History and The Wreck
Twenty-four year old Joseph Richardson and George N. Duck formed the company Richardson Duck late in 1854. In the period up to 1865 the yard built a total of 50 screw steamers, one paddle steamer, 10 sailing ships and 29 barges. the first steel ships built on the Tees were launched from this yard in 1859. Over the years the yard took over numerous other yards on the Tees until 1865 when it amalgamated with the engine builder Thomas Richardson and the shipbuilder Denton Gray, both of Hartlepool, forming Richardson, Denton, Duck & Co. though a year later split back in to its constituent parts. Over the period 1870-72 output of the yard averaged 10,000 tons per annum. By 1882 this had risen to 21,000 tons. In 1909 the company was put on the Admiralty List. The yard was busy throughout the First World War, building, amongst others, two Flower class sloops. During the 1920s the company suffered a fall in orders and went in to liquidation in 1925.
On April 7th, 1916, the British steamer SS Braunton, on a voyage from Boulogne to Newport with a cargo of government stores, was sunk by the German submarine UB-29 (Herbert Pustkuchen), 4.5 miles SxW of Beachy Head. There were no casualties
Source: Wrecksite.eu (http://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?169)
About The Charter
Channel Diver is run by Captain Steve who is an excellent skipper. A funny and easy to get along with bloke who serves up lashings of coffee and ginger nuts!
Channel Diver is a catamaran and as such is significantly more stable in the water, good news for those of us who are still trying to find out sea legs.
The Dive
Today I will be diving with my fellow buddy, Rob Waran. From research about the wreck, we knew that she was in around 36-40m of water. Normally Rob and I would be diving 32%, however, this mix would have been quite hot, a ppO2 of 1.47 is not something I'm happy to entertain so a different mix was used. That mix was 25/25 trimix with 50% nitrox for decompression.
We recorded a max depth of around 37m so the helium did take the edge off a bit.
Steve had shotted the wreck perfectly and we were right in the middle of the wreck. The current was running hard and I found it incredible deceiving that I was actually descending as the feeling of the suit squeeze was constant and injecting gas didn't change the feeling as the gas just moved behind me!
Eventually we arrived at the wreck, a minute on the bottom to relax and do a quick bubble check and we were set. We had to make sure we were in trim and looking fabulous of course :-) Current depth 33m. We needed to keep a track on average depth as it would affect our deco profile. And given that I was using an Uwatec D-Timer it didn't calculate average depth, so every few minutes I checked the gauge and did the quick average calc in my head.
We set off and headed over to the boilers, there was a considerable pipe sticking up from the wreckage about 5 feet, a quick peer down with the HID light revealed a crab who was not so pleased with having 21W of HID light in his face and made a go for me! ... so we moved on.
I looked down and saw what I thought was a torch that was still on, the mag lite style. My first thought was "EBAY!", I dropped down to look at it and when I got closer I realised it was a piece of lead used for the fishermen, it was around 8cm long and had a triangular cross-section - easy mistake to make!
Pulling back up and with Rob in the lead we carried on around the wreck. The wreck was quite broken up and it was difficult to tell where on the wreck we were, but I think we found the bow. After coming around the port side of the wreck there was an interesting sight.
I found a crab just floating mid-water. My first thoughts were that it looked like one of those face-huggers from Aliens had been frozen in time halfway through its flight. I saw it just hanging there, so I gave it poke with my light head and it started twitching which scared the hell out of me! Pulling back out of the wreckage we carried on around. There were a few lobsters around as well as some starfish looking creatures.
It was at this point that I found a significant conger! It was a good 2m long with a vicious set of teeth! A few seconds later I found another hiding under some wreckage.
We ended up doing several laps of different parts of the wreck including the bow and stern with propellers.
The Ascent
With a dive time of 35 minutes with an average depth of 37m we called the dive. Rob deployed the bag and I was to run the ascent. Rob started to inflate the bag and let it go, the spool was happily reeling out when suddenly Rob started going up, somehow the spool jammed (to this day we still don't know how it happened) so Rob had to let go of the spool and off it went. I could see on Rob's face the look of "bugger there goes £150 worth of bag and spool ...". There was a few moments of just sitting there looking at each other with Rob feeling sheepish. But true to DIR, I deployed our backup bag and then the roles switch, I was running the bag and Rob ran the ascent.
Other than the loss of the bag the ascent was uneventful. Thankfully, when we surfaced the skipper had recovered the bag! So all in all, a good dive and no one lost any really expensive gear!
Conclusion
The SS Braunton dive was excellent, we enjoyed reasonably good viz of between 5 and 10 meters. There was also a good amount of wildlife to see, I should advise, you need to be wary of fishing line as there was a considerable amount all over the wreck. The wreck itself is very broken up and was more of “bits of metal sticking out the ground”. So whilst it was a good dive and I enjoyed it, it isn’t one I would do again, and I would also advise others to find more interesting wrecks than this.
