00:00.43 kinkella Hello and welcome back to the pseudo archeology podcast episode 118 I'm your host Dr Andrew King Kella and we have been talking about shipwrecks and treasure hunting I thought I would take this section to talk about a shipwreck project that I worked on. Over twenty years ago at this point I can't believe it was that long ago I believe it was the summer of 9098 it was either ninety Eight or Ninety Nine I think it was 98 and um, it was something that I thought was really done right in terms of learning. About shipwrecks and it's the opposite of our me treasure right? It was much more about let's find the ship. Let's document. The ship. Let's tell the history of the ship and the story of the ship and let's make it open in a way to the general public so they can learn too. And so what I want to tell you a bit about is the story of the Pomona which was a passenger steamer that cruised up and down the California Coast at the beginning of the previous century. So the pomona was a ship that was built in 1888 and it was ultimately sunk. In 1908 and it happened to sync at um. 01:24.74 kinkella At Fort Ross Cove in Northern California home of very cold water. Let me tell you so what's the what's the story of this. So the pomona. Which again you have to think this is the early nineteen hundreds we don't have no highway one a one. There's no highway 5 and there's barely cars so people are taking these passenger steamers up and down the California Coast just to get places right? and it would just stop at the various ports. It would stop at San Diego and Los Angeles and and Santa Barbara and you get it right? You know San Francisco and onwards even up I think towards Seattle and that kind of thing and it would just go up and down the coast ferrying people and the mail and this these kinds of things cargo. The ship itself I do remember ah a lot of the specs of it I believe it was two hundred and twenty Eight feet long and again a passenger steamer which means it had a huge boiler and ran on steam. It had pistons and that kind of thing now in terms of its demise. What happened was. 1 ne stormy night of course in 198 the ship was cruising just right off the coast and it hit a rock and it started to sink and the captain was like oh now, let's turn towards the coast hoping to. 02:51.28 kinkella Ground the ship before it sank completely under the water happened to be right at Fort Russ Cove and so it it steamed straight for the cove and then boom it hit another rock and then it that's where it sank luckily it sank in only about thirty feet of water or so and the sinking took. Days now that sounds like it's no big deal. But at first imagine being on a ship that's like half sunk on a stone in sort of the entrance to a harbor in Northern California which is barely a harbor at all in a storm those people must have been really really scared so they had to. Take the lifeboats right off and make it into the cove from the ship itself in a storm. Do you want to surf a lifeboat to the shore I don't but they did and ultimately funnily enough. Fort Ross is a russian fort that had been built. Of course boy what the better part of a I mean many many decades before at that point what better part of a hundred years ago before anyway in the eighteen hundreds and there was I believe a caretaker there or they were able to get help and and there you go. So. In the intervening years the pomona had been lost. Basically nobody thought about it anymore every so often artifacts from the pomona would wash up on the beach but in the in the 90 s the state parks. 04:22.77 kinkella Decided to make a map of it kind of refined it. There was a very very basic map of almost nothing I remember we had but our job was to refind the pomona make a much better map and then ultimately the project was going to connect the pomona to what was now Fort Ross state historic park so really they were. Extending the park into the water right? beyond the fort itself and it's just a great idea right by California State Parks it was run I remember by Charlie Beaker who is from indiana university and he had his students and John Foster who was part of California State Parks and these guys had worked together on previous projects. They'd worked in the dominican republic which is where Carlton worked you write the host of the co-host of the life and ruins podcast and so um I worked with these guys for about two weeks we stayed at a boy scout. Ah. Little little boy scout camp right? there very very very basic accommodations I remember staying in just this little wooden I wouldn't even call it a cabin or room as much as a storage unit and all that was in there was the remains of. A bed but it was just the metal parts like just the springs like just a box springs but just the metal and I remember all I did is I had a I had a ah sleeping bag and I just rolled it out on top of the metal springs and it kind of oddly worked. But. 05:55.23 kinkella We so we stayed there. We did 3 dives a day I remember that the first 2 or 3 days we had to refine the ship we it and it was very difficult because when you're diving in a place like that. Even though it's only thirty feet it's cold we were wearing 7 and 7 millimeter wetsuits which is about as thick as you can go before a dry suit. Um, and we were freezing even in that and diving down even though it's thirty feet deep your visibility is what like eight feet I don't know maybe ten feet on a good day and so. You basically have to hit the wreckage perfect in order to know you're there so it took us a few dives of finding nothing but I remember those dives how it would go would be you'd jump off the zodiac. We had like a little rubber boat. You'd go down. There would be. Darkness for a while where all you could see where you're um, where you're various dials that on your Scooby Equipment you know your dive watch your computer. Whatever it's all you could see because if you can only see