Farne Islands, June 2003

Diving (in theory at least): Graeme, Phil, Steve, Rob, Ian, Barnes, Andy, Sue F, Richard, Lizzie, Mike
Non-diving: Miles, Lisa, Abi, Tracy, Sarah, Sue P, Gail, Kev

FRIDAY:

Took most of the day (and night!) for everyone to converge on Beadnell, as not everyone could get the day off and it's a long ol' drive from, well, everywhere. Almost everyone made it to the local pub in time for a pint, except Steve. Unlucky!

SATURDAY:

dawned bright and warm, which was a bonus as storms were forecast. After a decent breakfast over at St Ebba's House and a quick discussion with Stan Hall (our skipper for the weekend), those who were scheduled to go out on the boat for the day wended their merry ways down to Seahouses harbour.

Utterly fantastic conditions for diving

After a few minutes' confusion as to which boat we were on, Stan's son Lee pointed us in the right direction. Obviously we weren't there already, so a hasty lug of much kit right round the harbour and down the full length of one of the walls saw us looking down the ladder to the boat... which made it interesting getting Mike's twin set loaded up, to say the least!

Kit galore!

Once everything was loaded up and Stan was satisfied the tide was right for us, off we went.

And... away we go. The weather's still good :)

First stop, about an hour later, was The Hopper. Ian suffered from ear problems and aborted at 8m unable to equalise, which was a taste of things to come...
Visibility was about 6-10m, with some variance either side. Overall it was notable for two things (for me at least): bloody cold (9 degrees), and very few fish. We saw a fair few seals zip by, but none wanted to stop and play. I spent more time on this dive looking at small stuff on the walls - soft corals abound, and the bright sunlight made parts of the dive very sparkly indeed. After half an hour pottering about Phil and I stopped exploring and trundled back to the surface.
Everyone else seemed to think much the same - it was cold, and there wasn't a spectacular amount to see. Any wreckage around this area is well smashed up, so there wasn't really anything obvious, apart from a piece of pipe now embedded in the floor at one point, which isn't exactly the most exciting of finds! Phil surfaced from this dive feeling particularly poor - at first we were concerned about his cylinder fill, but after a short while he felt significantly better - probably just a combination of cold and being rather out of practice!

An couple of hours later, after a leisurely lunch, Stan took us out to the Knivestone. We dived the north side, since there was an extended slack period. There's wreckage all over the place here, mixed up from a number of long-since forgotten wrecks. There's also hundreds, and hundreds, of seals.

Seals. Lots of seals.

Phil, Rob, Andy and ultimately Ian sat this one out - Ian's ears played up again at a shallow depth, so he bailed out and we continued as two pairs, with Barnes tagging along quietly on his Inspiration.

Mike, ready for action.

Easiest way to describe this dive is that we went in from the boat, over the Knivestone itself and down into the central gully. Again, lots of seals whizzed past around us here but none (for me at least) hung around. After making our way up-current for five minutes towards one end of the gully - which is full of anchor chain pieces, and big ones at that - Mike and I turned and headed off back through the gully, popping out next to a propeller somewhere between 2-3m diameter. Further along the sea bed were the exposed bilge keel and spars of some wreck, and lots of large pieces of very impressively torn-up plates, possibly hull plates - I'm not entirely sure which wreck this was, but the current, direction of flow and depth make it likely that we'd reached the wreck of the "Jan Van Ryswick", if indeed that's what the wreck is. According to Stan it could well be more than one!.
Again, after about 30 minutes we made our way back to 6m where we did the classic "delayed SMB descent". Yes, while faffing with the blob we dropped 5m. Whoops. At least we made a nice smooth ascent after our stop.

We then pootled back (if it's possible to do such a thing) to Seahouses harbour, leaving most of the kit bar the empty cylinders on the boat.

Saturday night we decamped to the local stretch of beach for a barbeque and now traditional "wood finding" session. No, that doesn't mean what you think it means... it's very simple. We arrive on a beach with a whole heap of food, beer, and disposable barbeques, then most of the lads bugger off to find whatever driftwood is around. Of course, driftwood appears in the strangest places (dead bushes in the dunes, for example...) so we soon ended up with a rip-roarer of a fire too.

Cold? My arse!

We love it here. Honest!

Irritatingly it poured down at about 9.30pm so we were forced to go to the pub instead. Shame!

SUNDAY:

Dawn broke. We all tried to persuade it to go away (it was only 4.30am!) but it wouldn't, and a sucession of bog-eyed monsters turned up for breakfast. It turned out that there would only be five of us on the boat today, too, as various people were going off to do family-shaped touristy stuff, or simply couldn't be bothered diving in the cold again.
After getting back on the boat, the Famous Five marvelled at what has to have been the flattest sea most of us have ever, ever seen. It really was like a millpond, if millponds stretch as far as you can see and have barely a ripple on them.

Stan took us out to the wreck of the "Somali" (information here, here and here), which he owns. There were already a number of boats on the wreck when we arrived, but we had a bonus - there were only five of us, so we didn't have to adhere to the accepted method of splitting slack water into two, one group entering early and one late as the other surfaces. Lucky us.
We decided to drop off together, making our way to 6-8m to see how Ian's ears were. Once again, they weren't, so we watched him go back to the surface (vis at that depth was superb) and kick away from the shot, then we made our way down.

The Somali is a big wreck, as we soon discovered. We arrived on the bow shot (loosely termed, as most of the bow is missing). Phil and I turned left, Steve and Mike turned right, and we set off to explore opposite sides of the wreck. It didn't take Phil and I very long to penetrate the hull (I say "penetrate" when I want to sound all technical and cool - in reality we swam in through a great gaper of a hole in the plating!) to come across the most enormous steam engine we'd ever seen - five big boilers, massive pistons and a set of conrods so big even Miles (our esteemed "look, metal!" team member) wouldn't be able to pick them up. At this point two rather rude tekkie-dude divers swam into Phil and gave him the most disgusting look, as if to ask what the hell he was doing there. Some people just need to learn how to get out of the way quicker, eh Phil? Then one of them followed up with the I'm-going-to-shine-my-umbilical-torch-in-your-eyes game with me. Delightful.
Still, we were working our way backwards towards the rudder, when we hit the 100 bar mark and decided that we'd better either (a) leg it for the forward shotline, or (b) sod it and ascend free from where we were. Which we did. Ever the easy option for me!
After an ascent from almost 30m, with a three minute stop, we broke surface to find ourselves slap bang between the two shotlines. Stan came round to pick us up as the tidal flood was starting up, and lo if Steve and Mike didn't surface just ahead of us.
All in all a very enjoyable dive - a fair number of large-ish fish in the wreck too, mainly pollack but I think there were some mackerel also. I was too awestruck by the size of the ship to bother with identifying animals.

The Famous Five.

Once again, we had a break for lunch (and a surface interval!) and then made our way back over to the Knivestone. This time we dived it from the south side and explored around the outer edges for a while longer before getting into the gully again just by the propeller we found the previous day. The difference on this dive was the presence, throughout, of a seal which would not leave our collective fins alone at any point during the dive! Typically [see below], Mike was knackered and decided to sit this dive out with Ian, so Phil, Graeme and Steve got their wish for the weekend and Mike missed out. Not only that, but none of us had a camera. Doh!
All three of us surfaced grinning like children - and our new friend stayed with us until we were all safely back on the boat. Brilliant!

Footnote: when I say "Typically" above, I don't mean that Mike sits out the second dive every time. I mean that typically, someone decides to sit out a dive and the dive ends up being a corker. Sorry to Mike if it didn't read properly without explanation :)

Graeme Fowler 2003-06-26