Diving - The adventure continues!

More 2020 Diving

2020's UK sea diving season was nearing its end, but I still had a few more dives planned, if the weather would permit it.

Shipwreck Project, Weymouth October 2020

First up was a weekend diving from the Wey Chieftan IV out of Weymouth, with skipper Richard Bright-Paul and his wife, Sue.

This was being run as part of the Shipwreck Project dives I had joined in previous years, but with limited numbers, the decision had been made to change the format.

Rather than returning to our regular sites, we were going to carry out some exploratory and recording dives on sites we selected.

Another group had set out a few weeks before, but the high winds had restricted their choice of sites and they'd ended up doing a marine life survey on the wreck of the Black Hawk bow.

It's not a bad dive, but we've dived it a few times from our RHIB recently and a weekend adds up cost wise, so I was hoping we'd be luckier with the weather and do some more interesting dives.

The forecast didn't look great for the weekend, but it looked like we'd do some diving, so I arrived and joined the other divers at the Aqua Hotel in Portland on Friday evening.

We had an early start Saturday morning, leaving the hotel around 6AM.

Richard likes people to load early, so we had plenty of time for briefings and to grab a coffee and a breakfast snack before we set out.

With the wind blowing quite strongly, we had a local site in our sights, but it was, as Richard described it, "Something shows on the scanner, it may be rock or it may be a wreck".

Amongst our number were a couple of rebreather divers, so they dropped in first with instructions to release a floating marker once they 'found anything man-made'.

This happened quite quickly and George (my buddy for the weekend) and I dropped in and quickly found a strip of metal in the seabed near the shot.

Our brief was to photograph and measure anything 'of interest' and so we photographed this with a rule alongside for scale.

Up ahead of us, we could see the rebreather duo's torches moving about, so we swam towards them and, as we, did an instantly recognisable piece of wreckage came visible.

Using our torches and those from the CCR divers behind we were able to get some nice clear shots, some with divers for scale and others, showing more detail, with the ruler.

The rest of the dive revealed even more areas to record in the same way and we all returned to the boat buzzing about what we had seen and full of theories about what it was.


Prawn and Lobster on the wreck

At the moment, I can't add any details about what we dived on, but when it is possible I will add some more details and photos

With the wind still strong, our second dive of the day was a tame drift dive from Grove Point. The only point of interest on this dive, really, was that I came across a large rocky area which I'd not seen before, but there wasn't much life around on the dive, so it was pretty unremarkable.

We headed back to the Aqua and had a discussion around the first dive and then headed into Weymouth for a curry, which is something any Cameron run weekend will feature if he has his way!

Luckily, the tides were such that we had a slightly later start on the Sunday, so we were able to grab a quick cooked breakfast before heading back to Weymouth.

The wind, too, was kinder on the Sunday and we set off for the site of a wreck which Richard is pretty sure is the Netley Abbey, a ship which sank, thankfully with no loss of life, after a collision in fog with HMS Surprise in the late 19th century - Not a pleasant one for the crew and owners of the Netley Abbey!

This wreck sits at around 37M, but is reasonably well preserved, retaining a distinct hull shape and much to record.

As the identity of the wreck isn't 100% confirmed (There are reports of it being other wrecks and the Netley Abbey being elsewhere), we agreed that a combination of measuring and photography would help towards this.

The CCR divers went in first and spent most of their extended dive navigation around and over the wreck to note and video anything of interest.


Machinery on the Netley Abbey

The two pairs of OC divers had an objective to measure the beam (both, to validate the measurement) and the length from the shot to the stern or bow.

George and I completely forgot the beam measurement (Narcosis?), but set off to measure towards the bow. We managed to get 9M measured before we started to lose sight of each other and the next two measurements were 8M, giving a distance of 25M from the shot to the point at which we stopped measuring (but not the end of the wreck) as we'd reached our agreed bottom time limit.

George started to put up a DSMB while I took photographs of some machinery at the same point, partly to try to identify it and partly to record how far we'd got when our measuring stopped.


Machinery on the Netley Abbey


George on his deco stop

With only 24L of 200 Bar air to last two dives, we couldn't prolong our dive and deco time too much.

Back on the boat there was much positive discussion of the visibility, around 7M we agreed, and things seen.

The Camerons had measured the beam and to the stern, whilst the CCR divers recorded a large Anchor.


Geoff Patch's excellent video from the Netley Abbey dive

All agreed it had been an enjoyable dive, in our case stymied a little by limited air. It would definitely be a site worth revisiting with time to explore it properly.

On our way back, there was discussion of what to dive as a second dive and we finally settled on doing a drift, starting at the site of the British Inventor.

I was pleased with this as it's a wreck I've tried to find a few times (Richard commented that it would be very hard to find with a RHIB's sonar), but never dived.

We dropped in, right on the wreck, which, having been extensively salvaged, is really nothing more than a pile of flat plates now.

On the positive side, though, it is a haven for wildlife and we saw huge shoals of Bib and Pollock.

A few moments into the dive, a decent sized Conger swam unhurriedly past me and then around in a loop to take a look at the CCR divers. I've never seen a Conger choose to swim towards divers before. On the rare ocassions I've seen them swim, they usually quickly make for cover, but not this one.


