Wednesday, November 17, 2004 Dave Conlin studied anthropology and archeology as an undergraduate at Reed College in Portland Oregon and continued his graduate studies in archeology at Oxford University in England and at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.  He was the field director for the recovery of the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley in 2000, the Ellis Island Ferry in 2002 and the Lake Mead B-29 in 2002 and 2003.

Unsung Heroes

The VideoRay with YSI collects data on Arizona's interior. NPS photo by Brett Seymour.

Today we continued our interior investigations with the Videoray ROV, gathering data from deep inside Arizona at the third deck level towards the stern, where blast and fire damage from the December 7th explosion was minimal. Our YSI sonde monitors seven different parameters as the ROV carries it through the ship and today, as we have seen in the past, we saw a huge drop in dissolved oxygen as we moved further into the wreck.

The Admiral of the Arizona Memorial fleet of one, Art makes a run in our Boston Whaler. Photo by Brett Seymour, NPS.

Rather than bore everyone with pH and dissolved oxygen data we wanted to take some time towards the end of the project to highlight our secret weapon and the reason this project has run as well as it has, our one-man logistics empire, Art Ireland. Arthur Keith Ireland, a talented terrestrial archeologist in his own right with more than thirty years of public service, occasionally gets a pass from his normal duties to come out and work like a galley slave with the SRC team. On any given day, while the rest of the team are flooding ROVs, wrangling mung out of portholes or riding herd on our bevy of scientists, Art will be making runs to the dive shop for tanks, driving the boat, getting ice for the cooler or any number of workaday tasks that would keep the rest of us all occupied. As I said in an earlier post, even with all this, he still has time for a few salty comments about the quality of what we're currently kludging together, a timely jibe about that project back in Dry Tortugas 10 years ago when one of my team screwed up the data and only Art could figure it out and save two weeks worth of work, or a not-so-oblique reference to one of our many past snafus that he was able to witness firsthand. Art -- rarely grumpy, but always gruff -- has been the SRC's secret weapon for longer than Matt Russell, Brett Seymour or myself have been involved with the National Park Service.  So while we would never tell him to his face, we would happily tell any stranger that cares to read it on the web that Art is one of the most important assets SRC has in the field. A familiar site to the team after a dive, Art stands at the ready to assist with gear. NPS photo by Brett Seymour.

Art Ireland supervises dive operations at Pearl Harbor. NPS photo by Brett Seymour.