On The Road To Mecca

I dropped down a gear and the twin turbos kicked into life, driving the 225 bhp of the engine through the four wheel Quattro drive. Effortlessly the car took the right hand bend like a dream. I’d bought the Audi TT a few weeks earlier and we were on the quiet country lanes of Northumbria for a short cottage break to put it through its paces. I was in my element and a grin was breaking onto my face.

My mobile phone rang. Obviously I was busy so my wife took the call. A few words were exchanged before she turned to address me. “It’s Porg. She’s organising a trip to Scapa. Do you want to go?”

I didn’t need to know when, or how much. Such considerations were irrelevant. My response was immediate and emphatic. “Oh yes!”

Another gear shift and with ease we cleared the tractor ahead. The grin on my face was as broad now as the proverbial Cheshire Cat, but it wasn’t all down to the car!

To Mecca

Scapa Flow. The mere mention of the name is sufficient to bring a glassy eyed look to the most hardened of UK wreck divers. For to those that class themselves within that fraternity, Scapa Flow is Mecca itself.

It was June 1919. The First World War was over and peace negotiations were in progress. The German Imperial Navy’s High Seas Fleet had been interned in the natural harbour of Scapa Flow while its fate was decided. Held hostage it was being used as a bargaining tool. No less than 74 ships lay at anchor, including some of the largest battle cruisers ever to grace the oceans. They had been sat idle with skeleton crews for 7 months.

On 21st June the Armistice was due to end. However, that date had been extended two days but that was not known to the commander of the Fleet, Rear-Admiral Ludwig von Reuter. He feared that once the Armistice ended the British would seize his ships. He was not prepared to let this happen.

At 12.10pm on 21st June von Reuter gave the order for the entire fleet to be scuttled.

The contingent of the British Royal Navy that had been assigned to guard the Fleet had left the harbour to conduct torpedo exercises. Caught by surprise they were unable to prevent 52 ships of the German Fleet sinking to the bottom of the Flow.

Over more than 25 years these wrecks were salvaged so that today only 8 remain on the sea bed, but these include some of the most impressive wrecks to be found anywhere.

In addition there are other dives, such as the block ships that guard the entrance to the flow. All this adds up to one of the premier dive locations in the world.

Pilgrim’s Progress

All pilgrimages should involve a testing journey, and getting to Scapa is no exception. Justin was coming across from Chester to pick me up in Manchester. From there it was still an immense journey. Crossing the Scottish border we’d barely started! It’s only when you drive the full length of Scotland that you realise just how big it is. In all it took us 9 hours to make it to Thurso on the north Atlantic coast. We could have been in Sharm in less time! However, the drive does take in some of the most spectacular scenery that you could find anywhere and we amused ourselves with conversation and text messages from the other members of the team making their individual journeys northwards. By 6.00pm we’d arrived, found our digs for the night and met up with the rest of the team as they landed.

First dive of the week was Skinandi’s, possibly the northernmost night club on the UK mainland. Actually, calling it a dive is unfair, as it wasn’t that bad a place. Knowing we wouldn’t be diving the next day this was our chance for a real blow-out. We introduced the locals to ‘Freestyling’ – on a count of 3 just dance like there’s nobody there at all and let it all out! I don’t think they quite knew what to make of us. We had a cracking good night.

The next morning we were up bright and early. Before heading to the ferry there was work to do.

Let me introduce you to Digger. Most people learn to dive and spend the rest of their diving careers adhering to the rules and procedures taught to them. They’re inside the box. Some people stretch those rules and are innovative and progress the collective diving knowledge. They’re outside the box. Digger? Well, he once heard a rumour that a box existed, but he’s no idea where it is or what it looks like. When it comes to diving, Digger is ‘out there’!

Digger makes and dives his own rebreathers. Every dive that he survives is an achievement. For this trip he was on his third generation unit – the only thing was, he hadn’t built it yet! So the morning of the second day was spent on the pavement outside our B&B with a drill assembling the unit from the various pieces, some of which he’d collected on the journey up. The latest addition was a steel box housing for the scrubber, which had been made especially to replace its predecessor, a Tesco shopping basket. One look at this and the unit acquired its new name – it was the C-GoD; the Cheese Grater Of Death!

All work complete we made our way down to the ferry terminal where our mass of kit was piled up before being loaded into containers to go on the ferry. Our cars would be left behind for the week. Everything loaded we boarded for the 1 ½ hour sailing to Stromness. We passed the time by watching a DVD of a previous trip to Scapa on Justin’s laptop. Our appetites were duly whetted.

On arrival our containers were dropped off on the quayside right next to our boat and home for the week, the Jean Elaine. This is a converted fishing vessel that accommodates 12 divers. In truth it’s not your average Red Sea liveaboard – it’s very cramped to say the least, but in challenging sea conditions it does make an excellent dive platform.

With kit unloaded we headed off for food and drink ready for our first day’s diving.

Wreck Heaven

You may know that I’m new to underwater photography, so the few shots that I did manage barely do justice to the dives. Some of these wrecks were spectacular!

Our first day was a bit of a shakedown, starting with the F2; a German WW2 escort ship sunk in 1946. It has been extensively salvaged to the rear of the bridge, but forward of there is pretty much intact, including the 4.1 inch gun to the prow. This is really two dives in one as you can follow a line to the salvage barge that went down while working on the wreck, which is itself just as interesting, with guns salvaged from the wreck lying inside.

