Our main workboat, Roper, is on loan to the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Museum again this summer. During June we will set up our second workboat for diving. She has been named Polly, short for Polynavicular Morbus, the disorder of owning too many boats. In July and August we will use Polly to continue searching for the vessels that were scuttled at St. George’s Island, Maryland, in late July 1776 by Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia. Those vessels numbered between eight and 23, depending on which archival sources you like. We have more than 20 mag and sonar anomalies to investigate in the area. We will also have dive boat coxswain training and a field school and on-the-job training in low-visibility site mapping.
Roper will come home from Florida during the first week of September. The rest of September and all of October will be spent mapping what may be a Civil War canal boat, and the remains of a dozen World War One wooden steamships at Widewater, Virginia, across the Potomac from Mallows Bay, Maryland, where more than 150 of their sisters were scrapped. The Widewater work will end in time for us to return to home port and recover the mooring buoy from the U-1105 Historic Shipwreck Preserve on Hallowe’en.
If you would like to participate in any of these projects please click the “contact” button above and let us know.