eight feet and it's thirty feet deep that middle part when you're at like twenty feet deeper so you can't see the bottom you can't see the top so you would just float through darkness and then all of a sudden the ocean bottom would be there like you whoa you know and then you would cruise around looking for the ship when we finally found it. It just looked like hey. 07:28.28 kinkella Why did everybody? Why did a bunch of people just drop a bunch of metal here like did people dump metal here because you have to realize the ship was had already been there for 100 years so it had been hammered by the waves in the ocean for a hundred years. So. Sunken ships for the most part are not how you guys think they're not all in 1 piece stuff like the Titanic makes us think they're all like in 1 piece and you can like cruise through the corridors or something and for the most part you can't they have just been destroyed. They are opened up like think of an orange just opening up and having like the slices all over the place. That's what it's like and you could even the ship was so big. You could get lost on the ship. You would just be like I'm swimming through metal parts. What is this I don't know you know, just metal bits and bobs all across the seafloor. But after we found it we then started to map the remains of the ship. We made a datum at one spot on the ship on the drive train. The drive train was still there. It was like a hundred feet long I think and we just started mapping using tape measures mapping away from it and mapping the major chunks of the ship that were still there I remember that my job was the ah engine I did a lot. Ah, with the engine with my dive buddy. So I remember mapping like 1 of the pistons that was still there which are super super huge. The pistons in our own cars like the connecting rods if you guys know auto mechanics connecting rods only like four inches long or whatever it is and it's very small. 09:03.47 kinkella Connecting rod on a passenger steamship is like four feet long you know so these are huge parts mapping the boiler that kind of stuff so I was in the engine room area which is of course now open in just pieces all over the place um mapping something like that. In a surge too because the water's always moving back and forth. So what? me and my dive buddy would do is we would hold on to each other let the surge swoosh us towards let's say we have to map the boiler I would have I would hold the measuring tape he would hold. The underwater writing paper and we would let the ocean move us towards let's say again. It's the boiler. Once we got to the boiler I would I would have the measuring tape ready I would put it on the boiler as we moved by the boiler. And then with my thumb I could tell how long that part was and I would show it to him in his um, right at his mask I'd be like forty one centimeters or whatever it was right and he would write it down and then we would wait for the surge to pick us up again and we'd take the second measurement. 10:17.44 kinkella That's how slow and difficult underwater archeology is we would see people on on the ship like holding on to parts just to try and make sure the surge wouldn't take them away again. The surge will bring you back. But It's very again, very very difficult to stay at a spot. You kind of have to make friends with the surge and just let it take you backwards and forwards and do what you can as you are moving by so I'll always remember that and being cold the whole time too. Ultimately, after about a week and a half we had a decent map so we would dive there were 3 dives total and the more experienced divers would go twice and the less experience would tend to go once on that group I was much less experienced so I had much more archeology experience than most of them but much less diving. So it was fun for me I learned a lot about diving. Um, and ultimately we made this map and we brought up a couple pieces of the ship now these were just things like pipes and that kind of stuff that could be set up at Fort Ross above so Fort Ross was like on the bluffs above. The cove where we were diving and so people at Fort Ross um tourists could look out and then be standing where we'd have this little display that talked about the pomona I thought was a really great idea and one of the last things we did. 11:49.93 kinkella Was put a floater on the bow and the Stern of the ship. So these 2 white floaters so you could look out and see where the pomona lay right? You could see these two floaters. So your mind could be like oh that's where the ship is. Um, I just thought it was a great edit like what a great archeology project to map this ship in to see sort of check and see the status of it. Um to add it to a state park that was already there and. Give this other aspect. So now. It's like hey come to Fort Ross to learn about russian traders but also learn about early maritime history of California at the time and learn about shipwrecks and this kind of thing so it was just It was just a great project. Um I really has respect for it and I I learned about scuba it sort of kept me in the game I after that. 13:00.46 kinkella Started taking more advanced scuba classes. At that point I believe I only had my initial open water certification. But I knew like okay if I want to be an underwater archeologist I got to up my game I got to like get these advanced certifications I ultimately did get my dive master certification but that was years and years later. I do think that working on that project though kind of spurred me forward and of course helped me in my research on sonotas that would come a bit after that. So. That's how to do a project right. Notice I never said and then we brought up the treasure right notice I didn't say oh because it was haunted. You know it's just it has its own fascinating story. You don't need ghosts and with that. When we come back how to deal with the Treasure Hunter world