Diving - My Continuing Adventures underwater
Gotta get some metal!
While I do enjoy most kinds of diving, I do have a particular fondness for wrecks.
I find exploring the remains of ships underwater particularly appealing, but they're always a haven for sea life, wherever they are in the world, providing safety from larger predators and, often, solid foundations for plants and stationary creatures on otherwise barren sea beds.
So, I was looking forward to getting out and visiting some of those off the south coast of England on our club RHIB.
We took the RHIB out on a lovely April Sunday.
We were rewarded with a very flat sea, clear blue skies, no wind and it wasn't too hot.
We had some problems getting the boat launched as one of the brakes was jammed and it required borrowing a van to drag it out of the gravel and onto tarmac, to release it.
We made good time to the Elena R, where we found a hardboat with divers already in the water as it seemed we'd slightly missed the slack.
I dropped in with Piers as the first pairing and he indicated he was happy to descend.
I went down a way and then decided to turn to check he was OK, but he wasn't in sight.
I couldn't be sure he was on the line and perhaps he had passed me off of it, so I looked for bubbles coming up from below me, but I couldn't see any, so I assumed he was still on the surface.
Sure enough, he was, unable to descend, so we called the boat over and put another couple of Kg into his BCD and this time he was able to descend.
We reached the wreck and found ourselves close to the boliers.
We swam around in vis of 3-4M and decent light, seeing plenty of the wreck, some Spider crabs and a few Conger Eels.
The dive on the Elena R
There were also plenty of large fish, including Pollock and Bib in reasonably large groups, as well as Gobies galore.
Piers indicated he was down to 70 Bar before we reached deco and I put up my DSMB in a mild current and we floated across the wreck for a while before we ascended to the point where we could no longer see it below us.
Piers struggled a bit on the safety stop, but managed to complete it and we returned to the boat without incident.
A decent dive on a substantial wreck.
Caroline was running the day and proposed we dive the Cragside, inside the harbour wall as our second dive after returning to the Marina to refill our cylinders.
We found that there is currently a buoy marking the wreck, so used that the descend to the wreck, finding ourselves on the stern, the most substantial part of the wreck.
We explored the rudder and prop initially and then swam around the stern section for a while before moving forward across the much broken mid section and reaching the upright, but much smaller bow.
On this occasion, rather than turning around and swimming back across the same wreckage, I decided to see if we could swim onto the Enecuri (AKA The Spaniard) which I believed was further south than the Cragside.
A video from the dive on the Cragside only
We swam on for a few minutes across seemingly nothing but sand and Piers later commented that he wondered where on earth I was going!
Then we started to see small pieces of wreckage, but it was still unclear if this was parts of ship or just rubbish dumped after work on the harbour.
However, as there started to be more of this, I felt increasingly confident that we'd reached the Spaniard and then we found ourselves up against a wall that towered up to the surface, it seemed.
On closer examination, though, the wall was made up of steel plates rivetted together.
It was clearly the very substantial bow of a large ship.
We swam on and found the front, swinging around it and the finding a way into the wreck without having to swim up.
Here we found ousrselves in a large open structure, heading forward into the bow, which was covered.
Through a bulkhead we could see a ladder leading up and light flooding in down it.
We then swam back for a while and then forward and started to ascend up the side of the wreck.
It turned out that the top of the bow was actually at around 6M, so an ideal spot to carry out a safety stop (Piers was happier this time, having swapped some of his weights with me) in dappled sunlight.
From here we could see the same ladder we spotted earlier leading down from the bow deck, but the opening was too shallow for us to enter it.
We surfaced and swam away from the wall to be picked up by the RHIB.
We struggled a bit to recover the boat as the tide was nearly out, but we managed eventually, cleaned the boat, loaded our kit and adjourned to Billy Winters for a beer before heading home.
Overail, a very good day, diving on some decent wrecks in good conditions with OK visibility and getting some decent depth on the first dive.
I was happy as I had none of the buoyancy issues I'd had on our previous visit, which I'd now put down to a jammed dump valve on my drysuit.
Although I had added weight for the first dive, in case this was the issue, the second dive was back at my usual 9KG 'sea-weight' and I had absolutely no problems with buoyancy.
More freshwater diving
A few days later, I was back in Wraysbury for a quick couple of mid-week dives to familiarise a new member of the club with drysuits.
Rob had dived many times in the past, reaching the level of Dive Leader, but this was his first open water dive since 2009 and first ever in a drysuit!
Fortunately, despite that long delay, he seemed to have forgotten very little and quickly got to grips with the drysuit's buoyancy.
We did two dives, for the first, we walked in from the pier in the car park and checked Rob had enough lead to sink, being a bit overweighted to start with in my assessment, but you can never tell and it's better to start heavy rather than light.
He had no problems, so we headed out to the black cab, small boat and then found ourselves at the plane.
Rob's confidence and control was soon apparent as he had no problem swimming throught the plane without ending up pinned to the roof.
