Recent activities

Recent activities

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Here you will find the activities that happened since I came in contact with Stimana (November 2005) and which I find worth mentioning.

November 27, 2005 - A treasure-chest is discovered in the wreck of the Mediator

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To support the good work that Stimana is doing two local companies, the bank RBTT and the insurance company Fatum, decided to donate each 5000 Antillean guilders.

This is done in a special way. Normally on Sunday morning Theo van der Giesen with volunteer divers do their cleaning and archeological work on the wreck. This time also the supervising archeologist Dr. Wil Nagelkerken was invited to join the divers in the water.

Virtual tour of the wreck of the Mediator

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Over the past two years I have taken a large number of pictures of the wreck. During September and October 2007 I have created a number of panorama's of the wreck. I have arranged these to form a kind of virtual tour of the wreck.
The visibility was reasonable during these two months but even then it is impossible to get an overview of a larger part of the ship in one photo. So what I did was taking numerous pictures from a specific spot turning the camera from left to right and sometimes also up and down to compose a large picture of an area of the ship.
The result is a number of panorama's that each cover an area of the ship that is better visible in the composite picture than it is actually under water through your own eyes.

Enjoy the virtual tour by starting with the first panorama . It will give you a good impression of the wreck in October 2007. 

New airlift operation

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Today we started the airlift operation at a new location: near the bow of the ship in the forward hold. For more than a year we have done this behind the stern of the ship, but we were not able to make much progress there. During the week sand and debris covered for a large part what we uncovered in the weekend. At the new location the airlift goes through a hole in the upper deck. The fact that we are working under deck now means that we probably have mostly sand to lift and not too many larger rocks. We hope to find remainders of the original cargo under the sand and we are hoping to find an entrance into the lower part of the hold where more of the original goods are expected.
The visibility was very low today (2 - 3 meters) and there were a lot of jellyfish in the water.

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