The Stern

The Stern

On January 1st, Richard and I fabricated a special rigging for the GoPro using PVC and a rail mount. The new mount would allow us to secure the camera over the side of the kayak, and position it facing in any direction using the two universal joints.

With the new camera mount, we went for a second visit to the remains of the 1873 British bark Bessie Rogers on Saturday. With the camera attached to the kayak, facing down and set to take photos every seconds, I paddled over to the wreck.

I broke up the area into four lanes. Once a lane was completed, since the camera was mounted on the starboard side, I turned around and repeated the lane. The entire wreck took about a half hour or more to cover. In the end we collected over 2000 photos

Once home we reviewed the photos and were very pleased with how well the mount worked. The results were far better than those from our first attempt a week ago. We had many clear images of the remaining skeleton of the bark. We were quickly able to reconstruct many parts of the boat through photogrammetry.

3D Model

3D Model

Though we made much progress in gathering photos of wrecks for 3D modeling, there are a still a few issues to work out. The issues appear to be in the collecting process; not enough overlap, and some photos appearing too blurry. The speed I paddled over the wreck was probably the cause, since I progressively went faster each pass, and the quality went down with each pass.

This will be our last kayak attempt until it warms up again. Though this was meant to get familiar with how to best do the same with the ROV, we’re so pleased by the results we plan on doing many of the other wrecks in shallow coves using the same method.

 

 

 


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