DIR Diving Blog

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.

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, Joe, David and me) 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 as 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. To me it looked like 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 chilling out around Weymouth, we all met up for dinner in town, being joined by Ron and also Fraser who had ridden down to say farewell 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 Fraser (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 dive it for some time. 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 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.

After a 3 hour boat ride we arrived on site and Dave made damn sure the shot was well into the wreck. Clare and I were diving with the RB80’s with David and Joe teaming up together and diving a bottom stage. I had some trouble equalising and took a while to descend.

Reaching the decks in about 55m it was clear this was a huge wreck even in the fairly average visibility of about 6-8m. We made our way down the port side near the sea bed for a time, before ascending and crossing over the decks and around the bow. The RB worked as planned and the extension to gas was very nice. We called the dive on deco with around 40 minutes on the bottom as the tide began to pick up.

The Illinois is a huge wreck and being only limited by the tide and amount of deco made me wish we’d got scooters to tour all of it. 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 and clambered back onto the boat. A quicker return journey passed fairly quickly. I was surprised by the sound of the engines slowing down and the sight of a child’s dinghy which we spotted (empty) floating a couple of miles south of the Bill. Joe 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 – a long way to go for just one dive, but it was well worth it.

Clare in the boat we recovered…