DIVE DRY WITH DR. BILL #796: A NERVOUS WRECK
Back in the days when Tony Baloney used to play on the patio at Antonio's Cabaret, he had a joke he would tell, often as I passed by on my way home from the dive park. "What sits on the ocean floor and twitches?" Of course the answer is "a nervous wreck." Well, a lot of divers are nervous when they first dive wrecks and some operators require a separate wreck certification to dive them.
As a marine biologist, I'm generally not very interested in marine debris. If a wreck has been down some time and has a lot of critter growth on it, I can be convinced to dive and film it. Otherwise the vesssel has to have some interesting historical value for me to be persuaded. I do visit the small wrecks in our dive park, usually to check on any critters there. Only one of our wrecks has any "historical" significance... the "Pisces" which I used to party on in the early 1970s when Lynn Stokes owned it. I even saw it hit the breakwater and sink into Davey Jones' Locker.
I have dived a few wrecks around the world. On one trip to the Florida Keys, dive buddy Andrea Bill and I dove the 327 ft USCGC Duane and the 510 ft USS Spiegel Grove. The Grove had recently been scuttled but the Duane had been down since November of 1987. Divers flocked to the Grove but I found it a barren wasteland since few critters had colonized it when we dove. The Duane on the other hand was covered with critters and offered many opportunities for me to film.
Divers are often warned about the dangers of penetrating a wreck. The water may silt up causing them to lose the ability to see inside the wreck. Experienced wreck divers usually lay lines along their penetration route so they can exit if "blinded by the silt" (you remember that famous Bruce Springsteen song). I think the first wreck I actually penetrated was the Fang Ming off La Paz in the Sea of Cortez back in 2003. This fishing vessel had been seized when it switched to smuggling illegal workers into the States. In 1999 it became the first wreck sunk as an artificial reef in Latin America.
Closer to home, the HMCS Yukon, a Canadian destroyer, was environmentally cleaned and sunk off San Diego in 2000. I dove it with Joel Geldin of California Ships to Reefs. I was poking into one of the cargo holds to film some Metridium anemones when Joel tugged on my feet. I ignored him and he tugged again. When I turned around to see what he wanted, there was an ocean sunfish (Mola mola) that had been peeking over my shoulder!
In 2015 I was the guest of David Valaika's Indian Valley SCUBA on a dive trip to Egypt and the Red Sea. We dove two wrecks, the T43 minesweeper off Hurghada and the passenger ferry Salem Express, that sank off Safaga in 1991 with a loss of nearly 500 people, making it a controversial dive site. We were supposed to dive the world-famous British transport ship Thistlegorm which was attacked by German planes and sank off the Sinai Peninsula in 1941 and was "discovered" by Jacques-Yves Cousteau in the early 1950s.
The winds kicked up as we headed toward the Sinai and the dive boat captain decided it was too rough to try to reach the Thistlegorm. Instead we anchored on the wreck of the Rosalie Moller, originally a coal transport vessel but requisitioned by England to perform that function in World War II. She was supposed to deliver a load of coal to troops in Alexandria, Egypt, but was also attacked and sunk by German planes in 1941.
The dive boat we were on for this trip was rather questionable in terms of its professionalism. The captain let a young boy man the helm while he played on his cell phone. After we got to the wreck site, the winds and sea began to get rough. When I reached the mooring line to descend, the boat was slamming up and down presenting a significant hazard to our divers. One of my dive computers was torn off my wrist by the vessel and drifted down to depth. Then the line snapped and the boat was adrift. Those of us in the water were picked up by an inflatable and roughly deposited on the dive boat steps. I was certainly a bit nervous on this non-dive.
On my dive trip to the Dutch Antilles, I had the opportunity to dive both Bonaire and Aruba. On Aruba, Dive Aruba (aka Dive with Clive) was my operator. Clive led us on a great penetration dive of the SS Antilla, a 398 ft. German cargo ship built for trade between Germany and the Caribbean in 1939. After the invasion of Poland, German ships sought friendly or neutral ports. Then when the Netherlands were invaded, the vessel and crew became enemies of the Dutch. Rather than surrender the ship, the German crew scuttled it.
But it was probably in Thailand back in 2001 that I became a truly nervous wreck diver! We were to dive the King Cruiser wreck off Koh Phi Phi. This car ferry made trips between Phuket and Koh Phi Phi until it sank in 1997. Our dive master, the lovely Dieke van Ewijk, was looking forward to this dive. We descended to the stern of the vessel when suddenly the current kicked up and we were blown off the wreck. Visibility was extremely bad and we could not see the wreck at all. Fortunately my intuition was correct and we kicked in the right direction. I never penetrated the wreck but did take Dieke out to dinner that night!
© 2019 Dr. Bill Bushing. For the entire archived set of nearly 800 "Dive Dry" columns, visit my website Star Thrower Educational Multimedia (S.T.E.M.) Home Page
Image caption: The barren exterior of the Spiegel Grove and the exterior of the Salam Express; diver penetrating the Fang Ming and divers exiting the Antilla.
