HMS Swan - South Western Australia
I wasn’t very interested in diving this wreck. Divers I came across kept asking me had I done it and what was it like, but to be honest I wasn’t that interested. HMAS Swan like the Syclla in the UK are what I personally refer to as ‘designer wrecks’. They are ships that have been deliberately prepared for diving and sunk, all in a very sanitised manner. There is nothing wrong with this but I just prefer my wrecks ‘au natural’ and if they have a bit of a story behind them even better.
However, eventually I found myself back near Perth at the end of my trip so decided to dive it and find out why people were so enamoured. As it turned out I dived it more than once and grew quite intrigued as to its history and the enormous amount of work that was involved in preparing a ship such as this for scuttling. The Swan, as it is locally referred to, is in fact the former Destroyer Escort HMAS Swan and at a cost of 22million dollars she was the most expensive warship ever built in Australia. She was also the first ship to have been purposely sunk as a dive wreck in the southern hemisphere and until last year the only ship of this size to be used in this way in Australia.
HMAS Swan was decommissioned after 26 yrs service in 1996. Following this the Commonwealth Government declared the ship was to be gifted to the state of Western Australia. After decommissioning ex navy vessels are often sold to friendly nations or just stripped of anything useful by the Navy. The hull is then sold as scrap metal to be recycled possibly into tin cans or razor blades. Whilst this is a very environmentally friendly ending it is not a very dignified finale for such a worthy Navy vessel. However the fate of The Swan was to be vastly different. Ideas for the use of the vessel ranged from a floating church to a shelter for the homeless! Ultimately it was decided that she was to become a dive wreck and the Geographe Bay Artificial Reef Society were given the responsibility of preparing and scuttling the vessel. Here then followed a task of huge proportions as she was to be scuttled just a year later.
I had little idea that so much work was involved in making a ship ‘safe’ for diving. At about 112m long and 21m high this was no mean undertaking for the hundreds of volunteers involved, many of which were not divers themselves or involved in the dive industry in any way, but were still incredibly enthusiastic about the project. Thousands of hours labour were involved, red tape to be complied with and mountains of paperwork to be completed.
There were two main areas or issues to be addressed in the preparation of the ship for scuttling. Firstly environmental hazards had to be considered and any material that could harm the marine environment was taken out. Anything made of plastic was removed as were all fuel oil and hydraulic fluids and all tanks were emptied (over 7.000litres of oil was removed). These were then cleaned, an awful task taking six people more than six months to complete. The huge amount of electrical cabling (over 20 tonnes of it) was also taken out and sold. Not only did this bring in much needed revenue to help fund the project but over a period of time the bands holding the cables on the ceiling would break down thus causing a hazard for divers.
Access holes were cut through the hull, deck and bulkheads and doors were removed.
This allows a lot of light penetration and rarely do you go far inside the ship without being directly in sight of an exit/entry. For this reason it makes penetration of this wreck very easy even for those people like me who are always rather nervous in overhead or enclosed environments. In addition to shorter ‘swim throughs’, you can swim from one end of the ship to the other popping into cabins and a variety of places along the way. Large shoals of bullseyes can be found inside and we came across a huge Samson fish well over a metre long swimming around inside the last room just before we exited at the bow. We were blocking one exit by watching him from the door way but as there were two exits here I assumed he would disappear through the one in ceiling as it certainly looked large enough. However he was obviously agitated and when we swam into the room he whizzed out the way we had come in. Exiting through the ceiling and then swimming forward to the end of the bow a huge number of globe fish can often be seen swimming a little way below, but should you drop down to photograph them they quickly wiggle their short little tails and disappear.
All the extra holes that were cut also allowed the water to get in a lot faster when the ship was sunk, (which took a little less than 3 minutes), this increased the chances of her landing upright. Obviously this worked as she now sits pretty upright on the sandy bottom. Investigating under the hull you can often find flat heads lying concealed on the sandy seabed with western king wrasse and various other fish swimming in and out under the hull. Coming up the stern of the ship on the outside and looking inside the room on the next deck, flashes of white porcelain on the toilets are just about still visible from the rapidly growing encrusting sponge. Moving along down any of the corridors inside are shoals of bullseyes, footballer sweeps and truncate coral fish. Outside moonlighters patrol the railings along the gangways and sticking your head in the odd doorless cabin usually reveals a horseshoe leatherjacket or two. Access to the bridge is easy, as the door has been removed. Here you can sit in the captain’s chair (made easier if you remember to let a bit of air out of your BCD!) while your buddy takes a picture. You can then exit through a hatch at the top.
In addition to the sale of the electrical cable several tonnes of copper, brass and other valuable metals were salvaged and sold. Forty-three tonnes of lead that had been used as ballast and was right down in the keel had to be removed by hand and carried up four decks. More than $90,000 was raised from the sale of what had been salvaged from the vessel and helped to finance the project as a result. Whilst they wanted to keep the ship as intact as possible (even the loos! as can be seen in this photo) this had to be balanced against the need to finance the whole scheme.
Throughout the whole project advice had come from the Artificial Reef Society in British Colombia in Canada. Fortunately they had scuttled several navel vessels as dive wrecks of the same class and size as HMAS Swan and it was an explosives expert from Canada with the Navy clearance divers who completed the final task before the charges were detonated.
The site for HMAS Swans final resting place had been chosen with care in Geographe Bay in 30m of water and is diveable most of the year. The State Government has established some regulations for the area and there is an exclusion zone of 500m round the wreck, which prohibits fishing, or hunting of any kind. No anchoring is allowed in order to prevent damage to the wreck and divers and no more than six boats at any one time are allowed to moor up, for which permits are required and available locally. There is a buoy that marks the site and it is by following this shot down that you shortly come across the crows nest. It is just above this you can do your safety stop at the end of your dive and watch the patrolling batfish and the others that frequent this eyrie. Given that the visibility is pretty good most of the year there is never any problem with finding your way back to the crows nest and shot line. This is a definite advantage for navigationally challenged people like me.
Several dive operators go out to the site on a regular basis. I was staying in Busselton so I dived it with The Dive Shed
as I enjoyed diving with them. From Busselton the trip is about 40mins but should you be slightly further south Cape Dive operates out of Dunsborough, from here it is only a ten-minute boat ride.
