Well I needed to make sure I had all the salt off the dive gear so I booked a day at Vobster with Andy Bryson, Fiona and Mac. We had a really good day, did 2 dives as a 4 where we did valve drills and s-drills.
Myself and Andy also did an hour long scooter dive where we took 2 stages a piece and practised gas sharing while both running, gas sharing while towing, towing and using 4 bottles. It was an absolute blast and everything was just good fun.
Friday started off with some bad news. Due to challenges with moving boats around in the harbour we ended up only being able to manage 1 dive.
I’ve yet to get many photos from this day, so I’ll have to add some later.
Team 1 – Rich, Andy
Recovery dive
Team 2 – John, John, David
Recovery dive
Team 3 – Ricardo, Osama
Finish survey and have a fun tour round
Team 4 – Joe, Gareth
Take stills of recovery teams and have a fun tour
Team 5 – Al, Clare
Remove waster from shot, collect bottle of port for Ricardo and tour wreck
A lot of work now needs to go into looking at what we’ve discovered which may help solve the mystery of the wreck. Much of what we disovered over the course of the week changes the views of those involved. Iron clad masts, enormous rudder, mix of cargo etc all point to various options.
A presentation is currently planned for the DIR-X gig in October by which point we hope to have made further progress.
Thursday dawns with good weather so we aim for 2 dives catching the tide first thing with a 6am ropes off followed by another dive early afternoon.
We’d spent a good chunk of time on wednesday reviewing video and stills and this let us improve our map. Being able to work through the video actually allowed us to spot certain items that might have been overlooked on a dive. By also including shots of the lines and markers we’d installed it was also easier to ensure we had some accuracy. Dive teams and objectives were
Team 1 – Al, Clare, John Kendall
Video South and south east assisted by one of the HMI lights
Team 2 – Andy, John Grogan, Rich, David
Head west and north west with video and stills
Team 3 – Rob, Osama, Ricardo
Head north east and lay new zig zag line to fill in a blank space on the map
Team 4 – Joe, Gareth
Investigate bilge pump and area under the deck in an attempt to find specific features which might help id the wreck
We got some more stills and video, couple of examples are below
If any of the guys would like to post a personel view of what they acheived on this dive that would be great.
We chilled out on the surface for several hours and had lunch before getting in for dive 2.
Team 1 – Al, Clare, John Kendall
Video north and north line assisted by one of the HMI lights
Team 2 – Andy, Rich
Head north west with goal of adding line
Team 3 – David, John Grogan
North west line with goal of finding Capstan and surveying
Team 3 – Rob, Osama, Ricardo
Perform survey of South and south east lines.
Team 4 – Joe, Gareth
Concentrate on hull photos
Overall we had some very solid diving today and when reviewing the footage felt we’d obtained some very promising leads. The whole team was pretty excited at the prospect of friday’s diving.
As it stands we’ve had the weather abort the one dive we had planned today. We’ve spent the time preparing the video:
Weather looked good today so again we geared up aiming to get two dives done. Dive 1 we reached the wreck site well ahead of schedule and our objectives were:
Team 1 – John Grogan, Andy, John Kendall
Video dive aiming to capture key features with the HMI light
Team 2 – Rich, David
New NW line to be run from the shot
Team 3 – Al, Clare
New SE line to be run from shot
Team 4 – Gareth, Joe
Photo dive obtain photos of anchors found and other key features of the wreck.
Team 5 – Osama, Rob
Tour out to the west of the shot and investigate extent of wreck
John Grogan
When you are doing video work you have no idea how little of the wreck you actually end up seeing. You spend all of your time focusing on the lights, cameras and positions that you don’t notice the wreck itself. It’s always interesting to look at the playback afterwards to see what you were actually lighting. The HMI light certainly weighs something and was a great addition to the team.
The HMI lights had been lent to us by Halcyon after being used on the connection dive between Turner and Wakulla only two weeks before our project started. Silent Planet and Breakwater dive centre had been extremely helpful in aiding us with the collection of this and various other key items.
Dive 2 and we had swapped cylinders over and carefully updated our map. We now had a better idea of the wreck and what areas we wanted to focus on. The objectives were
Team 1 – John Grogan, Andy, John Kendall
Video dive aiming to capture key features with the HMI light
Team 2 – Al, Clare, David
Change line arrows on the main 4 lines and then tie in a new east line and then work south to capture the bottom of the wreck.
Team 3 – Gareth, Joe, Osama
Photo dive obtain additional photos
Al
The second dive of day 3 was planned to be a longer dive with us aiming for a 40 minute bottom time. We had some tasks to accomplish and wanted to spend some time exploring the eastern extent of the wreck. David took some photos of some particular features such as the mast and an unusual piece of wreckage we’ve yet to identify. We then swam across the main body of the wreck looking again at the coils of wire. These pose quite a puzzle to us as we aren’t sure if they are just ballast or if they were part of the cargo. Some appear to be solid banding where others look like they are iron. We also swam passed the anchors which are one of the larger features on the wreck. We ended up adding some line to the large winch which we believe to be the capstan winch.