Back in the days when Tony Baloney used to play on the patio at Antonio's Cabaret, he had a joke he would tell, often as I passed by on my way home from the dive park. "What sits on the ocean floor and twitches?" Of course the answer is "a nervous wreck." Well, a lot of divers are nervous when they first dive wrecks and some operators require a separate wreck certification to dive them.
As a marine biologist, I'm generally not very interested in marine debris. If a wreck has been down some time and has a lot of critter growth on it, I can be convinced to dive and film it. Otherwise the vesssel has to have some interesting historical value for me to be persuaded. I do visit the small wrecks in our dive park, usually to check on any critters there. Only one of our wrecks has any "historical" significance... the "Pisces" which I used to party on in the early 1970s when Lynn Stokes owned it. I even saw it hit the breakwater and sink into Davey Jones' Locker.
I have dived a few wrecks around the world. On one trip to the Florida Keys, dive buddy Andrea Bill and I dove the 327 ft USCGC Duane and the 510 ft USS Spiegel Grove. The Grove had recently been scuttled but the Duane had been down since November of 1987. Divers flocked to the Grove but I found it a barren wasteland since few critters had colonized it when we dove. The Duane on the other hand was covered with critters and offered many opportunities for me to film.
Divers are often warned about the dangers of penetrating a wreck. The water may silt up causing them to lose the ability to see inside the wreck. Experienced wreck divers usually lay lines along their penetration route so they can exit if "blinded by the silt" (you remember that famous Bruce Springsteen song). I think the first wreck I actually penetrated was the Fang Ming off La Paz in the Sea of Cortez back in 2003. This fishing vessel had been seized when it switched to smuggling illegal workers into the States. In 1999 it became the first wreck sunk as an artificial reef in Latin America.
Closer to home, the HMCS Yukon, a Canadian destroyer, was environmentally cleaned and sunk off San Diego in 2000. I dove it with Joel Geldin of California Ships to Reefs. I was poking into one of the cargo holds to film some Metridium anemones when Joel tugged on my feet. I ignored him and he tugged again. When I turned around to see what he wanted, there was an ocean sunfish (Mola mola) that had been peeking over my shoulder!
In 2015 I was the guest of David Valaika's Indian Valley SCUBA on a dive trip to Egypt and the Red Sea. We dove two wrecks, the T43 minesweeper off Hurghada and the passenger ferry Salem Express, that sank off Safaga in 1991 with a loss of nearly 500 people, making it a controversial dive site. We were supposed to dive the world-famous British transport ship Thistlegorm which was attacked by German planes and sank off the Sinai Peninsula in 1941 and was "discovered" by Jacques-Yves Cousteau in the early 1950s.
The winds kicked up as we headed toward the Sinai and the dive boat captain decided it was too rough to try to reach the Thistlegorm. Instead we anchored on the wreck of the Rosalie Moller, originally a coal transport vessel but requisitioned by England to perform that function in World War II. She was supposed to deliver a load of coal to troops in Alexandria, Egypt, but was also attacked and sunk by German planes in 1941.
The dive boat we were on for this trip was rather questionable in terms of its professionalism. The captain let a young boy man the helm while he played on his cell phone. After we got to the wreck site, the winds and sea began to get rough. When I reached the mooring line to descend, the boat was slamming up and down presenting a significant hazard to our divers. One of my dive computers was torn off my wrist by the vessel and drifted down to depth. Then the line snapped and the boat was adrift. Those of us in the water were picked up by an inflatable and roughly deposited on the dive boat steps. I was certainly a bit nervous on this non-dive.
On my dive trip to the Dutch Antilles, I had the opportunity to dive both Bonaire and Aruba. On Aruba, Dive Aruba (aka Dive with Clive) was my operator. Clive led us on a great penetration dive of the SS Antilla, a 398 ft. German cargo ship built for trade between Germany and the Caribbean in 1939. After the invasion of Poland, German ships sought friendly or neutral ports. Then when the Netherlands were invaded, the vessel and crew became enemies of the Dutch. Rather than surrender the ship, the German crew scuttled it.
But it was probably in Thailand back in 2001 that I became a truly nervous wreck diver! We were to dive the King Cruiser wreck off Koh Phi Phi. This car ferry made trips between Phuket and Koh Phi Phi until it sank in 1997. Our dive master, the lovely Dieke van Ewijk, was looking forward to this dive. We descended to the stern of the vessel when suddenly the current kicked up and we were blown off the wreck. Visibility was extremely bad and we could not see the wreck at all. Fortunately my intuition was correct and we kicked in the right direction. I never penetrated the wreck but did take Dieke out to dinner that night!
© 2019 Dr. Bill Bushing. For the entire archived set of nearly 800 "Dive Dry" columns, visit my website Star Thrower Educational Multimedia (S.T.E.M.) Home Page
Image caption: The barren exterior of the Spiegel Grove and the exterior of the Salam Express; diver penetrating the Fang Ming and divers exiting the Antilla.
