Joe Hesketh(Offline)

Normally the DIR-UK trips are a mixture of Tech 1 and shallow(er) Tech 2 dives (depending on who's booked on the boat that month), but usually always in less than about 55m. However, back in April we decided to make the July weekend a deeper trip. I was keen to get some more experience in this range after Tech 2 earlier this year and several others were due to be conducting potentially much deeper dives outside of Scapa Flow in September and also wanted the practice.

For one reason or another, from the 9 or 10 originally committed to the trip we were down to just 4 of us (though with costs covered this only gave the rest of us (Clare, Al, David and myself) all the more space). Having lost the use of Graheme Knott's boat Outcast, we were grateful of the use of Top Gun to be skippered by Dave Wallace. Since selling various bits of Dive Dorset to Smudge at Scimitar Diving, Dave and Liisa have kept Top Gun as their own private boat for various projects and so it now has one or two creature comforts too! We all knew Dave as both a diver and friend as well as a skipper, so the whole weekend had a relaxed feeling to it, just 5 mates taking a boat out to have some fun.

The weather on the Saturday wasn't too clever - not promising when the majority of the deeper marks out of Weymouth are quite far offshore. However, using some shelter offered in Lyme Bay Dave thought we may be able to get out to the Rotorua, a New Zealand ocean liner torpedoed in 1917 by a U-boat and now in about 60m of water.

We decided to head out past Portland Bill and then take a look at the conditions. Once out there we looked at the waves and um'd and ah'd a bit. Al described the sea state as like something from an Old Spice ad. The surf wasn't up quite that badly but, even so, all 5 of us thought it wise to turn back.

After an afternoon pottering around various Chandlers and dive shops, we all met up for dinner in town, being joined by Ron Livingstone (of this list) to whom Clare had introduced us and also Fraser (remember him!) who had ridden down to say farewell to Al and Clare before embarking on a huge motorbike tour of North and South America. By sheer coincidence, Ron had done a similar trip several years ago, so the rest of us sat and listening in amusement as Ron regaled Frase (looking increasing worried as the evening wore on) with various anecdotes, mostly involving near death and/or remarkably poor personal hygiene.

The weather was set to improve for the Sunday, so we made plans to go and dive the Illinois. This US tanker (again sunk by a U-boat in WWI) has often been described as one of (if not the) best wrecks off the South coast of England, and I'd been wanting to (be able to) dive it for some time. I certainly won't dispute the quality though perhaps will as regards the geography: at nearly 40 miles from Weymouth it's much closer to the French coast than it is to England (as the "Welcome to France" SMS on our mobile phones confirmed!).

The wreck now lies in 70m (though the tide on which we dived it put the seabed in nearer 65) and is distinguished from many wrecks of this size and age by being extremely intact (ship-shaped with huge scope for penetration - maybe next time!) and perfectly upright. For more details on the wreck itself, I'd recommend heading over to Leigh Bishop's site who has some cracking pictures, information and a cool artists impression photo-montage thing.

After a 3 hour boat ride (with only mild instances of Mal de Mer) we arrived on site and Dave made damn sure the shot was well into the wreck (we weren't coming all this way for nothing…). Clare and Al were diving together on the RB80s with David and I teaming up together and diving a bottom stage. Reaching the decks in about 55m it was clear this was a huge wreck even in the fairly average visibility. We made our way down the port side near the sea bed for a time, before ascending and crossing over the decks and through a small swim through at the bow. After switching off the stage we then made our way in the opposite direction until we called it on time after about 30 min on the bottom at an average of 60m (it was actually a bit shallower but we deco'ed out a little longer all the same).

I'm not a particularly avid wreckie in terms of getting excited about spotting winches and identifying engines and stuff, I prefer simply soaking up the atmosphere of something relatively few people ever get to see. Robert Kurson (in the book Shadow Divers) put it into words much better than I could when describing the attraction for diving wrecks:

"They saw stories in the Modiglianied faces of broken ships, frozen moments in a nation's hopes or a captain's dying instinct or a child's potential, and they experienced these scenes unbuffered by curators or commentators or historians, shoulder to shoulder with life as it existed at the moment it had most mattered."

Well, the Illinois has atmosphere in spades, made all the more so by the fact there were only 4 of us on this huge 400ft wreck. In fact we only saw Al and Clare twice (once at the bottom of the shot and again just before ascending) so pretty much had the whole thing to ourselves - a rare treat!

With the wreck being right on the edge of the shipping lanes, Dave had asked us to bag up from the wreck and following an uneventful deco we surfaced after around 100 minutes total run time with beaming smiles all round. A quicker return journey passed even faster with a few of us catching up on some sleep, being woken by the sound of the engines slowing down and the sight of Al trying to hook a child's dinghy which we spotted (empty) floating a couple of miles south of the Bill. I suggested we notify the Coastguard anyway (just in case there had been any hapless occupants), but they helpfully suggested we "sink the damn thing with a knife!".

All in all a great weekend - it's a long way to go for just one dive, but I think it was well worth it.

Joe


Clare relaxing in our "spidge" - hope she reported it to ROW!