Entering the water, the Techwise group became two teams. Alan, Rob and I waited patiently just below the surface, while the Dutchies sorted themselves out. Eventually they descended and my little team headed off. Alan lead us most of the way following the wall of the valley and then pointed me on the right way to the wreck, so I headed off. It wasn't until a few minutes later that I had a fin-tug - I turn around and see Alan! He points me on a new bearing to the wreck, which I follow and we eventually hit the stern.
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| Arriving at the stern |
Settling at the stern, I wait for Rob to arrive with me, turns out apparently I had been swimming uncomfortably quick getting to the wreck - this has happened a few times whenever I have led a dive, I really must try and slow down when I lead.
Settled down and closely re-united, we head off along the starboard side of the ship, swimming along the side of the superstructure the whole way. Along the way there were several entrances into the wreck. I really haven't explored the wreck anywhere near enough, there are whole decks I don't even know about! Continuing forward I swim under the huge davits, possibly 20-25 feet tall that were used for holding and eventually deploying life-rafts. It always 'twangs' with me when I see these on any wreck, because I always have a mental flash back to the scene in Titanic where Rose challenges Mr Andrews (the ship designer) on how few life-rafts there are.
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| Emergency rescue boat davots |
Continuing along this deck, we reached the end of the super-structure and we therefore dropped to the main deck, but on the way I stopped to look at a plaque that has been attached to commemorate the workers that died when there was a massive explosion in one of the main storage tanks. Sadly 9 workers lost their lives.
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| Plaque commemorating the victims |
Rob and I continued forward. In 2006 there were massive storms that hit Malta and the currents also affected the Um El Faroud wreck. The rear is weighed down by the massive engines, however the forward part of the ship is just empty space, as a result the storms split the wreck in two. Currents are now causing the two parts to drift apart. Now they are probably 15m apart from each other.
Swimming the chasm between the two parts of the wreck, Rob and I slowly dropped down to the seabed so that we could swim through the bulkhead that would split two storage areas in the ship. Swimming through a door, I turned around waiting for Rob to follow me through ..... no Rob ....give him a moment, he'll be right behind me .... still no Rob .... give him a bit longer ... nope still no Rob .. where the hell is he? ... I see a glint in the very corner of my left eye ... I look left and I see Rob's shaft .... of his light coming through a hatch on the other-side of the bulkhead. Swinging the GoPro around to be at this doorway instead to record Rob as he comes through.
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| Rob swimming through the bulkhead |
Swimming further forward in the storage cell, we start to enter an area with no light coming through from above, the light is dropping, but we can still clearly see that there is yet another bulkhead ahead of us. Swimming forward, Rob led and we swam through the bulkhead into the next compartment. It is pitch black in here with the exception of a small, 10" hole above us streaming white-blue light in via a pillar of light. The compartment is completely empty, we can see the ribs of the keel but other than that there is little of interest so we exit this compartment.
Between the two bulkheads that we swam through, part of the decking has been removing, so we ascend gradually up to it. Rob finds a ladder to 'climb' which brought us back to the main deck.
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| Rob climbs the ladder. |
Swimming along the deck, we are approaching the bow. There is small one-man passageway that leads into the bow structure, but we ascend up onto the bow-deck.
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| Swimming up onto the main bow-deck |
On the bow-deck now, Rob swims forward to look down a hatch which leads down to the passageway that I just mentioned. It's hard to resist looking down a deep, dark hole.
Despite having the ability to move how we desire in the 3D space that is the sea, we swam up the stairs to the starboard to take us to the absolute top deck of the bow. On this deck is the machinery for raising the gigantic anchors. The chainlinks are made from steel a good three inches thick.
Now I decided to capture what I thought would be a 'million-dollar-shot' (like the one in the
HMS Hellespont dive), I had Rob hold steady hovering just behind the bow-structure, whilst I swam right out away from the wreck and recorded Rob hovering there above the bow. Watching this shot back, I wish I had gone even further so that you could see the keel go the whole way down to the seabed.
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| That's another million in money-shots :) |
Heading back along the port side of the ship, we swam down the stairs to take us back to the bow-deck. Along the way, Rob finds a large hole into a compartment below the deck. Looking down there is some large machinery, some kind of venting equipment.
We continued our journey back, about to reach the gap between the two sections of the wreck, I took the opportunity to capture some video of Rob in perfect trim as I swam up beside him.
Swimming across the gap, we swam straight for the main superstructure. At the bottom of this structure, there is a door leading in. How inviting! Rob gave me a quick glance, with a gesture of heading inwards, a quick but enthusiastic nod was all I had to do and Rob was off!
Heading inside, we have large bore pipes running above, and on either side of us. There is a beautiful blue light pouring in through doors on either side of the deck, as well as pouring in from above us at the far end of the compartment.
Rob drops down a gap in the decking so that he can descend deeper into the engine room. At this point I've now got my work cut out: I've got a light on the back of my left hand, the GoPro in my right, I also need to descend behind Rob which means I will need to 1. equalise my ears by gently blowing whilst pinching my nose so that my ears don't get crushed by the increased water pressure caused by descending, 2. equalise my mask - again the water wants to try and crush it and 3. squirt some air into my wing to try and keep my neutral in the water - all at the same time! Oh and ideally not shake my light around too much because as a team we use the light to communicate - if you see a rapidly moving light, it normally implies a diver in an emergency - I don't want to false alarm Rob!
