In reviewing the work we did at the pond in 1994, I came across something interesting that we were never able to properly follow-up on.
During the May 1994 expedition, one of the divers - Eric Green - was doing a visual search of the bottom, swimming on the surface with mask and snorkel in an area where the water was about six feet deep and the bottom was "muck" (sediment) covered with two or three inches of green marine grass. He came upon something he later sketched (see below) and described during a video-taped de-briefing on shore. The audio on the tape is difficult to make out due to wind noise but I've been able to transcribe this much:
Eric: "It's like something that hit there - I dunno - if you were looking for something that hit the bottom, like something scoops it - ya know? That thick, deep down (holds hands about 18 inches apart) we have muck. What it looks like, you have a piece about this length (holds hands about 3 feet apart) with [unintelligible] (holds hands with fingers pointing toward each other) with seaweed all over it. [unintelligible exchange with Jim and Ric] I stopped and looked at it and looked at it. Nothing else there. I looked all the way around. This is sitting about this far (holds hands about 18 inches apart) from one edge and nothing else, no rocks around it, nothing out there."
Jim Carucci (archaeologist): "Close to the island?
Eric: "Yes."
Ric: "Do you think you could relocate this thing?"
Eric: "When I came up - when I saw it, I was looking straight across to the chopper here and I was close to the island. I can find - I can find the groove just running this way (gestures left to right) which something had hit there and skidded down the road - big groove about that deep - and in grass - and I'm running back and forth - and it's there on the top, all by itself, nothing else there.
Jim: "And it's not a rock?"
Eric: "It's not a rock."
Carucci: "Then it's probably a piece of metal."
Eric: "It's not a rock, I don't think it's a rock but .. in about six feet of water. ...There's no rock there and there's nothing at all around it. It's like something just settled down there over a period."
Ric: Could be wood.
Eic: "No, no. As I say, I was up on it just looking at it and I don't really know what it was. And I was like, I stood and looked at it for a while, I moved around..."
That's all we have. Our permit didn't allow us to disturb, much less recover, artifacts but we wanted to look at the feature closely, measure it, and photograph it, but we were unable to find it again in the time available.
In retrospect, this could be the most important find we've ever had at the pond. This sounds very much like a ground scar where a heavy object hit the pond bottom at a shallow angle at high speed and tore a path before burying itself in the sediment, leaving only a small portion of the object visible.
I've been trying to come up with plausible alternative explanations but not having much luck.