Free swimming Conger on British Inventor

We also spotted a number of good sized cuttlefish on the wreck, as well as the usual bigger crustaceans.


Cuttlefish on British Inventor

After about 20 minutes, the current took us off the wreck and we surfaced shortly after, but it had been an enjoyable second dive and rounded out a successful weekend very nicely.

We said our goodbyes to Richard and Sue and the other divers and headed for home.

SS Gallia, Lyme Bay October 2020

Some months earlier, a few club members had booked to dive the SS Gallia the weekend after the Shipwreck Project dives.

I knew very little of the wreck, except it was little dived and at around 37M. I figured, with few shuttle places available, that it would make a good end of season dive where some of us could use (or improve) our ADP skills and have a decently long dive.

Julian found an extensive report on an expedition that had surveyed the wreck a few years ago, which included a remarkable photograph of the wreck in 20M or so visibility with a diver hovering over it.


The photo mentioned above

You can see the full report of that survey here.

The weather offered a rare still day for our dive, just as well as it's around 12 miles out from Swanage, SE of Portland Bill, and we (Myself, Julian, John and Dawn along with a couple from, I think, Macclesfield) motored out fairly quickly on Vyper.

We arrived with the current still running, but dropped in just as it stopped.

I dived with John and as we descended the water very quickly got very dark.

By 20M I had switched on my torch, but even then the first I knew of arriving on the wreck was when my knees banged into it!

It may not have been the very darkest dive I've ever done, but it was definitely a contender.

John and I surfacd the shot grapple using the attached lift bag and then moved around the wreck, but with little more than a 1M diameter torchlit area of visibility, I found it impossible to identify where we were at any time.

John reckoned we went around the bow, which is vaguely possible, but I wouldn't say I'm sure now!

After 30 minutes we started to surface from the 39M seabed, switching to richer O2 mix gasses for our deco stops at 9 and 6M, where it was mercifully lighter.

It had been a challenging and pretty unrewarding dive, but we'd stuck together, stuck to the plan and surfaced without issue, so I'll put it down as a learning experience.

It was, though, almost certainly my last sea dive of 2020.

We travelled back to Swanage a fair bit faster than we headed out and everyone looked a bit shell shocked from the dive, especially the woman in the other couple. Sadly for them, it had been the only dive they'd managed to do in a weekend in Swanage - The joys of UK diving!

A couple of weeks later, on the 1st November, 5 of us made the short trip to Wraysbury Dive Centre for a couple of dives, to be in the water and give our salt encrusted kit a good soak in fresh water.

The day started with a downpour, but by the time we were kitting up to get in the water, the clouds cleared and we started the dive in sunshine!


Dawn captioned her photo 'Nothing like a Sunday dive' on Facebook and it was nice at times!

Geoff and Tim dived together for the first dive, while I joined Dawn and Julian and Dawn tried out Julian's twinset.

We headed in behind the shop, Dawn had a bit of a practice with buoyancy on a container and then swam towards the cave complex, which we found, and then onwards.

The vis wasn't too bad (Up to 3M in places) and we found quite a few of the 'attractions', but diving in a 3 is often a challenge in Wraysbury and at one point, I thought Dawn was floating up, so gave her a tug on her fins.

I'd still just had sight on Julian's fins at the point I did this, but as I scanned ahead looking for them again, I somehow lost sight of Dawn too!

I surfaced and waited a couple of minutes until they realised we were separated and then we all dropped back down again and continued the dive.

After a break for a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich, I teamed up with Tim for a second dive.

This time we headed in from the pier in the car park and tried to stay together as a 4, Geoff electing not to bother with a second dive.

We managed this until we reached the Lifeboat, but again, trying to keep an eye on Dawn ahead and Tim behind (and sometimes floating up) proved impossible and lost Dawn and Julian after that.

Tim and I continued around, finding the odd wreck here and there and were nearing the end of the dive as Tim was getting low on air, not having refilled his cylinder, we came across the 737 cockpit in its new location, more or less straight out from the pier we'd entered from.

I swam in and then realised the cabin section was wide open, so swam into and through it, but when I turned there was no sign of Tim.

I circled the cockpit, thinking maybe he'd swum straight through from side to side, rather than following me into the cabin, but I couldn't find him, so I surfaced and found him there.

He had gone straight through, it turned out, but was probably a little light with an almost empty cylinder and floated up to the surface (It was also his first open water dive in his new drysuit, so another variable added to the weighting mix).

We swam back to the pier on the surface, but we already knew that there was a good chance this would be our last dive of the year as the government plunged us into another 4 week (as I type, my money is on an extended period) lockdown.

If that was it, I achieved 38 dives in 2020 - My worst in years, but with no overseas trips, cancelled charter weekends, few spaces on shuttles and 3 prime diving months in lockdown, it really wasn't as bad as it might have been, with some notable highlights.

Tragically though, we heard that the dolphin who had made our dive on the Countess of Erne so memorable had been killed as the result of a collision with a large boat propellor, which saddened us greatly.

All we can hope is that, even if COVID remains, some sanity will prevail and we won't suffer another year of chaotic, economy destroying imprisonment and restrictions.

Looking ahead, we're already making bookings on UK charter boats and club interest is high, so one can only hope that it happens!

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