Dear Shipwreck 2004 Volunteers:

 

As I'm sure you know, our excavation of the shipwreck on the Southampton Beach is now complete.  We allowed the lake to engulf most of the site last Wednesday, then the Town of Saugeen Shores came by on Thursday to back-fill and cover the remaining exposed wood.  All portions of the wreck now seem secure once again under the stabilizing beach sand environment.

 

I want to take the opportunity now to express my personal thanks for all your efforts over the last nearly nine weeks.  As I'm sure I have told you, the work could not have been done without you.  And, what a great group you've been.  I don't remember a negative word (or even look) from any of you, no matter how hard you were pushed or what dirty, repetitive and just plain tough tasks you were given.  Everybody just kept smiling and working.  As I say, a terrific group.  Thank you!

 

We have a lot of work to do now, sorting through both the ship construction information and the artifacts that we (including many of you) found.  I hope to have some preliminary observations within a few weeks and I will be sure to post them on this website, so stay tuned.  I am just now beginning to sort through the 1500 or so photographs taken by our great site photographer Larry LePage.  I will send some of these along to the website also so you can have a look.  Larry and I have talked about some way of making available shots of each of you working on the site.   I'm sure we can work something out and we will be in touch about that.

 

Speaking of Larry, I want to publicly thank him for his terrific photographic work.  I have never had anywhere near this kind of photographic coverage on any site I have worked on and, as with most everything else we did, it was all done with no cost to the project and with Larry's always upbeat and smiling approach to the work.  Thanks Larry.

 

Speaking of websites, as I was a paragraph or so ago, many thanks to Ken Rothenberg and Mike Sterling for making the volunteer website happen.  Ken checked, sorted, answered and organized all the volunteer enquiries and daily shifts, Mike designed and implemented the website matrix then made sure all the information got on to the website and was kept updated daily.  Again, what can I say about these guys who made the volunteer website happen.  Thanks Ken.  Thanks Mike.

 

Once again, a big thank you to all you volunteers.  You are indeed special people.  If I ever do this again.............I have my volunteer list (you) ready.

 

Thank you.

 

Ken Cassavoy

Marine Archaeologist

Project Director, Southampton Beach Shipwreck Project  

If you would like to save any of the pictures, just click the right mouse button and respond to the "save as" pull-down menu.  You can save the pictures anyplace on your system and then print them in high quality form on your printer or another.  I got a bit lazy due to the sheer volume of these pictures.  I started out creating nice thumbnails, but it took quite a bit of time, so I had Larry LePage download the files to the host server and just presented the directory entries for your perusal.  If you know what days you were on the site, it should be ok.  Thanks, Mike Sterling