Scapa Diary Day 1 - The Mara and the V83

By Jane Wilkinson on 17 September 2008

At last I was to dive the famous Scapa Flow!

At the beginning

It had been on my ‘to do’ list for some time but I had been frustrated in my efforts to find a suitable boat and group to dive with. Trips seemed to be very technically orientated with divers using twins, rebreathers, stages and doing a lot of decompression diving. However, at the beginning of the year Hazel skipper of Stormdrift advertised a ‘Scapa virgins trip’ on the Yorkshire Divers Forum. This was aimed at people like myself who were diving on a single cylinder with/without pony, doing no stop diving and people who wanted a ‘taster’ of what the flow had to offer.

There are a variety of wrecks in the flow and some of the big ships lie at 40m+ and you would need technical skills to achieve reasonable length bottom times. However some of the huge battleships and cruisers from the German fleet are laying on their sides and the tops of their hulls start around the 16m mark which means that a lot of the deck area is laying in the 20-25m mark and can be explored without ever dropping to the sea bed at around 35+m unless you really want to.
Most of the divers arrived on Saturday and I met them down by the boat dropping off kit. Helen who is Hazel’s deckie was there and showed us round Stormdrift. It is a spacious boat with plenty of room for spreading out kit, ample kitting up benches and a nice cosy cabin out of the wind for writing up log books and having a chat or just dozing off in the warm. Your tanks are filled ‘in situ’ which makes life much easier you just have to remember to leave the regs off! Helen was more than happy to talk about Scapa, the boat, the diving and anything else we wanted to know about Orkney.

Into the Flow

Saturday saw us all on the boat promptly, keen to get started. In order that everyone could have just a bit of shake down and check equipment our first dive was to be the Mara, an ex trawler lying at around 17m. She had been off to have a refit in order to begin a new life as a dive boat, but had mysteriously sunk on her way back to Stromness minus a lot of equipment that should have been onboard! Once down the shot we began a circuit round the bottom of the boat. The viz was not brilliant at about 5-6m, the silty seabed was covered with huge whelks bigger than any I’d ever seen before. Gradually working our way up the side to the deck you could see the sides of the hull were covered with delicate feather stars many of which had curled up fronds, in lovely shades of pink, cream and pale oranges. Tyres still hung from the sides of the boat complete with spiky urchins sitting on top. As we slowly ascended and my nose became level with the deck I came eyeball to eyeball with a menacing looking scorpion fish that was lying frozen on some weed. Fortunately he didn’t seem as surprised by the encounter as I was and continued to stay stock still while I managed to take a few pictures before moving off. Working our way along the barnacle encrusted deck we looked into the wheelhouse and cabin, which appeared quite barren in comparison to the rest of the life on the wreck and then up onto the top of the wheelhouse itself until we decided it was time to ascend.

A step back in time

We moored up at Lyness for our surface interval, which gave everyone the opportunity to visit the Naval museum there. Although I had spent several days on Orkney before the diving week started and had taken the opportunity to look around many places I had run out of time to visit the museum on Hoy, so was delighted that we were able to do this. It is well laid out and has a huge amount of information about Scapa Flow and its history. I was fascinated to see pictures of the flow when it had dozens of the huge battleships moored up and even more amazed to see photographs that actually showed some of the German ships sinking after they had been given the order to scuttle them. Finally leaving the museum we made out way back to the boat for the next dive.

Getting swept along

The second dive was the V83 a torpedo boat sunk in 1919 that lies at around 15m. Small bits of wreckage lay at the bottom of shot from where a tiny little painted goby watched our progress. We then set off moving down the wreck accompanied by small groups of gold sinny. Large pollack glided about but never near enough to photograph. Some very colourful ballan wrasse swam round us however, as soon as I lifted my camera up they turned away uneasy and nervous about the ‘big eye’ they could see staring back at them that was my camera. I spotted many different crabs hiding, including some very sizable edible crabs. There were a considerable amount of velvet swimming crabs clinging onto various surfaces. These are sometimes known as devil crabs very aptly named because of their devilish red eyes that peer up at you, I also spotted one very tiny masked crab.
The best part of this dive was probably up towards the bow. I often find it difficult to identify bits of ships but even to my uneducated eyes I was able to see and recognise the torpedo tubes quite clearly. A large gun was also mounted towards the front of the boat and was clearly visible standing proud of the deck, which was encrusted with barnacles and weed. The bow itself was covered with white, olive and apricot coloured plumose anemones. You could swim inside the area that lay under the deck on the bow it was very light and the skeletal struts around the sides provided more homes for the delicate anemones which grew in crowds packed tightly together.
Leaving this lovely swim through and returning back along the bow I signalled that maybe we should begin heading east away from the wreck in order to be picked up. Swimming into nothing with poor visibility is always a bit unnerving especially with my level of navigation skills! However much to my relief, I did manage to get us going in the right direction.

So two lovely dives to start our Scapa week.

Contact

Author: Jane Wilkinson
Email: info@travel-dive.com

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