We headed on, through a container, until we found a collapsed rubber boat. As I approached it, I startled a decent sized Pike from the small cruiser next to it and it swam a little way away.
In good vis, for Wraysbury, I could make out the shapes of other wrecks from there and knew I was at the 'wreck site'. As we swam into it we spotted the large pike that is often here, just hanging mid-water, totally untroubled by the approach of divers.
We swam on, passing the Die Hard Taxi and eventually reached the 'cave complex', which had the worst vis I can ever recall seeing there, but we swam around it and then along the shelf to the bus and then exited behind the shop.
Rob kindly bought me a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea, which we enjoyed in the sunshine while carrying out a surface interval.
We decided to do a shorter second dive (our first had been around 45 minutes), so we headed right from the car park pier, after a giant stride entry, with the intention of reaching the corrugated iron tubes and some of the sites along the easterly corner.
We dropped Rob's weight a couple of kilos, too, and he had no issue with 11KG.
Things started well, we found the diving bell and then the VW camper van, but then as I (or at least, thought I) headed towards the tubes, we found the water getting darker.
At first I thought there was some kind of attraction ahead, but it soon became clear we were in the shade of trees, which meant we were in the furtherest corner, so I turned around.
From here, the water started getting siltier, with a layer hanging in the water, a few feet off the lake bed, making it difficult to work out where we were.
Eventually we came to a small cabin cruiser and reached the 20 minute mark which we'd set ourselves for this dive, so, not really knowing where we were anymore, I indicated to Rob that we should surface and we found ourselves not far from the plane.
Some video from the second dive.
From there we surface swam back to the car park pier and exited.
Not an especially exciting couple of dives, but they were really for Rob to get used to a drysuit and experience open water before he headed off to Indonesia for a 5 week Reef-Conservation exercise, which will certainly seem very different to an April dip in Wraysbury!
Salvage Work!
Darren, a club member and club chairman when I joined (he also arranged our excellent trip to Indonesia), is a keen angler and got in touch to ask if anyone would be interested in helping a fishing lake to identify and possibly remove what was causing anglers to snag their lines.
I had to abort our first attempt to get down there in April, due to a cold, but Andy and I went down in early May.
We met up with the owner, Ryan, who pointed out where people were complaining about losing their lines.
The lake is close to Heathrow and about half the size of nearby Wraysbury Dive Centre, but obviously fetures no sites for divers, being intended solely for anglers to catch the huge Carp it is stocked with.
We did two dives on the day.
The first dive was an exploratory one to see what we could find.
The lake was closed at the time, so we had our pick of places to enter, but Ryan recommended a slope near the area where the fishing lines were being caught.
Andy and I kitted up and dropped in, maybe fell in would be a better word as we soon appreciated the piers and diver friendly slopes of places like Wraysbury.
Ryan explained that the lake is dyed blue which keeps to algae and weed at bay and there was little to no weed visible, with a lake bed, very similar to Wraysbury's grey silt, being visible throughout.
The first unexpected sight we came across was a bathtub! This was sunk quite deep in the silt, but seemed to offer no significant snag hazard.
We next found a metal mesh cage, covered in Zebra Mussels, which seemed a more significant risk, so Andy tied his DSMB to it.
We also found a seemingly intact, but near vertical, rowing boat, but again it didn't seem much of a hazard to anglers.
Most significantly, and right where Ryan predicted, we found a large roll of metal mesh fencing, entangled around larger metal pieces and we surfaced (the whole dive never saw us deeper than 4M!) and picked a tree on the shore to relocate the obstacle.
As we'd swum around, we'd repeatedly been buzzed by large carp who seemed very interested in the large, bubble blowing fish that were suddenly in the lake.
Andy reckoned they were just interested in the silt we were kicking up, despite our best efforts to keep off the bottom.
The vis, generally, was about 2.5-3M, but diminished to near zero if we disturbed the silt as we did when marking the crate, for example.
We managed to navigate our way back to the cars underwater, spotting the bonnet of a car just before exiting, but lying flat on the lake bed, partly buried, it seemed to offer no snag hazard.
We got out and dekitted and had an hour break, during which I'd called Ryan, but he hadn't answered, so we decided to have a second dive and find the 'deep' part of the lake, but just as we were ready to go in Ryan rang and said he'd be around.
So we waited for him and explained what we'd found. He suggested he use an electric buggy and some rope to try and pull some of the worst items out of the lake.
Andy and I were skeptical it would work, but we agreed to give it a go, starting with the crate.
We wound the rope around and through the mesh of the crate, stirring up silt as we did so until there was no visibilty at all and then surfaced and gave the team onshore the thumbs up.
It was impossible to see what was happening below the surface in the murk and we didn't really expect much success, but shortly afterwards a large lump of wreckage emerged on the end of the rope onshore!
It seemed the whole crate had come out.
While it had been being recovered, Andy and I looked for the boat, but we couldn't find it again, so decided to see if we could recover at least some of the fencing as well.
