Martin Woodward on Diving

Lisa: So can you just tell me about the process of excavating the objects? How do you do that?

Well, today, regulations have sort of prevented those methods continuing because what I always used to do is use like a big underwater vacuum cleaner. It’s like a pipe that you inject air into, and the air will always rush to the surface, obviously it bubbles, and create a vacuum in the tube so we would gently be able to dig holes with that.

We had another device called a prop wash which is built on to the boat which redirects the … I had water jets on my last boat, very powerful water jets so it would redirect the jet steam downwards. It’s like a big bend and it would then push away the sand so you could dig like a 10-foot diameter hole gently, or quickly whichever way, but if you were working on archaeological stuff, you take away the very deep stuff and then when you get down near the bedrock, then you just sift it.

So, you would just be able to see everything and not move it around. So, there are several ways of doing it. We had all the kit to do that but nowadays, all the regulations now prevent you from using air lifts and things and it’s gone ridiculous really.

I’m glad I was doing it when I was doing it and well, I still do it but I do it on a lesser scale now where if I’m digging, I did by hand and if you’ve got to did a deeper hole then you have to find a different way of doing it.

But mainly most of the time I systematically grid out a site and then I gently … if it’s within that much I can gently use my little underwater scooter, turn it round and it will just gently blow away the sand. There’re all sorts of ways of doing it.