The larger objects were all north of our shot line and we came across the video team lighting up the ocean with the HMI lights. I hit minimum gas as we neared the end of our bottom time and we thumbed the dive at 40 mins.
The collation of more information has again taken our map of the site further forward. The video and photos has also allowed us to show Grahame what we were seeing and his knowledge was invaluable as to what features we were capturing and what we should focus our efforts on.
One of the strengths of kit standardisation became apparent today. A few items of equipment were damaged and needed repairs during the day. In one case a stage reg had a problem as it being strapped to the diver – in less than a minute a spare from another team member had been put to use and the diver hit the water on schedule. In another case a right post LP hose looked suspect so the entire right post reg was swapped and again it was a perfect replacement.
Monday and we loaded our dive boat RJRW. Due to some difficulties with Lamlash Grahame had arranged to use RJRW for the dive platform. We loaded the gear and set off for the wreck site.
Everyone geared up for the dive. The initial objectives were:
Team 1 – Rich, John Kendall, David
Secure shotline and run the north line from the shot.
Team 2 – Al, Clare
Run the south line from the shot
Team 3 – Osama, Rob
Tour wreck and orientate
Team 4 – Joe, Gareth
Tour wreck and orientate
Team 1 and 2 completed their objectives and this gave us a solid north south reference to run act as our baseline.
Comments from the individual divers
Clare
I tied in to the pipe at the bottom of the shot and followed Al who was trying to set a Southern bearing for the line. I haven’t done too much line laying at 56 metres with lots of stages to manage so this took a little longer than I would have liked but we didn’t have too much distance to travel before we ran out of wreck. After 15 or so metres we hit the shale sea bed and despite looking further out we realised that there was little more lying in this direction. Al turned the team back towards the wreck site and I reeled back, tying off on the last obvious piece of wreckage. A small kit issue meant that when we switched off the bottom stages we had to thumb the dive so a short but sweet introduction to the week.
After the team had reboarded the boat the weather necessitated a return to shore. We swapped sets over and stages but unfortunately as we left shelter the weather was too rough and we aborted dive 2.
Talking to Rob after the dives he remarked he’d been pleasantly surprised how easy it was to come and join a more regular group. He found he was able to leap in for a 50m dive with someone who he had never met before but could have confidence in their abilities and comfort from the shared expectations and familiar processes.
Gas filling followed for the dive we had done. We had our own 02 and Helium on Lamlash provided by Breakwater Dive Center and were then doing all the air tops at breakwater. We turned round 11 twinsets, 7 bottom stages, 22 nitrox 50% stages and 11 oxygen fills in a couple of hours and were ready for Tuesday. Anyone who reckons you can’t do trimix in less than 24 hours is talking rubbish 
At the end of the day we collated the information from all the divers and began building a map of the wreck site referencing objects based on the 5m knotted exploration lines we’d installed on the north south bearing. This let us build a set of objectives for the diving on day 2.
Sunday was our setup day in order to load the boat and prepare gas and equipment. The group travelled to our floating base for the week Grahame Knott’s boat Lamlash.
Cylinders were loaded, analysed and labelled. We had a mixture of divers on the trips with 7 of the 12 diving with 3 stages while others we doing shorter bottom times with a single stage. With most of the wreckage in just deeper than 50m this gave us the opportunity to have both Tech-1 and Tech-2 divers on the trip.
Once gas was sorted much kit fettling occurred with the array of video lights, camera’s, editing PC’s etc. The team also talked through dive plans and watched footage Grahame supplied of the wreck from 1996
from another group of divers.
The team sheet for the week included:
Al Pooley
Andy Kerslake
David Martin
Clare Gledhill
Gareth Lock
Joe Hesketh
John Grogan
John Kendall
Osama Gobara
Ricardo Constantino
Rich Walker
Rob Legg
Grahame Knott
Tom the cabin boy
Monkey the cabin boy
From 6 to 10 August 2007 a team of twelve of us from DIR-UK planned to conduct a series of dives on the wreckage of an unknown nineteenth century sailing vessel which lies 20 miles offshore in deep water off the Dorset coast.
This historic and potentially significant wreck, discovered by local skipper Grahame Knott, was first dived in the mid-1990s, but despite several clues being found and subsequent research carried out, her identity is still unknown. For an account of some of the story so far, read Leigh Bishop’s excellent article here.
photo courtsey of Leigh Bishop www.deepimage.co.uk
During a week of intensive diving, the DIR-UK team, coordinated by Andy Kerslake, hope to conduct surveys, take photographs, shoot video and (if thought likely to aid the wreck’s identity) recover artefacts from the ship, with the hope of piecing together further clues to this mystery wreck.
Whilst not an official NAS project, the team plan to employ several common techniques used on underwater archaeological sites. Unfortunately the conditions which typically favour such techniques, moderate depths and long survey periods, will not be afforded to the DIR-UK team during the week of the project. Lying at 54m (180ft) the wreck is far deeper than most underwater archaeologists are able to venture and the logistics for conducting a detailed survey in this range using traditional methods start to become challenging.
The team has chosen the optimum week in the whole season in terms of tidal movements to enable each diver to be able to carry out up to two dives per day if the weather holds.