The second dive was ‘Bottle Run’. As Royal Navy ships came into the harbour they would be inspected. Any junk, litter or contraband would be thrown over the side, so this area of the flow is littered with spidge. The flow is a voluntary conservation area, which means lifting anything from the wrecks is frowned upon, but the Bottle Run is fair game – it’s really just tidying up. I’ve never been one for taking anything from a dive, but this seemed reasonable to me and I lifted my first bit of undersea treasure in six years of diving – a mug and a small glass vase, both intact and neither of any real value at all!

Blown Away

The second day saw bad weather and we didn’t dive. If you do a week at Scapa at this time of year it’s inevitable that you’re going to lose some diving. We occupied ourselves with a trip to Kirkwall for a bit of shopping, a trip around the Highland Park distillery and a game of 10-pin bowling. There’s not much to do on Orkney really so you do have to hunt around for non-diving amusement, especially if you’ve left your transport on the mainland!

Day 3 saw us finally get the chance to dive wrecks of the German High Seas Fleet, and we were to be blown away in a different way. Our two dives this day were the Brummer and the Coln, two of the cruisers. Both lie in about 35m of water and are very impressive dives. They’re big! I managed to make the full length of the Brummer in a circuit, but not the Coln. There is so much to look at; the bridge structure, the armoured control towers, the guns. Both have been blasted for salvage so there are open entries into the wrecks if that’s your interest. They’ve been down nearly 90 years so there’s also an abundance of life on and around them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such large shoals of fish on a UK dive. Fantastic!

The better of the two was the Coln, and we’d revisit this wreck later in the week. It had been an effort to get all the way to Scapa, and it was less than comfortable living on the boat, but with these dives it was clear to us why we had come, and it was more than worth it.

Big? You ain’t seen nothing yet!

If we thought the cruisers were big we’d seen nothing until the next day when we dropped down on the battleship the Kronprinz Wilhelm. This was immense! It is upside down so you settle on the hull and but for the rows of rivets and bent plating you’d think you were on the sea bed. It’s just enormous! I did two dives on this wreck during the week and barely saw a fraction of it. Dropping right down under the bulwarks at about 35m you get to see the massive guns, now upturned. Just incredible. With air quickly consumed you can’t stay for long but rising up the hull again there are plenty of spaces opened by salvagers to explore. You can attempt to swim the length of it but you’re unlikely to make it all in one dive. The sheer scale of this wreck is what impresses the most.

As a shallower second dive we did one of the block ships; the Tabarka. As impressive as the warships were, I think this was probably my favourite dive of the week. This is a steamer built in 1909 and sunk to guard the entrances of the flow. It has actually been sunk, raised, moved and sunk again, to be left in its current position in 1944. The hull is upside down but can be accessed through a number of holes in the plating. Inside you can find three boilers and the triple-expansion engine. The various wooden decks have rotted away so you can move at ease through the inside of the wreck – a real ferreter’s dream! I loved it!

And yet more!

As the week progressed we did several more dives, taking in the two other cruisers; the Dresden and the Karlsruhe. Both are similar dives to the Coln, and though great dives in their own right perhaps not as good. The Dresden is beginning to collapse. Lying on its side the deck has now split from the hull on the higher starboard side and is beginning to fall away to the seabed. This allowed very easy access inside and made it more interesting as it wasn’t quite as described in the guide books. I enjoyed a good ferret around and ran my deco-obligations to the limit, spending 35 minutes on the wreck and another 25 getting to the surface.

We did a third dive that day; one of the block ships, the Doyle. This dive doesn’t have as good a reputation as the Tabarka, but we’d been talking to one of the divers from another boat the previous evening and he’d loved it, so we decided to give it a go.

This wreck lies next to the Tabarka in Burra Sound. Diving here is challenging as the tidal currents are fierce. You need to drop down to the wreck just before slack and shelter on the leeward side until the current dies. Then you can get inside, and much like the Tabarka it was a wreck-ferreter’s dream, with plenty of tempting swim-throughs. Before too long you need to come out before the current picks up again. I think we’d been dropped in a little late, or perhaps the slack was shorter than usual, but we started to feel the effects of the current whilst still inside. Not expecting the current as early, we thought we were having buoyancy problems. We’d had to haul ourselves inverted down the line to get onto the wreck in the current so both my buddy and I thought we’d got air trapped in our boots and tried to clear it with no success. In hindsight what we were experiencing was the current starting to flow through the wreck and catching our fins, lifting us upward.

We came out of the wreck and the tide was racing. There was no chance of ascending on the shotline so we made our way to the leeward side of the wreck and drifted off it. Settled in the current I sent up my SMB. Having got that deployed we then began to ascend. Unfortunately, we hadn’t been warned that there was a bit of a reef behind the wreck. As the current ran up and over this I was carried with it and found myself rising from 12 meters to the surface in no time at all! Fortunately, as a third dive in the day I’d run no deco-obligation at all so missed no stops. It was a little worrying but I got away with it.

Pilgrim’s Pleasure

So we completed our week by repeating dives on the Kronprinz Wilhelm and the Coln. Despite losing one day we’d managed 11 dives in all and every one was memorable for its own reasons. We had dinner and a few beers together before settling down for our last night on the boat. The next morning it was up early to load equipment into containers to go on the ferry and our epic journey home. Some 12 hours after setting off from Stromness I was back in Manchester. I’d been away for 9 days in all. It had been an effort and perhaps it’s not a journey I’ll be making every year, but it was very much worth it and I will do it again. Some of these dives are very firmly at the top of my list of favourites and if rusty metal is what you’re into then you really have to make your own pilgrimage to that Wreck Mecca that is Scapa Flow.