Yesterday morning, eight divers from DIR-UK made the first dives on the virgin wreck, Ice Prince, sunk on 15 Jan 08 in the English Channel, in roughly 60m.
Boat: Outcast
Skipper: Grahame Knott
Team 1:
Mal Bridgeman
Clare Gledhill
Al Poole
Team 2:
Joe Heskith
David Martin
Iain Smith
Team 3:
John Grogan
Andy Kerslake.
I've just made it back to Glasgow, so you'll have to wait for tomorrow for the dive report, but suffice to say, I suspect we'll all be grinning in our sleep tonight!
Iain
Last edited by iainmsmith; 14-05-08 at 19:55.
Ahhh... it appears to be down to a no lift policy now.Originally Posted by idiot who didn't check
Well done anyway, must be very nice having a new wreck to yourself!
Last edited by Lizardland; 06-05-08 at 09:09.
Look forward to the trip report,
alex
85 dives in 2008
56 dives in 2009
26 dives in 2010
Well done all.
well done, would be nice to dive it in prestine condition.
i assume the salvage operation is complete now and the multicat/divers have moved out?
any pics or video?
live to dive : dive to live
As I finally sit down to write this dive up, it is in a rather different frame of mind than my original post. The first part of this will probably be rather negative, but having seen the mountain being built on YD out of this molehill, there are a few things I would like to get off my chest before I write up the dive itself. If you've not seen the thread on YD, I don't recommend it. Feel free to skip the following if you're not interested in my philosophical ramblings!
When I got home after diving the Ice Prince dive, I was excited and pumped-up (despite the ridiculous drive home) at having been the first recreational divers to dive it. Why? Difficult to say for certain, but there was something about having been amongst the first on a wreck that felt good. Maybe it's a never-quite-suppressed competitive instinct, maybe it's the closest to any true exploration that I've ever done. Certainly it was my first dive on an undived wreck.
Yes, everyone knew it was out there and roughly where it was. Yes, it was the skipper who found it for us. As to whether any commercial divers had been down on it, I don't know with complete certainty. We were told that salvage operations hadn't even begun, hence Grahame's absolute "no lift" policy (as in "Bring it up and I'm throwing it over the side"). My understanding was that we were the first divers of any type. We were certainly the first to do it for fun.
So what?
Indeed, so what. Why did Hilary climb Everest? Why put a man on the moon? Why do cave divers quest for the unknown beyond the end of the line?
It was my deepest dive to date, my first on what I believe to have been an undived wreck and ranks, in my mind, up with the U-772 (my first two-deco gas trimix dive), the U-260 (an essentially intact U-boat), penetrating the Kowloon Bridge from top to bottom and diving Taj Mahal and Nohoch cave systems in Mexico. It wasn't my most technically perfect dive as I will explain below, but it was a dive I won't forget.
Yes, we knew there was another group planning to dive the Ice Prince later in the week. Those on YD or DIR-X will know that the lead organiser is someone who has had, at times, clashed with several members of DIR-UK (myself included). But there was at least one DIR-UK member due be on that other trip and if they had got there first, I, for one, would have wished them well and would have read the report with interest. But I would be lying if I tried to pretend that we didn't know that this other group were planning this trip. On the other hand, when the gods of wind and wave hand you an opportunity to do more than you have planned (we had planned a relatively shallow weekend to shake things down for the seaon) then who are we to pass up the chance.
When I got home, I was still in a buoyant mood and posted a deliberately flippant thread title with a great big cheesy smiley next to it. How often does one dive a "virgin" wreck (for me, it was the first in about 550 dives) and, when one does, how often does it have a name that allows one to make a schoolboy locker-room-humour pun work properly? It's clear from some posts on YD that some though we were taking ourselves too seriously. I plead my own twisted sense of humour, coupled with excitement, sleep deprivation and caffeine overload. I would also point out that the post here on Conger Alley was my own, on my own behalf, as I thought some people might be interested in what a recently arrived forum member had got up to. If I got that wrong, or if I struck the wrong note, I'm sorry.
