August 13th 2010 I began the long road trip to Carrigart in Co. Donegal. The road is long but the car was loaded with enough cylinders to provide a booster to the moon; two twinsets of Trimix 18/45; two stages of 100% o2; two stages of 50% o2; one stage of Trimix 21/35; two 1L ali argon bottles. Clearly I had a lot of Trimix diving on my mind.
It was a fantastic sunny Friday afternoon while driving up to meet with my dive buddy Declan Burke (DivinDec) for a weekend of deep wreck diving off of the coast of Donegal. We were diving from the superb boat the Rosguill skippered by the equally superb Michael McVeigh. I met with Declan early that evening in the town of Letterkenny for dinner and a chat about our dive plan for the next two days. We discussed our target dive sites as Declan was running the weekend trip he was planning on heading out on Saturday to the Empire Heritage and on the Sunday to either the HMS Audacious or the U89. With a lovely dinner in the digestive tract and having talked through our gas and deco strategies I got back on the road to Carrigart and the excellent accommodation of the Fisherman’s Village. I arrived into the B&B at around 22:00 and the place was busy with a group of UK divers who had just spent a fantastic week of wreck diving from the Rosguill. I said my hellos and goodnight to the guys in fairly close order and retired for a decent night sleep – it had been a very long day!
Next morning I had breakfast with a rousing conversation from the UK divers raging over the optimum lift bag configuration… it was genuinely strangely fascinating. With my fill of scrambled eggs and coffee I headed down to Carrigart dock to meet the dive team for the weekend. It was a mixed group of CCR divers and myself and Declan on OC. The CCR crew were really great guys and although they knew I was a DIR/GUE diver they did not try to convince me of their CCR ways and I returned the favour – instead we all focused on having a great bit of craic! The stunningly beautiful, sunny and calm day helped raise the whole spirits of the guys and crew on board and the banter was great. Our skipper had set course for the wreck of the Empire Heritage.
The Empire Heritage was a World War 2 transport ship and made of I would say fairly inferior materials as the vessel herself is almost totally broken into pieces. However you don’t dive the Empire Heritage for the ship, but rather her cargo... loads & loads of WW2 Sherman Tanks! If you ever wondered what it would look like for a God to throw his box full of toy tanks onto the floor - then you have to try to dive this wreck. Tanks litter the sea floor, right side up, upside down, on their side and resting on top of each other. It is truly an amazingly surreal experience to drift past these silent weapons of war and to see them in almost perfect condition with just a little marine growth over their armoured hulls. The visibility on this dive was easily 25m and we stayed amongst the tanks for 25min with maximum depth registering as 63.7meters. Our decompression ran roughly 79 minutes so a total runtime of 104 minutes and it was worth every second of it. A fantastic dive and a real treat to get the image of those tanks into your memory banks. It probably would not be as impactful on a second or subsequent dive - but for the first time, this was a superb dive.
Dinner was consumed with gusto, there is nothing like a great day at sea to give one a hearty appetite at night. The conversation again featured great banter and superb diving stories shared in peace and tranquillity between myself and the rest of the guys (all CCR) with no one chastising my DIR/GUE OC ways… these were classy, friendly, knowledgeable and accomplished CCR guys. Respect!
