Billy 38 - Kronprinz Wilhelm, Scapa Flow August 2005 August 16, 2005
Posted by Mark Gilmour in : Dive Reports, UK diving, Wreck Diving , trackbackMonday 8th August 2005Dive 1 Kronprinz Wilhelm, Max Depth 38m, Segment time 30mins, Run Time 59mins
The plan was that we would tackle one of the large battleships and we opted for the slightly shallower Wilhelm with tantalising prospect of being able to get down to where the 12inch gun turrets where.
Due to the slight confusion over when we were getting in the water the last 20 minutes of kitting up were a bit frantic, so it was first ready, first in. Ian and I followed, Paul, Lisa & Beanie in and we all started down the shot together with still a bit of a rip from the current as slack approached. At about 20m the huge expanse of the upturned hull below us came into view and Ian and I dropped off the shot to free descend down the port side of the hull towards the bottom. Our aim was to find those guns. We arrived at 37m and I started finning off away from midships. Ian called me back and signalled that we should fin the other way keeping the wreck on our right and heading towards the stern, hold on I thought the notes had said fin with the wreck on the left. But I duly obliged and followed along, next thing there is the cavern that opens up to the gun turret. Ian lead in slowly and I followed both of us careful not to kick up the slit. I spotted the top of a gun barrel in the seabed. I signalled Ian he gave me a sarcastic OK signal and shone his torch up, there right in front of us was the second of the 12 inch barrels pointing into the wreck and the deck on the upturned battleship. It was an amazing sight. The turret was huge from which this enormous gun barrels protruded. The scale is very difficult to describe. We continued into the wreck a little more navigating along the gun peering deeper into the wreck. Apparently it is possible to swim through and out of the other side but we ventured no more. We slowly turned and made our way back to the turret and sneaked a peek around the other side of it and into the hull of this huge Koenig Class Battleship.
We left the wreck via the same cavern carved out of the side of the hull and proceeded towards the broken up stern, here we carved a route through a neat swimthrough into the stern noting the plating was broken allowing to either swim out through the stern or continue as we did onto the starboard side. We then made our way along the starboard side where all the plating is pretty much intact (at least the part we saw) until we came to some which had probably been blasted away. Upon reaching here we had reached our planned bottom time and it was time to begin our ascent. A steady ascent with stops along the way saw us touching the surface at 59 minutes to finish a truly spectacular dive.
.Dive 2 Gobernador Bories (affectionly known as Gobananas) Blockship Max Depth 18m 43minutes.
One of the blockships, the Gobernador Bories is one of those that has been a subject of a divernet wreck tour. As we all waited for the current to drop a little, Skipper asked for two volunteers to go in first, Ian volunteered so in we went. Skipper dropped us ahead of the shot and we drifted onto it and started our descent. Things didn’t go quite to plan, the tide was still ripping a fair bit, we didn’t really look like flags on a flag pole, but only because the flag pole namely the shot line was horizontal aswell. As we pulled ourselves down to 6m I felt my fin come loose, I quickly looked back and signalled Ian, he started sorting out the offending fin as we then sank like rocks, trying to equalise aswell as stay on the shot. He sorted the fin and went ahead of me, accelerating the speed down the shot by dumping all the air from his wing and basically riding the shot line down, so I followed suit. We reached the relative calm of the wreck and headed towards the bow and found the “toberone Swimthrough”. where the plates and decking had collapsed had left a triangular swimthrough, in which we entered and made our way down.
Beanie had warned us that on a previous trip he had got a little stuck in this one and so we proceeded with caution. Due to the fast currents there was no slit so we pulled and crawled along wiggling and winding our way out. Great fun. As we exited we met up with Blanaid and Gary and headed off towards the elevated stern section. We spent the rest of the dive finning around and through the stern, taking pictures, enjoying the light of streaming onto the wreck from the surface.
After 34 minutes I sent up the bag and we started to ascend. A practise for when we did Tarbarka as the tide had turned and the current was picking up again. Unfortunately we failed in our practise and ascended too slow so that we ended drifting a loooonnnng way off the wreck, skipper was not impressed! We hit the surface at 43 mins and Invincible was there waiting, clocking the current at approaching 8.5knots. Lou and Caroline we calculated travelled 0.5 mile in about 7 minutes. It was quite impressive.
All back safely onboard and we headed back to Stromness for the afternoon and evening.
Comments»
[…] This one didn’t quite go to plan, after flooding my torch the day before I needed to strip it down and flush it with fresh water and hope for the best. Luckily I have a spare Light Cannon (ok it’s Lisa’s but I had it with me) this had a light diffuser in it for photography, so I took that out and swapped the light heads over. Big mistake as at 16m, just 2 minutes into the dive the light flickered and out it went. It had flooded again but with my spare light head inside AAARRRRHHHHH,I swapped to my back up torch but it was a bit dark and I thought maybe I could rescue this light head so I decided to bin it and let Steve and Ian dive together (that of course is a loose phrase !!!) So for a decent report on this one look at my last year review here. […]
Happy Days!