Lees Mills objects

[Diver1111]

Went out last Sunday with a buddy up to Lees Mills; Big wind and white caps-long boat ride in those conditions. Wanted to dive objects I had on side-scan from last year, attached.

What I thought was a boat-although the dark curve had me confused because I saw no hard target to speak of to generate it-turned out to be a piling driven into the lake bed. Two pilings actually-pretty big; I thought I saw lines off both extending up into the water column as if someone had marked them; The lines into the water column are actually the pilings themselves about 30 feet apart. The big dark curve is the shadow from one of them. Not at all what I was expecting.

The two fuzzy circular objects that appear on both the left and right side of the scan just off the bottom is actually a single bait-ball, a tight school of fish.

[Grant]

Close to shore or was it a random location for pilings? 20+ ffw is kinda deep for pilings. Interesting.

[Diver1111]

The two pilings can be found offshore perhaps about 300-400, off the Lees Mills dock/ramp. While I have never dropped my boat in at the Lees Mills ramp and have no reason to because it's such a hike (vs. going there by boat-and thus enjoying a nice ride in the process), this positional data will help you orient you to where these pilings are.

If you were standing on the Lees dock/ramp and looking south directly at the channel leading out of the Lees Mills basin, these pilings are at about 10 o'clock/11 o'clock in that "pocket"/body of water to the left.

Obviously they served some purpose, and I assume that purpose was logging, based upon my reading. I know from diving the CT. River and the logging-related history there, on the Connecticut they built heavy heavy-duty log "islands", from which they directed log-traffic. Logs floated down the river were of course not owned by only one company, so the stamps on the butts of the logs identified their owner; To identify them you must examine them; To examine them you must stop them-hence these islands-which we call "piers"; Basically a log traffic-island.

These piers are serious structures-built from logs that average 1-2 feet in diameter, notched at their connection points like a log cabin forming right-angles. They can be 15-30 feet high off the bottom, then filled with rocks in the center-big ones (my guess is 500 to 1,000 lbs each)-as ballast to hold them down. They are typically 25 x 25 feet in dimension at their base.

I am guessing that these pilings in Lees are remnants of the logging industry in some fashion.

I participated in a film about the logging industry on the CT River made by Ed Klekowski from U-Mass/Amherst a few years ago, where we filmed these piers, but they did not show up well, due to lousy viz.

Some images of this can be seen at:

http://www.wgby.org/localprograms/logdrives/index.html

Hope it helps.
D1111