Six become five

We all met up last night in the Boat the Rocks, a bar next to Scimitar Diving.  6 of us discussed exactly what we were going to do to get the video shots we needed.  We had a team for lighting, a camera team, and two beautiful models to lay line and look pretty.

On arriving at the dive shop in the morning, I was greeted by a rather sheepish looking diver, who explained to me that he'd taken the three days off work to come on the project, travelled to the UK to attend, and then left all of his dive gear in Bristol.  It's a small oversight, of course, to forget your gear on a dive trip. These things happen. Now we are five.

John lights up a Carley float mounting

The weather was gorgeous. Sunshine, and no wind at all. This is a refreshing change from the norm in the UK, so we (all five of us) were very excited to get onto the wreck. Smudge dropped the shot onto the stern of LST 531 and the new combined video/lighting team descended to get set up.  The shot had landed right on the stern gun tub. We were looking to shoot video on the port side, aft. This made it an easy job to orient ourselves. The visibility was probably between 3-5m, but it was dark as the plankton layers block out most ambient light below about 20m.  We fired up or selection of LED and HID lights, and try to get our eyes in.  Not too bad. John laid a line from the shot to our target area so that Pete and Duncan, who had not dived the wreck before, knew where to go.

Duncan lays line along LST 531

Pete and Duncan approached out of the darkness, lights ablaze and set to work laying line from the port gun tub, past the LCVP and on to the break in the hull. An important job well done.  We did manage to shoot some decent video too, and learned a lot about the positioning of the lights and lighting divers.

All too soon, Pete and Duncan needed to leave, so we bid them farewell and cleaned up the line.  I took the opportunity to shoot a little more video of John doing that, while Paul lit him up from above.

The weather was still nice, 80minutes after descending, and on the way home, we were treated to a display by the Red Arrows. I'm pretty convinced that they came just for us, but others suggested it might have something to do with the Weymouth carnival.  I guess we'll never know.

On our return, number six had returned with a box of dive gear and proclaimed his readiness to dive tomorrow.  The excitement mounts.

Visibility in the Channel

We got up this morning and loaded the boat, excited about what the days diving had to offer. The sea was very calm, although once we left Portland Harbour, the fog was causing a little concern.  It was warm already, so we figured it would burn off in due course.

We arrived on site at about 1130, and Smudge got the shot in in good time. Rich and Os planned a longer bottom time, so jumped in first to find a surprising amount of surface current. After a brief rest on the surface they descended the line and found that the shot had been pulled out in all of the exertion. It had fortunately left a nice deep score in the seabed though, so after tying in a line, they swam up current and connected with the wreck making the next teams job a little easier.  This was also done with 1-2m visibility and no ambient light, so the dive was starting to get difficult already.

The second team, comprising Paul Burgess, Michael Puz and Darren Morley soon arrived on the line but were unable to find the survey lines from our dives in 2010 and 2011. These were in place in 2012, so this was a big disappointment, as they make navigating the wreck so much easier. They headed off to work out where they were, soon arriving on the bow, and realising that this was not where they wanted to be as their job was to survey the break in the hull.  Turn around and head the 70m back.

Rich and Os' job was to look at the bow section and work out whether any vehicles could be seen from the entrance, as we've not managed to get inside much in the past. There was definitely a way on in this area and Rich tied in and started moving in, at which point his light failed.  In 1m visibility, inside the wreck. Os helpfully handed him a backup light and a few minutes was spent peering around to see what was going on. Access into further areas is very likely possible, and Rich fancied that he say a truck tyre at the end of his light beam.  Maybe, maybe not. Either way, they turned tail and fled as it was too far inside a wreck to be messing around on a back up light in poor visibility.

Heading back along the wreck, they passed the LCVP davits, propellors and engine. LST531 sank so fast that she was unable to deploy her LCVP's as lifeboats.  A large hole in the hull was also spied, which hadn't been noticed on previous dives. Paul, Michael and Darren had also come across the same hole, and it may well be the site of one of the torpedo strikes.

