00:00.00 David Howe Welcome to episode one fifty seven of a life nens podcast I'm your host david e and how I'm joined by my co-host Connor John and also Dr Carlton Shield chief go we are all back. You supposed to hit her button that says I'm back. 00:12.31 alifeinruins I Bram but but bra but but but but bear oh shit. 00:20.60 David Howe Set it up there. We go okay childish. We just love hat to listeners right? there anyway. Carlton is in the dominican republic currently um, or as I like to call it Puerto Rico that was quoting Donald Trump um anyway Carlton would you like to actually before. I'm going to walk back my statement and before we introduce Carlton I'm going to say connor do you have an addendum to last week's episode. 00:45.40 alifeinruins Yeah, we kind of we kind of fucked Up. We fucked up the the order of the National register eligibility. Thank you for all those people told us to that we were wrong and Dumb. We Really appreciate that Stuff. So. Read the Bolton don't listen to us don't send that upset to your friends unless they want to quote things incorrectly but we were incorrect. Thank you for telling us we were dumb. Please do out every time that happens what's up now. 01:12.46 David Howe Do you have the corrections. Do you know what? the correct answers are I get up the top of my head either. Actually we put up in slack Chris ah Chris Bear with things like you even sent it to us. So I know you're gonna shit yourself if we we don't do it. 01:26.62 alifeinruins Ah. 01:29.38 David Howe Rightfully So I would also shit myself if I had just sent this to somebody and they still didn't know it. You're a good man. Okay, let's do Arcpod Net Nope if you want runes. 01:35.90 alifeinruins I got it? Okay, so national register criteria a is action. Events b is body people important, EtcC is craftmanship and then d is data. So that's that's your. 01:50.79 David Howe If a site has all that. Yeah. 01:54.56 alifeinruins Yeah, yeah, so those those are your easy thing action body craftmanship data remember that Abc D. 01:59.87 David Howe Yes, sir all right? Carlton Doctor got excuse me newly defended actual doctor carlton shield chief go esquire extraordinaire how you're doing. 02:13.32 C_Geezy I I'm fucking tired like that's that's how I am I'm fucking exhausted. It has been a long 10 days and I still have a week more and. 02:31.68 David Howe I was like I like me. 02:32.92 C_Geezy Yeah, it's a good time but it's it's so it's a lot of work. It is way more work than I thought it was going to be. 02:43.33 David Howe Um, like like data wise like mentally wise or physically wise. Um. 02:48.70 C_Geezy It's like all of that I mean when ultimately we're maybe getting in about like two and a half hours worth of actual data collection field work. Ah a day right? because we're doing like 2 tank dives. And depending on your air consumption. You can be down there anywhere from like 45 minutes to an hour depending on depth. So the shower where you are the more air you're going to be able to have whereas the deeper. You are the more oxygen you absorb because under pressure oxygen compresses. 03:05.71 David Howe Who. 03:13.94 David Howe M. 03:19.82 C_Geezy Um, however, like the whole this field school is not straight for a number of reasons one. It's the indiana university underwater science field school. It's a interdisciplinary project that has archaeologists rain biologists earth and atmospheric scientists. And animal behaviorists. So there's like anywhere from like 3 to 4 teams in the water doing different shit at the same site. Um and like so for the archeology right now we're doing impact assessments for the dominican government. Um, so we're going to these sites these living museums in the sea and monitoring if objects are being displaced or what the fuck's happening and it's it's kind of like part of it's a shit show first David got out there. 04:14.22 C_Geezy These living museums are supposed to have these historic marker buys. They're supposed to have safety buoys that keep oncoming traffic the fuck away from the site so you're not killing scuba divers gone. No one knows where they are the resorts not putting them up the dominican government's not putting them back up so we had to spend like one day just doing site maintenance to. To make sure that we were safe because some of those boats are scooting in on top of our divers. Not okay in the slightest but it's like the the daily process is breakfast starts at 7 you have 30 minutes to eat. 04:43.60 alifeinruins Yikes. 