Use of a total station in vessel recording

While employed at Grossman & Associates, around 1993, we had the opportunity to record the tidal remains of two 40'-50' (?) large centerboard Hudson River cargo haulers inside a NY State Park, Bear Mountain, site of two nearby Revolutionary War forts, Clinton and Montgomery. The remains were also photographed using the Rolleimetric close-range photogrammetric camera system, from overhead as was possible, though the photos were never formally rectified (placed on a digitizing tablet, combined with survey data and used to document specific distances in 3D, as used in accident reconstruction, power plant "reporting", etc.). The complications of the mud and wood, along with the iron rods joining timbers together used like "trenails" (treenails, wooden pegs, in this case replaced by thick iron rod without thread and nuts in the centerboard "box" and elsewhere) made the definition of the elements, chased by tide below the Bear Mountain Bridge, the Hudson River is visibly tidal (drowned estuary) to Albany, NY and navigable to Troy, NY difficult to photograph as a close-range photogrammetric "object" without real serious engineering supports. Using a Sokkia total-station (then Sokkisha) allowed the sighting in of the remaining ends of the frames (they themselves "split" and joined horizontally by iron rod, keeping a curve for the outside planking once attached, and the creation of the schematic which could not be reduced to fit in the National Maritime Historical Society article on it, thought the copy I believe was sent to NY State Office Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, its commissioner Bernadette Castro, part of the NYC furniture business. It is the only one that I have done. Since, new total stations have "laser" ranging in them (though called that previously, they were more like "night vision scopes in the infra-red than "lasers") and one example to show that utility (could I have used that, as often the guy holding the "mirror" or reflecting prism, is the last one to actually produce the resulting documentation) was documenting an historic ship at dockside, to determine deformations etc., in it's "fearful symmetry". Posted to Underwater Archaeology yesterday.