The poor visibility had made any kind of quantitative survey impossible, so unfortunately both teams returned with little more than stories and observations. No sketches, but despite that, we have been able to put together a small sketch of the site.

We were very privileged to be joined by Stew Waring from the SHIPS Project in Plymouth.  These guys have some very clever tools and techniques for surveying shipwrecks, and Stew was kind enough to share some insight and give us some advice on how to conduct or survey work.  After our discussions back at Scimitar Diving, we now have a decent strategy for surveying the break, looking in more detail at the torpedo hole, and also to photograph one of the 2.5 ton trucks.

Distances are one of the things we haven't paid enough attention to in the past, and most of are surveys are very qualitative. We aim to rectify this, and one strategy we use is to lay line, knotted at 1m intervals. Boring job, so we made Os do it.

Tomorrow, we will be joined by a handful more divers, and we will hopefully be more productive.

A great day, and more fun to come tomorrow!

2013 diving kicks off

June has come around quickly, which means we're all set to start diving on the project again for 2013. While it's been a while since we've been in the water on these wrecks, lots has been going on.  After a conversation with Mike Postons from 3Deep Media, we commissioned some 3D representations of LST 531 to see how they portrayed the wrecks. We have been very pleasantly surprised, and the images have also gone down really well at the talks that Rich has been giving around Europe.  Given this exciting development, we've decided to return to LST 531 which has more interesting artefacts around the site and to improve the quality of our survey.  The idea is to build up our 3D map of the wreck, and then add in our photo and video imagery to make an interactive documentary of the wreck site.  I'm pleased to say that Mike will be joining us this week to give us some advice and feedback on the way that we collect the data.

Despite looking nice, the weather was blowing hard

Another interesting development happened after a long chat with Nick Chipchase, who has probably dived more UK wrecks than anyone alive, and researched and documented many of them as well.  He has kindly lent us his file on the LST's which includes sketches, dive reports, correspondence with survivors and newspaper and magazine articles about the events and the wrecks.  A real treasure and we're very grateful to Nick for lending us this information.

Last night, five divers arrived in Portland (the first days are always a bit light, for some reason), and we were told that the weather patterns were extremely unpredictable, and that diving today (Monday) was unlikely.

Project plan starts to come together

We showed up ay 8am anyway, to have the news confirmed.  We seized the day, though, and spent our time building a project plan that allows for changeable weather, and also moving into or home for the week in Scimitar Diving's new premises.  We have charging facilities, a nice big computer for video and photo work.  And writing the blog of course!  The weather tomorrow is looking good, we're all filled with gas, and are ready to go. Ropes off is at 10am, and we're planning to put two teams onto the wreck to look at the bow section, and the break in the hull where we should be able to see more vehicles.

Project Update

It's been a busy winter behind the scenes at Project Tiger. I've been overwhelmed by the number of requests I've had for talks at dive clubs around the country. I've talked at the University of Edinburgh, Arbeia Dive Centre in South Shields, CPAS in Lisbon, Portugal and Cave and Wreck Night in Amsterdam, organised by my good friend JP Bresser. The talks are generating a lot of interest, and the feedback is that we're doing a good thing, and people want to get involved, and more interestingly, are starting to set up their own projects too. Great news for wreck diving as a sport, I think.

You'll have seen the sketches that I put up a while back of our survey efforts. Overall I was pretty pleased with our work on these, but I felt that there was more to be done. I came across a company called 3deep Media who have done some amazing work on the wrecks of Scapa Flow, making visual representations of these ships in a way that takes the whole wreck documentation to another level. I started talking to them about our project, and they seemed interested - good news.

I send Mike Postons at 3deep all of our survey data, some diagrams and plans of the LST's and let him at it. I went down to Cornwall a few weeks ago to see the results. I have to say, I was impressed beyond belief. Mike has created a 3d model of LST531, where it is possible to fly around the wreck site, navigating all of our finds and basically viewing it "as if you were there". I cannot think of a better way to record and conserve these wrecks, than in a virtual 3d space. What a resource for anyone wanting to research the history of Exercise Tiger, or to look at the final resting place of a family member that fought on this vessel.

A few screen grabs for your titillation...