04:50.89 C_Geezy Then we have morning meaning where we go over what the focus will do because like every day like it's it's a new thing based on what happened yesterday we load up and we'd take all of our equipment and we put it in the trucks take the trucks down to scuba fun then we load up all the fucking oxygen tanks. So there's about 21 of us. 04:53.62 David Howe Yeah. 05:10.68 C_Geezy Um, so that means 42 tanks load those up into vans including all of our dive equipment all the water get that on the fucking boat. Everything's on the fucking boat then we got to drive to the site and it depends on where the fuck are going and then while the while well that's going. We're all trying to get ready putting on our wetsuits getting overall equipment set up. 05:29.90 C_Geezy Then we got to send divers in the water. Our master divers to basically get the right mooring set up so we have the right guideline to get us on site because day 1 gentlemen let me tell you about the shit show with the guallo day archeological preserve was visibility about four feet like it was it was. Turvulent down there. So it's about twenty five feet down you can't see shit. We were all wandering like we all burned through the first tank because no one could find the fucking site and we do. We dropped it right next to it. We all scatterted. You couldn't find it and of course like you're panicking and you don't realize like how fast you're going through oxygen or what's going on. 05:52.61 alifeinruins 1 06:07.67 C_Geezy In a normal situation. What you should do if you can't find the site after 5 minutes come up talk to the boat right? and the boat will direct you nobody did that everyone went through all their oxygen and they just popped up or they ran out of oxygen right? and so people fucking all over the ocean have to swim to the boat in a timeve masterard. 06:12.73 David Howe M. 06:27.37 C_Geezy Front directors like what the fuck is going on youton he's like Marcel Kornfeld like it's a very similar vibe. Um, and it was just. 06:32.37 David Howe But except like when all of the students are on the ground digging in dirt. They're all floating astray in the fucking floats of a Jets of emotion. Of course he's going to be upset. 06:44.50 C_Geezy Um, and so but they were able to find the site. So the second I we're able to get down there and actually like do some assessments for for the archeologists for this for this first half. Um. 06:57.20 C_Geezy Which I'll get to in a bit. We're just basically like doing looking at anchors and cannons making sure that they're oriented the right way and then what their inclination is because we're trying to see what the fuck's happening and and what's what is happening is because these morning booings keep getting lost or cut by somebody people are. Tying their mooring lines to the fucking cannons. So Then the cannoons are getting druged around the skin. Theyre getting drug around the seafloor because these boats are just pulling them and it's destroying Coral. So like that's that's where this interdisciplinary nature' is coming in because like one there's some very endangered corals that love the iron on these things for watching those. 07:16.72 David Howe The more in line. 07:35.85 C_Geezy Then we have the marine biologists watching these sergeant major fish that make their nests on straight walls. So they're putting their and these things will fucking attack you? Um, so like I'm trying to get like this inclination. Why I have this fish like literally biting my face and like coming after me and the fucker's only this big like but they're aggressive. Um, and then he just got to watch out like we have a lot of eels. Um, at at the site and then these lionfish that are invasive and they're extremely venomous. Um, there's no sharks in this part of the Dr like um, we're in the southeast tip we're in the caribbean but as I'll talk about later. Ah, the rest of the project. We're going to be on the atlantic site and there there be sharks which are fine but but we've kind of gone to a number of sites. So like we did the Guadaloo Bay called the guop um, archaeological reservee. That's right off the coast here where I'm at now at at viva. 08:34.30 C_Geezy Did the captain kid site the second day which was a blast. So what happened was is when Captain Kidd found out that he had been. He's he's not really a pirate. He's a um, a privateer but when he found out he was being accused of piracy. He was basically like. 08:42.30 David Howe Good. 08:50.56 C_Geezy He's the only pirate that is known to have ever buried treasure like offloaded his treasure sent to ship a fire and he went to new england where he was eventually hung twice. Um and the Captain Kidd is a phenomenal site for 2 reasons 1 treasure hunters couldn't find it because they looked at the documents they they knew where the ship was burnt and they thought it was. 08:58.88 David Howe The neck was too thick. 09:10.43 C_Geezy Fell there but our project lead Charlie Professor Charlie beer he went to england looked at documents and there's ah there was a dutch narrative. They'll watch the burning ship basically leave this river trabutary and float to Catala Island and that's root song so we were able to find it a couple of years ago and so it's completely preserved treasure hunters haven't hit it and that's pretty critical in this country where there's not a single archeology program a single museum creation program. There's only a handful of archeologists most of which are cuban so all the cultural material that has come out of the ocean in this country is through treasure hunters. And do these treasure hunter agreements. They're fifty fifty splits between the treasure hunters the dotting and government so there like I've looked at site plans by these treasure hunters they're fucking garbage they're destroying coral like their job like all they're focused on is getting things out to sell. Um. 09:53.77 alifeinruins Oof. 09:57.60 David Howe Oh of course. 