Scapa Diary Day 3 - The Radiation and HMS Rodean

By Jane Wilkinson on 24 September 2008

The weather looked a bit brighter as we made our way to the boat on the third day, hoping for a little more sun than we had had the day before. We had another diver joining us for the rest of the week who had just passed his AOW whilst up at Scapa, so two shallower dives were the order of the day before we did something a bit deeper. Motoring out of Stromness we headed down south to dive the Radiation, an old trawler that has been deliberately sunk as a shallower dive.

An unbroken wreck

Descending down the shot line we could clearly see from her outline that The Radiation is more or less complete. Continuing down to the sea bed at around 24m I started a circuit around the bottom, searching for anything that was lurking underneath the hull. Swiftly backing away from the glare of my torch a brightly coloured squat lobster, disappeared from sight and my camera lense. The usual varieties of wrasse and gold sinny that we had been seeing over the last couple of days were swimming around the boat which sat on a sandy sea bed covered in razor shells. There were a couple of sun stars whose lovely vibrant colours are only brought out by a bright light to illuminate them while the delicate fronds of feather stars in varying shades of apricot and cream could be seen clustered round the bow of the boat and growing along the railings. At various places you could peer through broken bits of planking and see the crabs and fish lurking in the darkness. Tyres were still hanging from her sides but unlike The Mara there were no cheeky urchins perched on the top of these. Gradually ascending to the deck level I came up eyeball to eyeball with a rather timid velvet swimming crab who quickly shot across the deck when he saw me. Unfortunately I had stayed to long circling the lower levels of the boat looking at things. Time was soon running out which meant I was only able to do a quick circuit of the deck area of the boat with no time to look in the wheelhouse before I realised should be on my way. Easily finding the shot again I began to ascend and was just finishing my stop when my buddy joined me.

Some bold wrasse

Our second dive of the day was HMS Rodean lying in about 16m of water. It was a fleet minesweeper that hit a mine and sunk in 1915. In the 50’s the wreck was blasted to remove her superstructure and increase the clearance over her so she is very broken up. However, there is still a lot of identifiable wreckage laying about making homes for numerous sea creatures. Her two huge boilers are easy to identify with much pipework vizable. Round the stern area are her mooring bollards amongst the wreckage, part of the prop shaft should have been lying nearby but I was unable to spot it as usual, this could be because I’m not exactly sure what a prop shaft looks like! An enormous amount of brightly coloured sun stars, varying enormously in size and colour, seem to adorn the various twisted struts and girders laying around. The most memeorable part of this dive, which was remarked upon by all the divers later, was the boldness of the wrasse. They are obviously used to being fed by divers and they seemed quite happy to swim straight at you. It did mean that instead of the usual tail that I get in pictures I was able to get a couple of good shots as can be seen by one picture where it actually swam straight at me practically kissing the camera lense before swimming up and over the top of me!

So yet another days good diving with something for everyone.

Contact

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

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