Anyway...the trip report:
The background:
Leave work at 1700. Go home for dinner before leaving Glasgow at about 2000. Drive via Cambridge to pick up a cylinder. Get to Weymouth on Saturday morning about 0730. Uuuurrghh....Ropes off aren't for another five hours, so find breakfast, get a haircut, find some bits-and-pieces for my DIY filling station and generally mong around. Eventually the skipper arrives, so I get my stuff onto the boat and set up. Saturday's dive is the Salsette, which we've all done before, but the weather is too bad to try anything more adventurous. My descent is not fun - I get hit with tooth squeeze at about 18m and the rest of the descent is spent getting down a bit, up a little, down a bit, up a little. Not fun for my team and bloody painful for me. Takes us 8 minutes to get down. 22min bottom time at roughly 42m depth in 4m viz. Get caught out by the current round the bow which pulls me round it ahead of my team and we get a little too close to losing contact with eachother. Sort our lives out and head back along the wreck to the end of our bottom time. Ascent is pretty clean and basically satisfactory for a first tech dive of the year. Retrospectively, my team felt that I could have trimmed the deco a little and, indeed, I probably could have, but didn't think of it at the time.
The ride back is the worst dive-boat conditions I've ever been in. Most of us are left having to sit against our sets to stop them working loose and being thrown of the benches. Those who have used cargo straps to hold their rigs to the rails are looking smug and dry from the cabin as the rest of us sit miserably outside. One diver (who shall remain nameless) comes flying out of the wheelhouse, green, and promptly gets his feet exactly where I need to put mine to get out of his way. I go for a diving commando roll under his left arm and across the deck which scores limited points for artistic merit and technique, but does avoid me getting redecorated!
Andy Kerslake, in particular, seems to have picked a bad spot, as every wave crashes down over him, lashing his face with water which felt like it was made up of whips of ice. I make a comment that the Arctic Convoys were probably worse...it doesn't go down too well...
Sunday: Iolanthe.
With another lunchtime start we head out again. Mark Emrey, Andy Kerslake and I are the third team. With 10 minutes to go, Mark manages to smack himself in the face with his brand new tie-down strap and splits his forehead open...right where his mask is going to go. He bails out. The first two teams hit the water and Grahame takes Outcast round again while Andy and I move to the platform. I'm in the gate and, as the buoy gets closer, reach back and flick the switch on my 50W halogen light.
Nothing happens. Flick. Flick. Nothing happens. A volley of curses bursts from my lips as I step back and sit down. I pop out of my harness and look at the light-head. The filament is clearly broken. Mark offers me his HID umbilical torch instead. We fix it onto my rig...and I realise that I'm weighted for my own, stupidly heavy, lead acid battery pack, not a lightweight NiCad. Things are getting very rushed, time is ticking and I thumb the dive. I'm not in the right mental state to jump into 50m. Andy takes it very calmly...though I do subsequently get "educated" about proper weighting to allow for last-minute changes in lights. Still, losing the dive probably cost me less than replacing the bulb if it had been a HID(!). Not much of a consolation though. I fix the torch on the way back in to harbour.
As we get back to Weymouth, the possibility of diving the Ice Prince is mentioned for the first time. We're all up for it, knowing and accepting that a) Grahame might not be able to find it b) it was a three hour trip out, the same back c) we might get out and discover the weather wasn't suitable for a dive on the edge of the shipping lanes. I'm sure we all had our own reasons. My primary motivation was that the idea of writing "virgin wreck" in my logbook would be pretty cool. Read into that what you will.
Monday dawns. I'm not sure whether we were up before the sun, but we're now on the early tide (so that people like me can get home!) The sea is like glass and all the signs are of a beautiful day. We're on the boat by 0700 and breakfast consists of the pork pie that I grabbed from the Weymouth petrol station at 2130 on Sunday night when I realised that we were going to be gone before the B&B owner woke up.
Everyone falls into their normal routines of assembling rigs, checking this, analysing that..with the obligatory banter and wind-ups that I'm sure are just as much a feature of all your trips as they are of ours. Outcast heads out for the long trip out.
The weather seems to be holding. I grab some sleep to bank it against the long drive home to come.
As we approach the shipping lanes I'm back in the wheelhouse. The sea has got up a little - Force 1, maybe 2 at most. Not a problem. There are some VERY big ships out there. Grahame turns on the echosounder...and there she is! There's no doubt about the fact that we've just gone straight over the top of a very, very intact hull, lying on its side. As expected. We're not quite where the Ice Prince was supposed to be, but we're so close that it can't be anything else. Grahame circles back and relocates the wreck and makes a number of passes along it in different directions. He estimates that we've got at least an hour before we can get in and we discuss how we're going to time the dive. Essentially, we're going to hit the water with some current still running in order to avoid drifting too far on the ascent. At Grahame's request, we agree to come off the bottom 25min after descending...irrespective of how long my tooth takes to get down.
