The times they are a changing

Yesterday marked the beginning of a new era for Deeper Dorset. This might look like a pile of old blocks (and it was) but the fact of the matter was that we had seen this area of rocks on the sidescan sonar in 65ft of water. Because of the regular shape of the rocks and the obvious straight lines it made us think we could be looking at something man made and normally we would have put a diver down to take a look. We now have the capability in no time flat to deploy cameras exactly in the right position so that we can check out the mark and within minutes we can now put this one to bed as a spurious contact. This is going to revolutionise our ability to check out sidescan targets without divers and all the faff that entails. Finding divers keen enough to take a look in the first place has always been an issue and now we don’t need to worry about it. That said we still need divers and have a small band of great guys that support us however there just aren’t enough of them so we have had to find a more productive way of checking out sonar targets.

New Era

1 thought on “The times they are a changing”

  1. This can only enhance the target diving experience in the long run. I saw this sonar mark and it did indeed look very exciting. The shape really stood out to me, especially as we’re looking for aircraft this season. Seeing Grahame manoeuvre the boat over the mark and drop a camera right slap bang on it was a sight to behold. But then seeing it appear on the big screen we couldn’t believe it. Rocks, lots of straight edged rocks all lined up perfectly.

    Back to the original point, now we can quickly discard targets we can almost guarantee when we put divers on a target, it’s going to be something of interest. I’m sure we’ll still get the occasional pile of shite that we couldn’t figure out with the cameras, but I think the pile of shite:interesting target ratio should come tumbling down. Also, the time involved is a huge factor. We were able to check out 10-20 targets in the space of a few hours. Diving each of these would have taken us multiple trips and could have been weeks.

    And we haven’t even got the ROV wet yet ……..

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