Belemnite Diver Blog

The blog has moved back to being self hosted and off BearBlog. Largely due to Bears insane policy of shadowbanning paying customers. This probably means nothing to anyone not me, so don’t worry more diving and CCR posting coming soon.

The Steamship (SS) Iolanthe was an armed steam driven cargo ship that was torpedoed by German U-Boat UC-75 about 10 miles off Portland (UK) early Jan 1918. Having being hit in calm seas, she turned and tried to make for a safe port but took on too much water and was abandoned by the crew who survived. Apparently UC-75 was later sunk near Yorkshire having engaged with a convoy and being attacked by HMS Fairy who also sunk in that action.

Finally back in the salty stuff recently. Had one good day (described below) and one day of the worst sea I’ve ever been in and we won’t be talking about how that went - it was so bad at one point I threatened to take up golf!

The MV Aeolian Sky was a Greek transport ship, launched in 1978 and a year later was heading down the channel from London to Dar-es-Salaam loaded with various cargo when she collided with another boat.

I read ‘The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.’ by Atul Gawande a few years ago, and again more recently and on both occasions I was struck by its relevance to CCR or other deep technical diving (and even diving generally).

The book, as the name suggests, makes the case for how valuable checklists can be to ensure that no matter how confident you are in the process, having a list to follow is a good way of avoiding errors and catching problems early. The books use cases focus largely on medicine (the author is a medical doctor), construction and aviation but apply just as well to diving and especially CCRs with an extended number of preparation steps.

So been a month since I posted and that was kinda a boring entry, as might well be this one.

Two reasons - one, no one reads this anyway, so I don’t feel any great urgency to post. Two, and this is by far the bigger of the two, my diving has been very limited the last couple of months.

After Scapa and diving the German fleet quickly came June and a number of family commitments as well as a non diving holiday. Into July and I had a quarry dive to check over the SF2 and get some squeaky trimix for what promised to be an excellent weekend of reasonably deep diving on the South Coast….

Dive manufacturers seem to have a relentless enthusiasm for making things hard to take apart to service. I assume this is so you’ll pay the money to become a proper service tech and to protect the income of those that already are. For regulators and tanks I’m largely on-board. Give me someone who knows what they’re doing and I’m happy to pay, but for so many other things that just need removing, replacing or tightening the lack of tools can be a major pain in the backside.

In addition to the sunken German fleet capital ships like the Coln, Karlsruhe, KronPrinz and so on, there are other wrecks in Scapa Flow with their own stories to tell.

One of my favourites is the UB-116. As the name suggests, she’s was a WWI era UB class submarine. She was commissioned right at the end of the war in May 1918 launching from the Blohm and Voss yard in Hamburg. On 25 October 1918 she left Heligoland for Scapa Flow, at this point in the war the regular enlisted men had already started to mutuny but the German authorities wanted to show that power still existed in the fleet and launched a final attack on British warships. The U boats were intended to be the tip of the spear of any attack and sink a large number of British ships.

Diving Scapa Flow (Part 2) - SMS Karlsruhe

This is a pretty regular ‘shake out’ dive in Scapa Flow as its shallow and more broken up than some of the bigger ships, despite that, it’s still one of my favourites. The shallowness means better light and a longer dive (the cold really is my limiting factor) and as I’m normally pretty navigationally challenged, the layout helps me actually find and identify bits.

Diving Scapa (Part1) - getting there

Almost any diver who loved wrecks should (if they don’t already) consider Scapa Flow as a ‘must do’ destination. The sucken German Imperial fleet is the main attraction but given the Flows use in both World wars as a deep water anchorage for the British there are plenty of other things too. I’ve been lucky enough now to visit Scapa Flow on a few occasions but only now blogging about my last trip.

Having written back in Jan about the trials of owning a rebreather, I was finally glad about a month ago to get everything back in a fully working and tested condition, all I needed now was to go diving! As with last year, work continues to drive my stress levels to new heights and thus the responsibility for organising this trip largely fell to my lovely girlfriend to sort accommodation and drive me around as she could then leave and go enjoy Dorset and Devon when I was sat on a boat. She, as normal, did this excellently and now all dive trips will need a hot tub!