Portsmouth July 07
Portsmouth is a great venue for diving as there is so much to do if you get blown out and given the awful weather that the south has been experiencing this year it was more a question of when rather than if!
Arriving late on Thursday to find the diving for Friday had been canned I decided to finish my tour of the Historic Dockyard. I had visited the Mary Rose back in January but had run out of time.
A Primary school visit was when I last seen HMS Victory, so I was viewing it through very different eyes.
Being so clean and shiny with everything beautifully painted it is hard to imagine just how awful conditions would have really been below deck particularly during a battle. I really cant imagine the ‘well ard’ youths of today lasting five minutes!
I find it fascinating when you find out the origins of a word or a name and in this case it was ‘knots’……. as in nautical speed. The line on a reel was knotted every 47ft 3in. One seaman held the reel, another heaved the log over the ships stern and a third watched a 28second time glass. As the log line ran out the knots were counted against the time glass the number of knots counted related to the ships speed in knots. One knot = one nautical mile per hour.
The second ship I had look round was HMS Warrior built about 60years later in 1860 and what a difference in technology in such a short space of time.
Rescued from being used as a floating workshop to an oil jetty at Milford Haven with the restoration being the most costly and complex project ever attempted, she is certainly very impressive and a credit to all those concerned. However, although she has been beautifully restored and painted the conditions at that time would have been pretty grim. The engine room was very impressive…even to my girlie eyes… its hard to imagine what it really would have been like to spend several hours a day shovelling coal and ash in temperatures that would often reach 43 degress centigrade. Don’t somehow think the HSE would be too impressed!
Having got the thumbs up for Saturdays diving we all turned up at the Marina bright and early. We were diving out of Haslar Marina, Gosport. The Highland Brigade was quite a nice dive and I even managed to find the depth charges in the rack at the stern. The skipper had thought we were only doing one dive so the rest of the afternoon I spent at the Submarine Museum I have yet to dive a sub but found the tour round the inside of this one interesting. Although it is fairly old and out of date compared with the high tech subs we have now it still gave you a fascinating insight into what it was like to serve on one….I came to the conclusion that I would not have made a good submariner….especially when he explained how you would have to escape should the occasion arise.
Sunday dawned sunny and fine and we managed two dives one of which was on the Prince Leopold. Visability was pretty shite on all the dives and the photos were rubbish. I had been hoping to just use the WA lense with ambient light and get some black and white wreck shots. However with visability around 4-5m at best it was not to be. Also quite an expensive weekend with my LP hose going and my lovely DSMB getting chopped up by the boats prop! We came to the conclusion that I had probably let my blob go whilst the boat was more or less overhead picking up another diver. I started reeling up and felt a tug and immediately loosened my hold on the reel in case I was going to get dragged. Lots of loose line then started appearing and getting tangled around my kit and finally the cut end floated down past my nose and I realised what had probably happened. Unfortunatly it was one of those with the twist and blow bottles so an expensive loss.
Monday we all duly trooped down to the marina hoping that we might get another dive in. Several other divers had driven down for the day to fill empty spaces on the boat, but after motoring out to sea for about hour conditions were such that trying to get back on the boat would have been very dangerous so we decided to call it a day and all head for home.
So a total of three dives out of a possible eight, verdict - very disappointing dive wise but I had managed to do a few other things instead.
