After an overnight train from the moors of Scotland all the way down to Fort Cumberland in Portsmouth I met up with Mark Beattie-Edwards and Mary Harvey from the Nautical Archaeology Society (NAS). The Nautical Archaeology Society is a fantastic organisation which provides resources, training courses and publications for anyone interested in underwater archaeology from complete beginners to hardened professionals.

I had chosen to spend time with the NAS to learn more about how interested members of the general public and maritime archaeologists can work together to research and protect shipwrecks. I was very fortunate in that the first weekend I was with the NAS, Mark and I traveled up through the traffic on the M25 to the town of Hunstanton to help a number of NAS volunteers survey the wreck of the steam trawler Sheraton.

The Sheraton was built in 1907 and between 1915 and 1917 she was used for boom defence work. Later, in WWII she served as an armed patrol vessel before she came to an inglorious end, washed onto the beach at Hunstanton in 1947. This was the second year that the team had worked on the Sheraton and the aim was to supplement the measurements gathered the previous year and to complete the photomosaic that was started in 2008.

Over the weekend members of the team worked taking measurements and drawing the key features of the wreck while others took photos for the mosaic. To this end, the wreck was divided into metre square grids and photos were taken of each square with a camera on a tripod. Once back in Portsmouth (as the new guy) it was my job to carefully stitch together all 86 photos using photoshop to create the photomosaic a very time consuming and frustrating job. However, once it was completed the photomosaic was a very useful tool showing the wreck from a unique perspective. 

I found my time with the NAS both really enjoyable and useful giving me heaps of ideas for integrating interested people with maritime archaeology. After leaving NAS it was time for me to head back to New Zealand for some much needed R&R before I take off to the USA to dive the Great Lakes which I will talk about in my next blog.