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The real dive story from Jason Gibb's logbook.
Dive 1
Aim: Explore the wreck and remove the protective sand bags
Dive time: 49 minutes
Max depth: 10.4m
Seabed: Sand and silt
Weather: Flat, calm and beautiful sunshine
Boat HQ: Urchin
Sea temp: 14oC
Dive details:
Scottish diving rocks! Clear, calm water, sun, blues skies (but still, the water was freezing cold!) The conditions were perfect for filming and I was over the moon when I got down there. And diving with such an immense figure in the marine archaeological world as Colin Martin is a thrill too. The dive site is amazing with artefacts scattered all over the place, like the contents of a 17th century museum have been emptied over the site!
Today Colin is removing sandbags he covered the site with to stop it being washed away in winter storms. It was a hilarious sight. He whipped off his fins, grabbed a sandbag in each hand, stood up (straight) and walked them along the seabed. Colin is a refined British gentleman in his 60s, white tash, well spoken, and here he was walking across the bottom of a Scottish seabed with a sack of sand in each hand! What a man.
Dive 2
Aim: Survey and excavate the stern to look for carvings
Dive conditions: As previous dive
Dive time: 61 minutes
Max depth: 12.2m
Dive details:
Beautiful weather. Another great dive. The artefact richness of this site is like nothing else. We spent most of the time slowly excavating the stern of the ship. On most archaeological sites you would whip out an airlift which is quick at shifting large volumes of sand, but at this site there are so many artefacts that Colin and Miranda dig slowly by hand.
Dive 3
Aim: Excavate and survey the stern
Dive conditions: As previous dive
Dive time: 56 minutes
Max depth: 10.1m
Dive details:
Colin found a ceramic cup and I got a great shot of him pulling a pipe out of the seabed. It's almost intact – if you put tobacco in it you could have a nice smoke! We also found a complete pewter plate, about 15 inches across. I've never been to a site like this, it's find after find and the visibility of the water is blinding! Also filmed Colin's two sons excavating the bow section. It's a real family enterprise, as Paula (mum) does the land-based research!
Dive 4
Aim: Measure ship dimensions and thickness of hull
Dive conditions: As previous dive
Dive time: 72 minutes
Max depth: 12.8m
Dive details:
All the finds mean we haven't been able to dig as quickly as we'd like, so today was a matter of getting all the information we can before packing up and going back to London. Ship structure expert Brian Lavery from Greenwich was watching my pictures and making calculations. Miranda and Colin got down to taking measurements and I think we got somewhere. We basically discovered that the Swan was not a very effective ship as it was a hybrid – a British body like a Chieftan tank, but a continental design like a Lamborghini!
I'm gutted to have finished the diving here. It was cold, but the best we've seen this season.
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