I'm diving with David Martin and Joe Heskith in Team 2. Slack arrives and we hit the water. The descent is relatively slow as a) David has his camera along and b) we're aware that my tooth might play up. By 25m, I'm starting to think I've got away with it...I really should have known better. At 30m I get hit again. I've felt it coming and have been trying to slow the descent but feel that I'm off trim and working surprisingly hard to control my buoyancy. I can't work out why. It takes three and a half minutes to get from 30 to 34m and I can feel my team wanting to kill me! Suddenly it clears and I'm good to carry on down. As we do so, I suddenly realise that the thing that has been "not quite right" for a while, that I haven't been able to identify, is that I'm not hearing much when I hit my wing inflator. It has become disconnected and I've been doing buoyancy for 38L of compressed gas with my drysuit and feet.
We finally hit the top of the wreck in 48m, 9min and 30s into the dive. Viz is a better than the Salsette but by no means great. My first impression is, "It's blue...very blue!". We've landed on the starboard gunwale. We confirm "OK" and head aft, towards the superstructure which we expect to be the most interesting part of the wreckage. We head aft for about a minute and a half, seeing the white superstructure to our right and reach the stern. A number of mooring bollards are evident, with yellow and black hazard paint on their tops. We descend, seeing the huge lettering that spells the ship's name. I realise that what I'm looking at doesn't say "Ice Prince", but appears to be in Greek capital letters. I note a capital "pi" and a capital "sigma". I've since found a photo of the Ice Prince's stern which confirms that the name on the stern is, indeed, in Greek It's surprisingly difficult to recognise Greek letters when they're turned on their sides! I make a metal note that we really ought to have found time to look up the name in Greek before the dive (though quite when we were supposed to do so, I'm not sure) David takes a number of photos of the stern.
We follow the stern down to the seabed in 61m and start to work forward along the superstructure. Ice Prince's bow was somewhat buoyant when she went down and apparently drifted some way from her reported sinking position with the top left edge of the superstructure providing contact with the seabed. The port flying bridge is badly smashed and the mast-fit from the main superstructure has taken a beating. I forget whether the "golfball" radome was spotted by anyone. The blue and white striped funnel a recognisable feature.
I've been aware that I've been breathing pretty hard all the time. Part of it is CO2 accumlation from the descent and I am aware that, by my standards, I'm a long way down. I don't waste time trying to see if I can see my SPG needle moving with each breath! I hit Minimum Gas at 23 minutes and thumb the dive.
We begin the ascent and, literally, run into of the hazards of an intact wreck - derricks. My heels seem determined to lodge under one of the booms. I thought it was one of the small red stern derricks in the above photo, David thought it was a white liveboat davit. At the time, all I'm really thinking is that I wish the bloody thing would go away!
As briefed, Joe is preparing a DSMB which Grahame has asked us to shoot as we leave the wreck. Joe passes me his Pathfinder reel to hold while he launches. I won't let him until I'm sure that we're above the overhanging deck (paranoia creeping in, I think!)
From there, the ascent is unremarkable. I take a little time to get settled down, but by the time we hit the 21m gas switch, all is well.
Running some approximate numbers, my SAC on 18/45 backgas was about 33L/min (which is, frankly, horrific!), dropping to 11L/min on 50% and 16L/min on O2.
Other learning points are probably 1) However might time, money and effort you've spent getting to a dive site, if things aren't right you don't dive. I got this right on the Iolanthe, but wrong on Salsette and Ice Prince. 2) Distractions do precisely what they say. I can't believe that it took me until the wrong side of 30m to realise that my wing inflator wasn't plugged in. But it did, because I was busy worrying about whether my tooth was going to cause problems. See 1) above.
3) The internet doesn't communicate humour well. People who weren't on the boat and didn't feel the buzz probably won't understand.
In the limited time we had, we didn't see a lot of the Ice Prince and I'm sorry that my tooth killed 40% of my team's allocated time. On the other hand, there aren't a lot of wrecks in UK waters where the paint is still fresh and the features so clear. I did enjoy the dive and I'd love to go back...after I've seen a dentist!
Last edited by iainmsmith; 14-05-08 at 22:17.
Well Done Iain
Good honest write up. You've just earned your CA badge
YD pisses me off o end!I won't even look for the thread mentioned if you don't mnd
Great write up Iain, a good honest report & Well done on taking a virgin
YD pisses me off no end!
Hey if you think YD is bad then you need to look amongst some of the attitudes on here.
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