Shipwreck Hunt

Wednesday, we headed over to the harbor between Silema and Valletta and boarded the Isis, a small boat owned by the Aurora Trust, to look for a shipwreck with the ROV. We were hunting for a WWII fuel barge that was stationed in Malta by the British. The barge, which was used to supply fuel for submarines, was sunk decades ago during an attack on the harbor. The previous ICEX team was able to find the wreck, so we were hoping to find it and take some nice sonar scans.

The team was split into two groups; the first group (Drew, Tyler, Sara, Eric, and Tim) wasn't able to find the wreck due to strong currents and (as we later found out) not-so-accurate GPS coordinates. The second group (Austin, Yingxue, Anna, Brent and Prof. Clark) was able to find the wreck after a 45 minute search.

The ~20 meter long wreck is situated along a slope so that bow is about 16 meters deep and the stern is only about 5. Prof. Clark was able to get a good number of sonar scans along the length of the wreck (using the smart tether); hopefully we can make some kind of a map using them, though they seem to be quite messy.