Alberta diver explores ancient shipwreck off Crete
A Fort McMurray man is seeing a world few people have ever visited as he helps researchers explore an ancient Greek shipwreck 45 metres under the Mediterranean Sea.
Ray LeFrense, a scuba diver and instructor for decades, is spending a month in Cyprus clearing debris from 800 clay amphora (containers) being carried on a craft from the island of Chios that went down 11/2 kilometres offshore about 2,500 years ago.
Most of the wooden boat has disintegrated, but the metre-high containers still lie in the same position where they were stored, providing an excellent outline of the vessel, LeFrense said Sunday from his base on the eastern Mediterranean island.
“It’s amazing to think about how those amphora are there, and they have been sitting in that location for 2,500 years … This wreck sank well.”
The Suncor maintenance supervisor is one of a dozen technical diving volunteers taking part in a field school run by the University of Cyprus and the Nautical Archaeology Society, a charitable group based in Portsmouth, England.
He dives for 20 minutes at a time, using an airlift pump to gently suck sediment off the amphora — which apparently carried olives or olive oil — so they can be numbered, photographed and occasionally hauled to the surface for further examination.
The bottom is sand and clay, the temperature 21°C even at that depth, and the water is so clear visibility is at least 10 metres, a big change from the cold, dark waters off the B.C. coast where LeFrense, 42, has explored artificial reefs in the past.
He typically dives six days a week, taking archeology classes at night for the first two weeks in such areas as artifact documentation and photography.
He became interested in the field when scientists spent a summer off the coast of his southwest Newfoundland hometown of Isle Aux Morts, studying a 350-year-old wreck and showing residents some of the items they found.
“I remember seeing them as a kid on display in tubs of salt water. That just fascinated me … I kind of became passionate about it.”
While he didn’t want to make it a career, he embraced underwater archeology as a hobby, visiting locations off Australia, Malaysia, Florida and elsewhere.
His dream is to find a wreck of his own. His ancestors are credited with saving hundreds of lives when two ships, the Despatch and the Rankin, went down near Newfoundland in separate disasters in the 1800s.
LeFrense hopes to start searching for those missing ships within the next couple of years, beginning with locations he plotted on charts from information provided by his grandfather.
“I think it would be a unique experience and a personal (achievement) for myself, because the wreckage has a direct link to my family. It’s also historically important to the province where I was born.”