Scapa Flow Trip Report Part 1 - The Journey August 15, 2006
Posted by Mark Gilmour in : Dive Reports, UK diving , trackbackIt’s 698.8 miles driving direct from Romsey on the south coast of England to Scrabster on the north coast of Scotland. However take some friends and the trip is a little longer but a lot more fun. So I packed my kit into the car and trailer on Thursday evening ready for an early start on Friday morning. I left Romsey at 5am to get to North London for 6.30 to pick up Howard. After loading his stuff into the trailer and roof box we headed north to Derby to pick up Steve. Our timing was impeccable as we reached his place just as a full english breakfast was being served. Fully fed and trailer now full, we headed yet further north towards Preston where we picked up our final fellow “fun bus” member. Ian and Sue met us just off the motorway where we loaded all Ian’s gear in and the packed lunch Sue had prepared for us. By this time it was 1pm and our next stop was Scrabster, 8 hours later, well OK we did stop once for a change of driver and a wee break just short of Aviemore.
778 miles later we reached the Weigh Inn in Thurso, where we met the other members of the group who had travelled thus far. Garf, Ian (JAG) & John had arrived at 5pm, along with Juz and Blanaid, Simon and Joe had also arrived by the time we got there, but Roy and Mary had had a spot of car bother in Pitlochry so were in Inverness. Eventually after a lot of fun and normal dive banter, mainly aimed at Digger we turned in for the night.
After a decent breakfast we slowly made our way down to the ferry terminal to load our kit into the containers to go onto the ferry. When we arrived we found that half of our one our containers was filled with someone elses stuff and that the other container wasn’t even there. Just as we were about to turf all the kit out we found out it was Garf, Jag & John’s kit, so no need to do that then. We sat and waited for the Hamnavoe (bless you) to turn up so we could get another container.
We were the last on the ferry and they closed the doors behind us and off we went. Steve and I made our way to the quiet room and promptly fell asleep in the chairs. After an uneventful ferry crossing we arrived in Stromness and started to drag the containers around to the MV Invincible. As we did Ian (skipper) turned up in his Land Rover and hitched them up to tow them, nice.
It was low tide as the ferry docked at Stromness as a consequence of this we had to load the kit onto the lower deck of Invincible. It was therefore decided to throw the lighter stuff down to someone waiting on the deck, unfortunately for Joe’s fins someones throwing action was not quite right and his fins disappeared down the side of
the hull and into the water of the harbour. Simon stepped up to be the first into the cold green water of Scapa flow. He was kitted up in his drysuit and a sideslung 7l in a few minutes and in he went, search and recovery style. A few minutes later he popped up with Joe’s fins.
After getting all our kit set out on the benches and Ian sorting out the fills it was time to head off and find something to eat. Last year we had two very good meals and the cafe/bar behind the ice cream shop on Stromness high street. Unfortunately this year new owners had just taken over the restuarant part and hadn’t found their feet. I think they called it Gows Galley with a Pirates theme, unfortunately it just didn’t work.
So after a very disappointing meal it was back to the boat to sort out our plans for the morning and also a lot of kit fettling, which did include an awful lot of work to Diggers Kiss rebreather.
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