10:04.41 C_Geezy But Captain Kidd wasn't that way I wasn't able to do as much work at kid because um while I'm here also being a professor and helping these like run things I'm also trying to get my scientific diving certificate. So the Captain Kidd site has this wall that goes down a hundred feet so that's where I did my deep dive. So why everyone else was kind of doing that I got to go go down this fucking sheer face coral one hundred feet down in this crystal clear water where I could see the top. Um it. It was easily the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life I was only down there like the whole dive itself is 20 minutes and our bottom time was 5 at the depth. 10:39.86 alifeinruins And. 10:41.70 C_Geezy But there was this gorgeous, very rare corals that are extraordinarily expensive down there that I got to see and then it kind of came up and that was a 1 tank dive because it it's like it was a twenty mile boat ride. So it was like an hour and a half to get there and so what I did. 10:57.12 alifeinruins Shit. 11:00.22 C_Geezy Had so we had and the the site's precarious because it's it's the current is hitting it up against reef there aren't many beaches here like this environment the dominican republic is very similar to the Yucatan it's a carsk environment lots of limestone not natural beaches so we had like 2 students like on the ref edge they have walking talk who's trying to direct students. Um, in this really choppy water like we when we were coming up because after a hundred feet you have to do a safety stop at around fifteen feet me and my dive buddy who led me we just kind of went checked out the canns the dirt safety stop just kind of serving the archeology but like that. Current was so was just was bad and you had to be very careful because students were getting slammed into reefs slammed into corals like then it it was it was precarious. It's dangerous, but it was gorgeous. 11:47.69 alifeinruins Move. 11:52.88 C_Geezy Gorgeous there. So once I took my stuff off I was just helping students direct because our main project there were these palmata quarrels that students were trying to find and do photogrammetry so what we did at captain kid mostly is we photogrammetry the entire site to develop a Gis model. 12:02.93 David Howe Work. 12:08.90 C_Geezy To see where everything is because that's that's the best way you're going to get any information out of underwater Arc you can't really take measurements. Um, so you have to just do photogrammetry and just fucking map an entire site and that's that's how you're going to find your artifact distributions and look at differences in how things have changed relatively. Um. 12:09.50 David Howe That's cool. 12:28.87 C_Geezy It's It's a really different world and and you have to think very differently about these things and it's not like at a field score of an active project where you come into something. You don't know you can just hey like hey what's going on and you can trek from there. It's like you can't talk underwater and you have a limited time that you're there. And so like you are trying to it is just high speed all the time and we knew we weren't going back to kit and that was the only day we were there. Um. 12:57.45 alifeinruins So You really given like the small window to to do all the stuff and like you mentioned at our previous episode which I think was like 103 you said that like the even in like the pools. The communication is terrible and you're trying to orient yourself and. See it just like X is like it is um, just exponentially worse in that real life right. 13:22.38 C_Geezy Yeah, absolutely um I've gotten really comfortable where I don't know anything I will if like if something's happening I'm I'm not wasting oxygen we're going up to the surface I'm gonna communicate with the boat and we're gonna go back down because I've heard enough of our project director being like why won't students just come up and let's figure this out because they start kind of. Freaking out down below and trying to figure it out themselves I'm like fuck that I don't know what's going on here I'm going up to get this man. That's been doing this since the fucking 70 s he'll tell me what to do and get down there and and move forward. So I have no problem just asking for help to just go up. No not at all because um. 13:51.77 David Howe Um, does that waste a lot of oxygen. 13:56.85 David Howe Okay. 14:00.45 C_Geezy Some of these places like we're not going below thirty feet really for there's these mandatory safety stops especially the guat that's like maybe 15 to twenty feet I can just pop up real quick. You deflate your obesity you come up I just single to the boat I'll just kick over and then yeah, there's a little bit of oxygen consumption on the way. To get my trim back in line. So once I get back under the water I need to balance myself to make sure I'm not going up or down too much. So. There's also a lot of of like oxygen management myself. So like my first couple dives I was only down there for like 30 minutes because I was not accustomed to. 14:28.39 David Howe What's a basically is that called water. 