The next morning we loaded up the Rosguill from Carrigart dock and headed out to sea on yet another flat calm sea accompanying a suitably stunning sunny day. Michael McVeigh set out to sea with the mark for the U89. This wreck is a WWI German U-boat off of the Donegal coast and rests upright on the seabed at a max depth of 60m. She had the misfortune to surface during operations directly in front of a Royal Navy vessel that quickly proceeded to ram her, sending her on her final voyage to the bottom of the sea. I will never forget the moment I saw this wreck begin to come into focus at a depth of 30m as Declan and I were descending skydiver style next to the shot line. I was watching the depth gauge clock out the ever increasing depth when with 30 meters still to go to the seabed we could start to make out the shape of this huge wreck (and I mean much larger than the WWII U-boats). Her conning tower was very slight but very menacing and the super structure is still in excellent shape - there is no difficulty making out the fact that this was a submarine. She has two 4" deck guns - one aft and one forward of the conning tower and the site is littered with 4" shells. You can look into the bow torpedo tubes and even look into the torpedo room from one break in the superstructure - with torpedoes readily visible. We explored this fascinating wreck for 25min from bow to stern with a max depth of 56.7m. Deco was just over an hour, but well worth it. I surfaced from that dive with a total runtime of 93 minutes and a smile that just would not go away for a few hours... simply awesome wreck. Sorry I have no in water photo as my camera housing cant go below 40m. I pulled out of Carrigart on Sunday afternoon the 15th of August and headed back to Kilkenny with a fantastic two days of deep wreck diving in the bag. Declan was a superb and very capable dive buddy. The CCR guys were superb, great fun and very, very experienced I really enjoyed their company, banter and superb diving stories of the deep wrecks off of the Donegal coast. Michael McVeigh shone through as a stunningly accomplished skipper and he was extremely capable and friendly I left Carrigart already looking forward to a return trip as soon as the next opportunity presented itself…
Tuesday the 28th of September presented just such an opportunity. I got the call from Declan… there was a slot open for a dive on the HMS Audacious. I was in my gas station blending gases quicker than I could say “I will be there!”. I arrived into the Fisherman’s Village on Monday evening the 27th and instantly bumped into some of the CCR divers I had met on my previous trip to Donegal in August. We headed out for dinner and caught up on our diving news and views. When we arrived back at the B&B Michael McVeigh had put a real treat onto the agenda. He had gathered three ships bells and wanted us to record them being “struck” (rung) for the first time since they had been recovered from the deep and restored to their original glory by Kevin McShane. The three bells were:
- Transylvania: She made her maiden voyage on September 12, 1925 from Glasgow to New York. In September 1939 she was used as an armed merchant cruiser.On August 10/1940 the Transylvania was torpedoed by the German submarine U-56 35 N miles north of Tory Island. She was taken in tow but sank before reaching the coast With the loss of 48 lives. [click hear to ring the bell]
- H.M.S. Carinthia: Sunk; a converted Cunarder. The Secretary of the Admiralty regrets to announce that H.M.S. Carinthia Captain J. F. B. Barrett, R.N, armed merchant cruiser was torpedoed by a U-boat and subsequently sunk. Two officers and two ratings lost their lives when the ship was hit. The next of kin have been informed. The remainder of the officers and ship's company have been saved. Survivors arrived at a British port on Saturday and described how the Carinthia replied with all her guns to the submarine. One of the men Was badly injured add has been taken to hospital suffering from pneumonia which he contracted after the ship went down. The Carinthia was a 20,000-ton Cunarder built in 1925. With some 50 others she was taken up for naval service at the beginning of the war armed and commissioned as a man- of-war. [click hear to ring the bell]
- RMS Amazon an ocean liner sunk by German submarine U-110 on 15 March 1918; U-110 was sunk by escorts the same day. [click hear to ring the bell]
Tuesday morning it was early start to the day and we once again loaded up the Rosguill with our gear and we steamed out in the direction of the WWI super dreadnought HMS Audacious.
[Wikipedia] At the beginning of the First World War, Audacious was part of the 2nd Battle Squadron of the Grand Fleet. On 27 October 1914, the 2nd Battle Squadron — consisting of the 'super-dreadnoughts' King George V, Ajax, Centurion, Audacious, Monarch, Thunderer and Orion — left Lough Swilly to conduct gunnery exercises at Loch na Keal.
