This was by far the best dive of the year! I could not take general views of the wreckage as all the fish got in the way. So sadly the dive video is less of a record of the wreck and more of the overall dive.
Hellen the skipper took her time before dropping the shot line and it was right in the middle of the wreck area. The wreckage is not that high in places but the shot was right next to the largest piece.
The viz was very good maybe 3-4 m even with the 6 of us ‘stirring up’ the bottom and especially with the weather being so overcast. The bottom is mostly gravel with some silt but not much of that.
The wreck is only over some 30 feet diameter and needs a lot of work to work out what one is looking at. In hindsight I should have tried to float some 3 m above parts of the wreck to get better pictures but there was too much drift for that. The amount of material in the water prevented, with my little camera, using the flash.
From what we can work out, it had two engines, it would appear that the engines are ‘face down’ in the sea bed and so it is difficult to see or count the number of blades each engine had. It is a radial engine and the video clearly show two of the engine cowlings, well that is what I think they are.
There was a large solid object within the wreckage field that needs further investigation to make sense of what it was. At first sight I thought that it was another engine with struts on it but it did not appear to have the same symmetry as the engines
There was a large panel that was ellipse in shape that contained two large circular sub-panels each about 4 feet in diameter. That did not make sense to me, and still does not even after the dive.
This is the first dive that I have been trying to use my brain to seriously work out puzzles underwater, apart from the arithmetic during my training. It just goes to show that one has to be focus on just the one aspect of a task during this sort of investigate dive to make headway. Well in my case at least.
Roy and I moved north to a point beyond the wreck and then tried to get back to the wreck and failed to find it again. At Roy’s suggestion we moved to a drift dive and floated back onto the wreck. I can honestly say I am in awe of Roy dive diving navigation skills!
We joined Adrian and Simon another buddy pair filming a cuttlefish who was enjoying the limelight. I always have a sense of pride in the way divers just enjoy looking at the underwater creatures it is a simple pleasure.
Next time I dive on it I will have to take a lot more time around each piece. I think that I will have to be selective of my dive buddy, who will be happy to spend most of the dive around just one or two objects while we measure and examining the bits. This will entail a lot more of pre-dive planning.
As a dive it has it all, interesting objects and loads of life around.
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