Portland 2005
09 October 2005
Trip report by Joe Hesketh
First published in London Diver, May 2006
When Claire took over in the editorial hot-seat she had a few questions about how the magazine worked. Mostly mundane stuff about printing and distribution, etc., but in answering those questions I also passed on some of the wisdom that was handed down to me when I picked up the reigns three years before that. Foremost amongst these pearls was the need to badger and hassle people to write things like trip reports as, without editorial intervention, these rarely happen by themselves. So it was with a mixture of satisfaction that she had grasped the concept so quickly and dismay at my having been duped that I found myself unable to refuse the "suggestion" (made on her part whilst my sage words of advice still rang in the air) that I write up the then fairly recent Portland trip for a later issue. Grrrrr, and I thought I was smarter than to fall for that. Anyway, here it is, though a little later than planned (see what happens when nobody chases you for it…). [I am obviously just too nice… Ed]
In October 2004, a few hopeful souls from London Branch congregated in Weymouth on what turned out to be an extremely windy weekend. Following no diving on the Saturday, we had a slap-up meal that evening and indulged in one or two shandies, pretty confident that the word from the skipper the next morning would be as it was the day before. It was, so we packed up and went home and that was that. The skipper, Paul Pike who ran Dive Time, offered Mel an alternative weekend as it was he who had made the cancellation, though the first one he could offer was a year down the line. She took it, and a few of us made vague promises to come back again next year thinking we would most likely get blown out again.
Well, the year passed and when October finally came, the weather actually wasn't all that bad. It looked like we might even get to dive. There was of course the slight problem of the boat, Dive Time, which Paul had in fact sold in the intervening period. He had found us another skipper though who could honour the booking and we found ourselves with Ivor Janson on his boat, Protector.
Protector is a RIB, though aside from the sponson it doesn't have much in common with even a large RIB such as Percy II. This one is 11 m long, has a fair sized wheelhouse with a kettle, heads, a diver lift, kit benches, oh and 430 HP of inboard diesel on the back. Not bad for a dinghy! Whilst there was a fair amount of room on deck, the benches only had room for six sets of double tanks, and whilst it helped that four people had singles rigs and could kit up on the floor, we still had to do a bit of shuffling round to get everyone in and out of the water. However, it really wasn't that bad, and Ivor's affable manner, knowledge, skills and his simple but ample lunches made us all soon forget about any issues over space.
The line-up for the trip had, I am told, gone through various changes during the year. With some spare places remaining right up until the last minute, these were finally filled, giving us a full complement of twelve divers. The line up was Mel, Jamie, Dave, Angie (a friend of Dave's and whose trips some of us had been on that year), me (Joe), Kevin (a mate of mine), Tobias, Angus Saunders (an ex-member of London Branch), James Astrop, Morgan, plus Beavis and Butthead (sorry, I mean Richard and Matthew…).
With a range of different kit and experience on board, Mel had decided to restrict the diving to wrecks in the 30–35 m range. First up for Saturday morning was the St Dunstan, a bucket dredger and a victim of WWI which I'd dived at the start of the previous season with Jamie. Lying in 28 m of water in Lyme Bay, I'd forgotten just how far away this wreck is, with Portland Bill only just visible on the horizon by the time you reach it. Andy Lawrence, who skippers Goose, once described it as "not so much a trip, more of a voyage" when one of my buddies suggested it to him as an alternative dive. On Autumn Dream the previous year, as I recall, we'd all managed to keep ourselves entertained on the way out there with a copy of The Guardian and a lively discussion on the key differences between "dogging" and "cottaging" (I seem to remember Morgan knowing the most about the subject, though I'm sure that's just because he's so clever…). Nothing quite so bawdy this year, well not until the Sunday at least.
Anyway, with a bit more time to poke around this year, we had a pleasant dive ambling round what's left of the wreck. There was an amazing amount of fish life sharing our dive too, large shoals of bib and pollock and even a lone bass (we think, though it didn't hang around for too long). Unfortunately, not everyone got to enjoy the wreck. The long journey, whilst not overly rough, still took its toll on both Dave and Angie who succumbed to seasickness and wisely chose to sit out the dive. Angus too had to miss out on the St Dunstan due to a technical problem with his rebreather which only became apparent in the water (he had brought with him a large tool box though, and managed to get it fixed before the second dive).
As the weather closed in and the stomachs of yet more of our number began to violently disagree with the lack of a stable horizon, enthusiasm for a second dive wasn't exactly running high. Options were limited and the final choice of the Dredger in Balaclava Bay further cut down the number diving to just four. My buddy Kevin welched on me, as did Mel on hers, so Jamie and I mooched around the scant wreckage together (two small lumps of metal, the larger of which the other pair missed) and then moved off to practice some S-drills and valve drills.
