Message #146060

[Bianca]

When the History Channel crew arrived we were able to complete several dives of the southern end of the site (using our gps points). On the first dive our Bahamian boat captain and expert diver Elsie Brown went down holding our drop camera and swam it in a circle around where our boat was anchored. Due to the depth (90-110 ft) he could only dive for 20 minutes, but we obtained some great footage. Fortunately, the current on this day was neutral from the 70 foot level down to the bottom. Greg and I did the next dive along with David Ulloa and his safety diver. David was using a rebreather device so was the only diver not limited to a 20 minute dive. Because the current was quite swift from about the 10 to 70 foot depth, Greg and I tethered ourselves to the anchor line of our boat and descended to the bottom reahing a maximum depth of 120-feet. Once there we were able to unhook our tethers and explore only two of the rectangular mound sites beneath the boat. Our objective was to seek some manmade evidence such as stones placed on top of stones as in a wall, or tool marks, or right angles, etc. The rectangular formations resemble mounds and were covered in both live and hardened coral. We brushed off the sand and debris where we could being careful not to disturb the live coral, but could not find any objects that were not coral encrusted. While exploring the first mound I happened to look over at the second one which was about 50 yards south of us and thought I could clearly see what appeared to be two stone blocks lying one on top of the other. I alerted Greg and we headed over, but to our disappointment by the time we got close to it the image had “disappeared” and the area was simply a “blob” of the mound covered in hardened coral. The differentiation of a seam separating the two blocks that seemed clear from the distance was not visible as we gave the site a close-up inspection. However, we were impressed with the fact that the rectangular mounds were surrounded by flat sandy seabed and that the gradual drop of the ancient shoreline could easily be made out.

Since we were limited to 20 minutes to avoid a long decompression ascent, our time on the site was short. During both Elsie’s dive and our dive, David Olluoa was filming the site (and us) with his high definition video camera. After our debriefing it was decided that David would return the next day and do shots across the entire site using his dive scooter and HD video. Meanwhile we moved over to the Bimini Road to get some additional footage there. In January with the History Channel we had gotten some great shots of wedge stones and prop stones found under the main stones of the road. This time we also found lots of impressive prop stones providing more proof to contradict the statements made by skeptics that the road is merely a single layer of fractured beachrock lying on the seabed. We also found numerous rectangular slabs stacked under the huge blocks that are visible from the surface. Later on we found several stone anchors that were identical to Phoenician anchors and pulled the smallest one on the boat for closer inspection.

The next day the heavy currents were much more treacherous at the 90-100 foot depth so David had some trouble getting video of the entire site. However, he was able to access several rectangles on the northern end of the ancient shoreline at the 100 foot level. His video was amazing and what he was able to show Greg and I after the dive contained several points of interest. First, he was struck by the unique and regular pattern of the rectangles as he began shooting. They were uniformly spaced and all of a similar size and shape. He could immediately see four rectangles about 50 yards apart lined up perfecting along the ledge where the 10,000 B.C. shoreline would have been. He was struck by the fact that, although they were covered with coral, the seabed surrounding them was mostly a flat sandy area with no coral. He is an experienced deep diver and has never seen coral form in regular block formations this way except when it was covering some manmade objects such as shipwrecks or buildings blown into the water by hurricanes. Of course, for this much coral to be covering the mounds they had to have been in place a very, very long time. Could these be buildings from a pre-ice age civilization that had been inundated by some force of nature such as a tsunami or a hurricane or rising sea levels as the ice age glaciers melted? One statement we made on film is this: “What would you expect to see if you found stone structures that had been underwater for 12,000-years?”