Rob is waiting, floating above a walkway while I get settled on the same level a quick circle of the lights in a large O is our way of communicating "You OK? Yeah I'm OK too".
On this level, there is a small office in the corner, there is still a walkway going further aft, but we work around this deck.
We are now coming around the starboard side of the compartment, about 5m below us the huge engines are visible, we are floating above them looking around - there are so many corners to investigate but time is limited!
To our right there are more rooms, even some stairs leading up into an area I have never been before. Swimming through a hatch, we arrive underneath the entrance that we came in to the engine room from.
I thought now would be an ideal opportunity for a selfie, with the dark background of the compartment behind me!
At this point, I could see that Rob was tapping his computer quite a lot, he turns around to me and says the computer is broken (imaging breaking a twig in your hands - that's the guesture). Whoops! Now I ask myself - Chris, so what's our average depth been? (my computer only tells me current depth, so I have to check it every few minutes and do some sums in my head to track average depth). I had been tracking it, but I sanity checked myself, the deck is at about 20-21m, the very bowels of the engine room is 32m, but we were not that far down, so I played it safe by picking an average depth of about 24m. Next question, how long have we been down ... *look at computer* approaching an hour. So with those two pieces of information I can start working out a decompression strategy.
We are now heading back along the port deck, looking out to my right I see a school of barracuda swimming gracefully.
Arriving at the stern, its time to head back to the inlet. Now from memory I thought that if we took a 45 degree angle running off the stern that should bring us nicely to the inlet. On the way we would switch to our 50% oxygen decompression gas, and then follow the wall around to the inlet, ascending slowly as we go, before completing the bulk of our decompression between 9-6m in the safety of the inlet.
That was the plan ....
Things didn't QUITE go to plan.
We took the 45 degree bearing off the stern. I figured 5 or so minutes we would start to see the wall. There is also a divers helmet mounted on a plinth on the way ... After 5 minutes I had NOT seen the plinth nor could I see the wall. I was keeping us 'deep' at about 25m because I wanted to keep an eye on the seabed for clues to home. I was getting twitchy, my reserves were running low and decompression obligation is racking up and I wasn't sure exactly where we were. I turn around and ask Rob where he thinks. He wanted to go further right, but that REALLY doesn't feel right to me, so I keep us on the bearing I was headed on. But I wanted to get us off the weak trimix and onto our decompression gas - doing so means that we will be at least starting our decompression even if we are fannying around trying to find home.
I turn around again I tell Rob we are going to switch. First thing, I had to bring us up to 21m so that we could safely breathe the 50% oxygen mix in our stages ... I got us settled, and I had Rob switch first. Once he was settled, I switched. I did feel my body unwind a little, I was now on a relatively plentiful gas supply now.
Time to continue heading home.... I keep us swimming on our bearing a bit more then I get my first clue, and it wasn't any of the physical clues mentioned earlier: I was a boat going overhead. I know boats go in and out the inlet regularly, now sound does travel very quick under water which makes determining direction virtually impossible (the sound arrives at both ears at virtually the same time) but I was adamant it went straight over, so I re-directed us.
Swimming onwards, I'm getting more and more tense again because I can't see any walls (it turns out I was basically swimming right up the center of the inlet, but because of the 'poor' visibility I couldn't see either side so I didn't know I was coming in the inlet).
We had been swimming at 21m for about 5 minutes now, so it was time for us to move up a bit to 18m. Because of the stress of getting us home, I hadn't worked out a pucker decompression pattern, but what I was doing was giving us 3-5 minutes every 3m, I knew that would result in a massive decompression time, but that would definitely be enough.. Up to 18m in mid-water. Then carrying on.
I got a slightly better feeling now because I could see some kind of rocky seafloor coming up underneath us, I know the inlet ramps down to about 20m so I started getting a feeling like this could be it - in any case, we at least found the coast of Malta again!
Rob asked me about our deco, I asked for his wet notes so I could start writing some info down. My theory was if I give him the key points, he could work out the deco in his head so he would feel comfortable with my proposed deco. So I tried to tell Rob the key points. In my mind they were
- Average Depth: 24m
- Bottom Time: 65 minutes
The deco profile I was thinking was based on the 45m diving we had been doing the previous days because I wasn't thinking clearly enough to really work it out
- 21m - 5 (already completed)
- 18m - 3 (already completed)
- 15m - 3
- 12m - 3
- 9m - 5
- 6m - 10
Time to move up now, we also plodded along the seabed until we hit the "ceiling". At about the 13m area, I looked up and could see the surface, although with the current profile I was still 15 minutes away from surfacing.
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| Almost to the surface now .. |
Whilst I looked up and trying to triple check my numbers (to make sure that they were at least on the conservative side) and self-checking (have I got pain in any joints? Am I already bent?) I saw my proof that everything was going to be OK. I saw someone jumping in the water, looking behind them I saw the infamous ladders. I had got us back to the inlet - at this point, I felt my entire body relaxing.
Rob and I got settled against the wal at 6m to get cosy for the 'long' stop of over 10 minutes.
Hitting the surface, it was lovely to feel the sun on our faces again. The dive had been excellent, there was a period of 20 minutes of truly stressful moments, but it was an amazing dive!
Dive Video
Throughout the dive, I had been shooting video on my GoPro Hero camera. I've assembled the video into a piece which you can watch below. If you like the video, let me know with a 'like' (the heart icon!).