In a middle of a turn at 08:05, Audacious ran upon a mine laid by the German auxiliary minelayer Berlin. The port engine room was flooded immediately, and Audacious began to list heavily and settle by the stern. Captain Cecil F. Dampier, thinking that the ship had been attacked by a submarine, hoisted the submarine warning and the rest of the squadron steamed away from possible danger. Audacious — though unmanageable — was still capable of making 9 kn (10 mph; 17 km/h) on her starboard engines. Dampier believed that he had a chance of making the 25 mi (40 km) to land and beach the ship. The light cruiser Liverpool stood by, while Audacious broadcast distress signals by wireless. The Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, Sir John Jellicoe, ordered every available destroyer and tug out to assist, but did not dare send out battleships to tow Audacious in because of the apparent submarine threat. Meanwhile, the White Star liner Olympic arrived on the scene.[1]
At 10:50, with flooding worsening in the starboard engine room, Audacious stopped. Dampier brought the bow of the ship round to sea and ordered all non-essential crew off. Boats from Liverpool and Olympic assisted until all but 250 men were taken off. At 13:30, the captain of Olympic, Commodore Haddock, suggested that his ship attempt to take Audacious in tow. Dampier agreed and with the assistance of the destroyer Fury a tow line was passed within 30 minutes. The ships began moving toward Lough Swilly, but Audacious was so unmanageable that the tow line parted. Liverpool and the collier Thornhill attempted to take the battleship in tow, but to no avail.[2] In the meantime, at 13:08 a message had arrived from the coastguard station at Mulroy that the steamer Manchester Commerce had been mined in the same area the day before. At 16:60, Malin Head reported that the sailing vessel Cardiff had also been mined the previous night. Upon learning this, at 17:00 Jellicoe ordered the pre-dreadnought battleship Exmouth out to attempt to tow Audacious in. In case the ship was saved, he also requested an officer from the Construction Department at the Admiralty, in anticipation of major repairs.[3][4][5]
Vice-Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly, commander of the 1st Battle Squadron, arrived on the scene in the boarding vessel Cambria and took over the rescue operation.[5] With dark approaching, Bayly, Dampier and the remaining men on Audacious were taken off at 19:15. At 21:00, Audacious capsized and exploded, sending debris into the air. A piece of armour plate fell on and killed a petty officer on Liverpool, which was 800 yd (730 m) away. This was the only casualty in connection with the sinking.[6][7]
Jellicoe immediately proposed that the sinking be kept a secret, which the Board of Admiralty and the British Cabinet agreed to, an act open to ridicule later on. For the rest of the war, Audacious' name remained on all public lists of ship movements and activities. Many Americans on board Olympic were beyond British jurisdiction and discussed the sinking. Many photos, and even one moving film, had been taken. By 19 November, the loss of the ship was accepted in Germany.[8] Jellicoe's opposite number in Germany, Reinhard Scheer, wrote after the war: "In the case of the Audacious we can but approve the English attitude of not revealing a weakness to the enemy, because accurate information about the other side's strength has a decisive effect on the decisions taken."[9]
On 14 November 1918, shortly after the war ended, a notice officially announcing the loss appeared in The Times:
“
H.M.S. Audacious.
A Delayed Announcement.
The Secretary of the Admiralty makes the following announcement:—
H.M.S. Audacious sank after striking a mine off the North Irish coast on October 27, 1914.
This was kept secret at the urgent request of the Commander-in-Chief, Grand Fleet, and the Press loyally refrained from giving it any publicity.[10]
”
A Royal Navy review board judged that a contributory factor in the loss was that Audacious was not at battle stations, with water-tight doors locked and damage control teams ready. Note that Marlborough, of the subsequent (but fairly similar) Iron Duke class, was torpedoed at Jutland and for a time continued to steam at 17 kn (20 mph; 31 km/h).
The wreck of Audacious was found 24 miles north of the Irish coast, and filmed for the television show Deep Wreck Mysteries on the History Channel. [/Wikipedia]
The sea was a little rougher today than on our last trip to Donegal, but spirits were high and everyone on board was looking forward to the dive. Declan and I rolled over the side with Trimix 18/45 in our twinsets, one stage of 50% o2, one stage of 100% o2 and of course a 1L ali bottle of argon.
We bottomed out just above the seabed at 63 m and basked in the presence of the awesome scale of this WWI wreck site. Thanks to Martin Kiely for providing me with a copy of his photo (left) from this dive. This picture shows clearly the sheer scale of the ships guns and boy were they stunning… Leaving the overriding impression on anyone who witnessed these astronomical tools of war of “thank God we were never on the receiving end of those bad boys!”
The dive ran flawlessly as we spent a full 20min exploring the wreck. There were artefacts to be seen all over the seabed and this proved to be a great and interesting dive.
Decompression ran at just over 60 minutes and of course it was worth every second of it.
As usual Declan was a superb dive buddy and deco ran as smooth as silk.
I headed back to Kilkenny that evening tired but with a great smile on my face – a superb little trip.
Thanks to everyone on the Rosguill that day – it was superb!
Safe diving.
Grif.
