Dover First Timer -Andaman 54m October 19, 2006
Posted by Mark Gilmour in : Dive Reports, UK diving, Wreck Diving , trackbackIt’s been a very dry couple of months recently due to moving house and all that entails and then there is the weather! The last couple of weeks have not been good for getting out diving. I was due to break my Dover duck back at the beginning of the month by diving the Genemar, but the weather put paid to that but thankfully Paul Oliver put up another Dover outing this time to do the Andaman.
Diving from Dover has it’s own challenges, by reputation the vis can be challenging and the busy shipping lanes make it very interesting. The upside to Dover is that usually irrespective of the weather there is normally somewhere that can be dived. Because of the shipping lanes the amount of boat traffic means that free ascending on a SMB is not an option, the way back is back to the shot and up to the safety of the moored boat. In bad vis this means reeling off the shot onto the wreck.
The Andaman is a large Swedish ship built in 1947 displacing 4765 Ton being 146m long with a beam of 20m and she lies on her side in 52m of water and stands up 24m proud 
She sunk following a collision on 24 May 1953 apparently there is still silver bullion in her holds to be had, we didn’t find any!
I was due to be diving with Steve who I had dived with in Scapa Flow but unfortunately manflu got the better of him and he was unable to make it, however knowing a number of the people on the boat and having dived with them before didn’t cause me too much bother. In the end Keith and I buddied up as our proposed plans for the dive married up quite nicely, unfortunately upon re-analysing his cylinders Keith discovered that his mix was 29%, overnight it had settled from 25% which meant that effectively we had a ceiling of 42m without exceeding ppO2 of 1.6 but realistically 40m which is where we set our max depth to be.
This presented an issue that the sea bed was at 54m and the likelihood was that the vis and the placement of the shot would mean that we would have to reel off from the shot onto the wreck. This meant that the shot had to be exactly on the wreck for us to reel off from up the shot and not the seabed, otherwise we wouldn’t know where we were going or how to get back to the shot to ascend back to the boat.
A solution was proposed that in the case that the shot was off the wreck then Mark (who was diving on a rebreather) would put a transfer line from the shot at 36m across to the wreck. This meant that we would not have to drop down to the bottom in order to make it across to the wreck.
So having kitted up we followed in a few minutes after Mark Chase, Colin and Howard who were on rebreathers, as we descended the shot it got darker and darker and the vis remained poor, my new torch a Greenforce Tristar LED performed really well in the murk. I was very pleased with it. At about 28m I saw the slow flashing of the strobe that Mark had placed on the shot to pinpoint the transfer line. This meant that the shot was running away from the wreck. I signalled to Keith that I had found the transfer line and started along the line. After about 10-15m I was thinking where is the wreck, a lesson I had learned from Scapa this year was to cover my torch to see if I can see the silheuotte of the wreck. I could just make out what looked to be the faint outline of the top of the wreck (apparently this was the wheelhouse)about 10m or so in front of me. Having covered my torch I then realised that Keiths torch was no longer following me, so I turned and could just make out the strobe back on the shot and Keith’s torchlight occasionally shining towards me, he had turned back to the shot. I quickened my step and finned back to the shot to check on him. At this point we decided to thumb the dive and headed back up. By this time we were just touching deco obligation on the computers so we headed slowly up.
Overall our dive time was 22mins I had a max depth of 40.8m. The reasoning for thumbing the dive, things just didn’t feel right. We had discussed this before hand and had said if either of us didn’t feel right then up we come. I really like diving with divers who follow that sort of mantra when diving. These are the people I choose to dive with. The wreck will always be there, and there will always be another chance to dive it.
There is a bit of a trip report on the forum link is below:
Comments»
Man, I give you credit for diving wrecks in those conditions. But I think I’m happy with 40m visibility diving the USS Emmons of the coast of Okinawa, at the moment! And I hate to think how cold those waters must be!
I take it you were tec-diving on the wreck? I’d be interested to know the equipment and certifications you have.
Have a great Christmas, and all the best in 2007.
Dave