BSAC/NAS Wreck Appreciation Course - June 08
Do you know your davit from your derrick? If not then this is the course for you!
Turning up at the Aqua Hotel, Portland on a bright sunny morning I hoped that this course would help me identify the bits and lumps of metal I saw scattered around the seabed on wreck dives.
I rarely took much notice of the rusty bits on dives tending to regard wrecks as reefs for marine life rather than having much intrinsic appeal themselves. Although I had done the PADI wreck speciality some years ago it was fairly limited and dealt mainly with diving techniques for wreck diving rather than looking at the wrecks themselves. This course however was totally new and developed by Jane Maddocks (BESAC) working with Mark Beattie-Edwards (NAS) this was the first time the course had been run so they were really testing the water. While this was technically a BESAC course I had signed up for it after seeing it advertised on Divernet and although a PADI diver I was still made to feel very welcome.
After an introduction and outline of what the weekend would cover we were off on Cutlass to dive the Cragside. Cragside is described as an Unknown Coaster in the Dive Dorset book. It lies not far from the harbour wall near the bow of The Spaniard. The purpose of this first dive was to see the wreck before we embarked on the rest of the course and then …hopefully….view it through different, more knowledgable eyes the second time.
Having not dived with Smudge (who runs Scimitar Diving) for a couple of years it was nice to be on his newest acquisition Cutlass. Whilst slightly different from Scimitar it certainly proved to be a first class boat for diving and with perfect diving weather we set off across the harbour.
After an interesting dive we returned to the hotel for lunch and then settled down to some classroom work covering two very interesting topics, wreck location and ship construction and layout. The latter topic was the one that others like me found the most useful on the whole course and what we had really come for. Using simple diagrams Mark explained section by section working to stern to bow what you would usually find on common vessels At this point it all started to make sense and so many things that I had seen in the past and even photographed I was able to name.
We then had a brief look at wrecks and the sort of life you would expect to find on them. This was followed by some discussion of kit configuration in relation to wreck diving and the laying of distance lines which we then had a go at in the car park. Fortunately most of the divers had gone for the day so there wasn’t too much of an audience while we zigzagged backwards and forwards across the car park with reels and lines.
The next morning saw us back in the classroom and after a brief discussion about laws associated with wrecks and any finds bought to the surface we had a practical dry session on site recording before going out to the wreck on a second dive and doing it for real.
Working in buddy pairs we measured the offsets and then went for a second look round the wreck. Basically most of the middle of the ship is missing apart from the ribs but you can use these to naviagate from one end to the other where the stern and bow are pretty intact.
After lunch we then returned to the classroom and this information was then transferred to paper as we drew the wreck from the measurements we had taken. Despite the poor visibility we had managed to get some accurate measurements and produced a good drawing.
Altogether another very successful weekend although like me other participants found Marks session on the construction and layout of common vessels the most useful and would have liked this session to be longer.
