduced considerably by installing a safety valve to prevent the diver's air from escaping.

You can kinda feel this if you don't put enough air into your dry suit as you descend.
I can only imagine what that guy's balls felt like.
That's where I remember feeling it the most.
Maybe if the closed system of my dry suit extended to my head I'd feel it pretty intensely there too.
I wonder which would trump the other. . . .

History of Diving

I'm doing a paper on the history of underwater archaeology which, as of now is mostly the history of diving itself.
Water has been overlooked for so long in science when not involving simply the creatures that reside amidst it.

People have been shown to have been diving for at least 6,500 years and have built contraptions like bells to keep them down longer for at least 2,300 years.

The man known for his comet, Halley, also invented a bell that could keep people under for an infinite amount of time as long as casks of new air were handed down from a ship above and released into the bell. There was actually a cooling system that kept the divers' breath from creating too intense of a heated environment in the bell. The only issue was depth, where the further down you go, the more water fills the bell.

With that said, here is one story written about the use of a Halley bell in the waters around Turkey:

From: The London Annual Register of August 29, 1775

There is also a ghoulish story about an incident that took place in 1790. A team of divers using a Halley diving bell were sent to Senaglio Point in the Bosporus to salvage a shipwreck. Minutes after starting their descent, they signaled frantically to be brought back to the surface. When they were pulled up, the horror-stricken divers refused to go down again. At the bottom they had come on an amazing spectacle: hundreds of life-sized dolls in the shape of bowling pins, with skulls for heads. Most of them had been toppled over, but there were rows of them jammed upright among the rocks or stuck in the mud and slime, slightly swaying to and fro in unison whenever the current moved them and, of course, grinning “with lipless grin,” as though beckoning the divers to approach. The divers had stumbled on the spot where generations of concubines from the seraglio had been ritually murdered by being sewn up alive in sacks weighted with stones, with only their heads protruding, and then thrown into the sea at night from boats. The women had either fallen victim to court intrigue or somehow offended the Grand Signor (some of them had as many as 2,000 concubines at one time.) Sultan Ibrahim I, who reigned from 1640 to 1648, was said to have drowned his entire harem of 1,200 concubines. The eerie Loreleis that had frightened the divers were their skeletal remains.

Stop

Got a hold of this picture from some cave divers that go to my Seattle shop.
It's from a cenote around Cozumel.

Seal

This is a short clip I took of a Harbor Seal
at the Alaska Sealife Center.
It was doing it for like 5 mins.
I didn't start filming until the very end.