Thursday 30th March : the first time (one more) ... !

It was the first dive with the submersible Nautile for Bleuenn! She tells us:

"The day before the dive, I was very excited at the thought of discovering a tiny part of the ocean bed, which, all the same, represents 70 % of the surface of the globe ! The day of the dive, I was a bit tense but couldn't wait to get to the bottom.

I have always been very impressed by the technicality of the launching of the Nautile: the technicians and the divers who detach the cables once the submersible is in the water, the mariners on-board who assist in ensuring a gentle launch. Everything happened so quickly, the daylight disappears rapidly and as we reach 230 m it is nearly already dark!

 

We arrived at the seabed around 10h45 after a descent of around 1h45, 3700 m down at the foot of a massive and magnificently impressive scree slope. The scree resembles a mountain, albeit subsea, inhabited by a fauna of strange fish and red shrimp.

As we start to ascend the scree, my innate knowledge is that we are exploring mantle rock, altered peridotites that we call serpentinites. This was a great satisfaction as it was exactly what I expected. The blocks of rock are huge and it was not easy to find an appropriate place to take samples.

After around 2h30, we reached the top of the scree.

Its surface is covered in sediment, there is a huge quantity of animals, fish, shrimp, brittle stars and enormous sponges attached to the blocks of rock emerging from the sediment. We pass over plains of sediment and faults of varying sizes until we reach the top of a ridge which is probably another large fault.

 

We descend and travel along the wall, the rocks are very similar to the scree we explored earlier. It's starting to feel cold inside the sub (the temperature of the water around us is 4°) and the sides are condensing with the air we exhale. We then return to the summit of the fault to the plain of sediment.

After 5 hours, it is now unfortunately time to return the surface...time has flown by! We release the ballasts and return to the surface like an air bubble, relatively quickly because after all the ascensions, we were only at 2600 m.

The arrival was quite moving, after having witnessed some incredible sights. I am now entitled to my diving baptism !