This was quite easy to find as Andy had noted a three trunked tree on the shore, close to it.
Again, we wound the rope around and through the fences mesh and around the more substantial pieces of metal, but as we did so, we quite quickly found ourselves in zero vis.
Eventually, we gave up the unequal struggle to see or feel what we were doing and gave the thumbs up again.
The combined weight of the fencing and metal were significantly more than the crate, so we didn't really expect to get a lot of it up, if indeeed anything moved, but we could see lots of bubbles on the surface, so assumed something was moving.
The fence and car parts - You can make out the shape of a seat in front of the tree in the centre of the picture.
Once again our expectations were exceeded and it seemed (by touch) that most of the fencing and a large amount of the metal had gone.
Feeling around, I could feel some substantial, but rounded metal pieces, which felt a bit like car subframe assemblies.
Interestingly, when we examined the wreckage it turned out the metal parts were car seat frames and there were clear signs that it had been burnt out, so somewhere in the lake are the remains of an entire burnt out car, it would seem!
Ryan professed himself very happy with the day's efforts and Andy and I managed to find the 'deep' part of the lake after our salvage work was done, clocking a dizzying 7M, but it had been an interesting day with pleasing results.
More RHIB diving
Getting our RHIB out is never a simple matter and it's been further complicated this year by the site where we store the boat no longer providing launching and recovery facilities.
Frankly on our arrival in mid-May, the yard was looking like a junkyard with scrappy looking yachts squeezed in close to our boat, only a large and very expensive commercial RHIB being launched looked 'prestige' in any sense, so it's hard to see what the aim for the yard is. The cynic in me wonders if they're trying to run the business down with the goal of getting the land redesignated as eligible for residential development as I'm sure flats or houses at Ferrybridge would be far more valuable than a boatyard.
On this occasion former chairman, Darren, offered to help out and also came out on the boat, which was fortunate as we went from 6 divers down to 3 by the time we set off due to various minor health niggles.
Without Darren we couldn't have dived realistically and would have had to call the day off.
It didn't start very well as we got the boat in the water, but it wouldn't fire, as if there was no spark getting to the fuel.
We pulled the boat out and scratched our communal head, but came to no answer and then George, who works at the yard, said he'd ask Geoff (a mechanic who works there and has helped before with our boat) to come and have a look.
He very quickly spotted we hadn't attached our kill-chord! In my defence, Darren owns a boat and didn't notice either and I've never known any to remove the kill chord from the boat after use before!
Of course, it started straight away after that, but we were running about an hour later than we planned.
As it turned out, that wasn't a big problem as, due to a windy forecast and a newly qualified diver, Andrew, we had planned to dive wrecks in the harbour.
We motored out to the wall and quickly felt we'd found the top of the Enecuri at 6M or so.
Kim, Andrew and I jumped in, but despite having 15KG of weight Andrew seemingly couldn't descend.
We called Darren over and put another 2KG on him, but I found his BCD was very full of air and I think the problem was that he simply wasn't getting rid of it all from his BCD and drysuit.
We'd drifted some way from the shot while trying to sink him and I decided we'd be fine to descend and swim underwater to the wreck.
Mistake number 2 of the day as I became disorientated in relatively poor vis and we never found more than a few small scraps of wreckage, certainly not the large one we went looking for.
There were lots of small crabs, including Hermit crabs and I spotted a Brittle Star as well, but overall it was a disapointing dive on a sandy harbour floor which we gave up on after half an hour.
We motored back to the Marina, where they stung us for £15 for a temporary mooring while I filled my cylinder and we ate our lunch.
Kim decided not to do a second dive as his back was aching after the first, so it was just Andrew and I and I was keen that Andrew should see something on his first RHIB dive, so we elected to use one of the semi-permanent buoys that have appeared on the Cragside.
We dropped in and this time he sank reasonably easily.
We quickly found ourselves on the substantial stern section, which we explored for a few minutes before heading towards the bow section, taking in the more broken centre of the wreck.
When we reached the bow, I asked Andrew for his gas level and with 110Bar still, I decided we'd try and find the Enecuri again, as Piers and I had on the previous visit.
Some video from the second dive, includes some footage of the Enecuri this time.
This time, despite poorer vis, we seemed to find more substantial wreckage quite quickly and continued on until we reached the impressively large bow section, which we explored for a while, before ascending to the top and completing our safety stop there.
A fair more satisfying and enjoyable dive, providing Andrew with the two wrecks I'd promised him from the day and allowing me to capture some video of the Enecuri as well.
We got the boat out of the water with few problems and cleaned and packed the boat away, noting that we have a few small issues with the trailer and accessories to sort out.
We forgot to use the jerry can of fuel we'd brought to refuel the boat, so the next trip will need to fill up first, but said our goodbyes to George and then headed for home after a generally pleasant day out on the RHIB.
If only there was more interest in the club in diving from it! ...