14:28.73 alifeinruins Um. 14:38.70 C_Geezy That kind of word but like now I'm able to get a dive down for an hour because I'm like I have to actively think about my breathing all the time like I have a little note on my data slate. That's like deep like slow deep breaths and that's also helped me maintain my buoyancy a lot better underwater so I'm able to hover a lot easier now. Um, and get that work done. 14:59.73 alifeinruins David what we're asking. 15:03.61 David Howe You said ah obesity. 15:05.86 C_Geezy Oh a bcd. That's the that's the like vest you wear that has your scuba tank attached to it. It has your regulators. It has your dive computers at times you. So yeah, so this is what? um. 15:13.87 David Howe And you you said to to deflate it does it like suck water in to keep you weighted down. 15:21.97 C_Geezy Jacques Cousteau invented this whole scuba system. So it will actually inflate and deflate with air so to help manage your buoyancy and then also when you're at the surface you can just inflate it and it basically acts life vest so you can just sit there and just fucking backstrope your way to the boat without much effort. So it'll keep you up. 15:28.47 David Howe Um. 15:40.15 C_Geezy Um, so usually when you jump into the water when you first go in your obesity is a little inflated. It's that way when you have the water. You'll just come up early because you just don't want to sink. 15:47.99 David Howe Yeah. 15:48.67 alifeinruins Yeah, and that takes oxygen out of your actual tank and that's how it's connected. Okay, that makes sense So like you you want to use likes you want to use that like sparingly if possible right? because you want to preserve the oxygen and get as much time below as possible. 15:51.60 C_Geezy Yeah, yeah, so there's little air harrows that's connected directly to it. Yeah. 16:04.58 C_Geezy Yeah, and there's also like a manual inflate thing. So like rather I'm getting better at not having to use the buttons that will take the Austin directly in since I'm already breathing Austin I'm I'm ah getting better at just like manually inflating it. So don't have to train too much. 16:20.91 C_Geezy Because at this point now I think I have over four hundred and fifty minutes underwater at this point through this project. Um, so I've gotten like much better and like a lot of the students. It's kind of been funny because they're like he has the highest amount of archeological training. But the least amount of being underwater so like a lot of the students are help or helping me to like figure my shit out while I'm trying to like I'm sitting there like floating around like trying to tell them how to take measurements. It was hard for me like fuck it turning upside down on accident like is the way the air will will fit in a vest that you know so. So I mean you know how air air air works that way so like a lot of times we're angled sort of heads are down so our fins aren't kicking up sediment in the back. So all that oxygen's in the is in your back and then when you try to like orient yourself or remove in a certain way those oxygen bubbles will move in your vest and look um. 17:14.95 David Howe Um, do you use? um like ah, a trimble to map like to get a datum or do you drop it down from a boat or like or is it just an arbitrary around the site datum that you make okay. 17:15.73 C_Geezy There's like a. 17:26.68 C_Geezy Arbitrary around the site. So like you can't really get good Gps coordinatnets. We had a student the other day. He ah got an app on his phone and got like 1 of those waterproof protectors and he was just startling above and like trying to get data but the other issue is is like the way that water refractions work. Distances are a little fuck you walking and then just trying to get like a straight line in a current is just difficult so that's why we do the photogrammetry and then you can and since we're pretty close to shore you can map those onto Google maps and yeah gis coral plots. So like Noaa has done a lot of reef and shoreline. Data. So we're able to map it that way. 18:02.79 alifeinruins And you have like known tie points right? or like known locations that you can. You can you can ultimately tie it all together. 18:05.97 C_Geezy Yeah, yeah, and so like all the sites that we work on the purpose of this project is these living museums of the sea. So these are protected sites and what that introduces then to the local tourist economies. They also become these scuba zones. So like all across by ebay. There's indiana university pamphlets of all the living museums and they're actively like dived to the 5 dive shops in town are like we're going. Go check off the living museum done by the americans and see these cann's like there's fucking plaques down there. That have like the name of the ship and everything like that and when it sank and it's all in spanish I can't fucking read it? Um, but like there there you know, but it's not just like this random collection of cannons that were the ones that know about it. We're we're actively making these living parks to save them one from the. Treasure hunters but 2 to stimulate local economy and interest into these locations. 19:04.35 David Howe Well on that note, let's ah, let's hop into the next segment here's an ad from our sponsors I think we have patriotsuply.com now let's let's hear that let's hear to that ad.