The Veritas

By Mark Milburn on 27 September 2008

Temporary Repairs

The Veritas was going to be our last dive over the bank holiday weekend. It is privately owned by the original owner of Seaways Diving, John Ellis. He even gave Shaun the marks for it. The 1,100 ton, 135 foot long Veritas sank on the 5th of August 1907, whilst carrying a cargo of pit props. It had recently been in a collision and was making way for Cardiff after some temporary repairs. They were obviously too temporary.

It started to take on water too quickly and the boiler fires became extinguished. Some tugs from Falmouth tried to tow it into Coverack, but it went down, vertically, with its stern out of the water for two days before disappearing below the water.

Planning

The water temperatures still aren’t as warm as I would like, but as this dive site was around 40m I would have to do some decompressing if I wanted to get a decent amount of time diving the wreck. I had made my plan, filled my cylinders with the required gas mixes and made my way to Falmouth.

We met at 1:30pm on the Quay. There was to be around about forty five minutes travelling time to get to the site and then a little time to find the wreck before slack water. The wreck is now quite flat with the highest point being the boilers a few metres above the bottom. After circling around for a little while, Shaun dropped the shot as close to the boilers as he could get. I jumped in with my video camera in one hand, my other hand holding my mask and regulator in place. Two cylinders on my back and one oxygen rich decompression cylinder under my arm should give me plenty of gas for the dive.

Into the Depths

I descended the line and found myself right next to the boilers, where Shaun had hoped the shot would be. The visibility was quite good and you could see the width of the wreck. I headed to my right to see what I could find. The wreck is upside down. Apparently it recently split and flattened out and you could get into the wreck – I couldn’t find many places where you could penetrate any more than a few metres.

There was quite a lot of large bib on the wreck, as with most of the wrecks around here. A conger eel peeked from under some of the sheet metal plates. The wreck was covered in the usual fan corals and dead man’s fingers, as well as cup corals and plumose anemones. Most of the surrounding sea floor was sand, which made it easy to navigate. Approaching the stern I came across the intact four bladed cast iron propellor and the remains of the rudder at around 38m, which was the deepest part. The hull around the stern was reasonably intact and was shaped like it should be, but the hull looked like it had broken around the water line.

I then started off towards the bow, again finding a couple of places where I could peek inside what was left of the upturned hull. More bib swam around under cover of the wreck, another conger eel having a peek at what I was doing. Corkwing wrasse and cuckoo wrasse darted away from my camera lights. Unfortunatley there was a very colourful large male cuckoo wrasse which would have looked good on film. Eventually I found myself at the bow, which was very flat. The wreck looked like it had broken along its keel and then spread out sideways.

End of Slack

I started heading back towards the shotline and the boilers, but slack water had passed and the current was starting to run quite quickly. I tried pulling myself along the wreck but it was going to be a bit of a haul to get back to the boilers and the shotline; it would put me outside the time of my dive plan of thirty minutes at the bottom. So up went the surface marker buoy and I started to drift, flying over the various small rocky outcrops that lie in the sand around the wreck. After a while all that I could make out was the covering of the white dead man’s fingers. I followed my decompression schedule, changing to the cylinder under my arm at 9m. I finally reached the glorious sunshine on the surface after forty seven minutes.

Now to see if the video had come out…......

All in all it was a pleasant enough dive. The wreck is quite broken but has a lot of sea life – very similar to many of the wrecks around the Cornish coast except that it is quite small and upside down.

Contact

Author: Mark Milburn
Email: info@travel-dive.com

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