On the Saturday evening, we'd made a group booking at an all-you-can-eat buffet style restaurant. Several people had been there before, including myself, and were aware of the dilemma awaiting. The buffet serves Indian style starters and mains, plus Chinese style starters and mains, and that's before you get to the soups and salads. The problem was that, even ignoring it being a buffet, the quality is uniformly excellent and the only sure fire way to avoid the problem of choosing which to have, was just to have all of it. Five platefuls seemed to be the minimum the indecisive diner could hope to get away with (if one includes a course of crispy duck, which being "free" we all slightly overdid…). Various methods were employed, from stuffing everything down quickly in the hope that your stomach wouldn't notice what was happening, through to a methodical pacing of dishes over the course of the evening. None of these worked particularly well and so, bloated, we staggered the short distance back to the B&B (the excellent Aztec House, now a regular favourite) and an early night, all slightly concerned about the 6:00 am breakfast (not so much that we'd have to get up early but that we'd have to force down yet more food).
Sunday started with some unpromising weather with a light drizzle to top things off. Matthew had made the journey down from Cardiff that morning and (despite the 7:30 am ropes-off time) seemed to be raring to go. Angie didn't feel up to diving much that day so chose to drive home and make the most of the rest of the day. As Dave was sharing a lift, that left ten of us zooming off at full speed to try and make slack on the Elena R, a Greek steamship mined in November 1939 en route to Antwerp. Again in just shy of 30 m of water, it's now pretty broken up after being salvaged but makes a pleasant dive, and Kevin and I managed to find a neat little swim-through to keep us entertained.
The weather really seemed to pick up during the morning, and by the time we had all surfaced from our dive, it was to glorious sunshine and fairly calm seas. Following a relaxing lunch on deck whilst moored up in Lulworth Cove, we tried to decide on a site for the afternoon dive. The bow of the Black Hawk was put forward, although Ivor mentioned that, given our preference for a short-ish surface interval, the tide might still be running a bit too much there. Instead he suggested another shallow wreck, which wasn't often dived. He said he wasn't exactly sure of its identity but he'd always known it by this name. The name—which I'll get to in a minute—begins with "P" and rhymes with 'tennis'. "OK, sounds good", we said. After a while talking about this, it dawned on someone to ask, "er, how do you spell that?". "Ah, yes…" Ivor chuckled, "I think it is spelt how you think it might be…". Naturally, being the responsible and mature divers we are, the conversation that followed wasn't at all puerile and we obviously steered well clear of asking Mel (unluckily for her the only female still on board) such questions as whether she fancied "going down on the Penis" and whether she'd prefer to "do the Penis whilst it was still in full flow or wait until it went slack". No siree, we didn't stoop to that level at all…
After all that, we went to look at, and actually ended up diving, the Black Hawk bow anyway. A cargo vessel, the Black Hawk was one of the 2,751 so-called Liberty Ships all built to the same design as part of an emergency ship construction program in the US at the end of WWII, with the express purpose of carrying much needed supplies for the war effort across the Atlantic. The SS Black Hawk was hit by a torpedo from the U-772 on 29 December 1944, the explosion from which blew the stern section clean off. That part sank further offshore in about 48 m of water and makes a great dive, being fairly well preserved and still an impressive size (when afloat these ships used to displace 7,000 tons). As an aside, the sub which sank the ship, was itself sunk nearby the very next day, most likely by a Wellington bomber. Listed as the U-772, there are some doubts as to its identity and I have been helping with a project diving on this wreck to try and uncover clues as to which U-boat it might actually be.
Anyway, our site for today was the bow section of the Black Hawk, which following the hit was towed inshore and now rests in Worbarrow Bay in a much more manageable 17 m or so. It's a great little rummage dive, though not nearly as well preserved as the other half due to the shallow water and the fact it was salvaged and then blown up again! The current was still fairly strong, but you could easily pull yourself around and find shelter from the worst of it. The time I dived it before this I saw a dead conger out in the open and draped over a beam. Quite an eerie sight as we tentatively studied it up close, still with half a thought that it might suddenly rear up and surprise us. The conger corpse had gone (nothing goes to waste in the sea), though we did see one of his chums in the boiler, hiding but still very much alive.
All in all, a great weekend. As it turned out, this was my last sea dive in 2005 and a great way to round off the season. Thanks to Mel for organising.
Posted byUnknown at 2:32 PM
Labels: photos, portland, trip report
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