Cork Sub Aqua Club

Kowloon Bridge, a photo by riordan_david on Flickr.

A week ago, for the first time in several years, we dived the Kowloon Bridge. It is hard to know why we hadn’t dived it recently, we dive other sites nearby on a regular basis, but I think that the main reason was that after the bow section collapsed a few years ago it became less accessible: deeper, the deck moved from 5 meters down to 18 meters, and there was less shelter from the current so it had to be dived at a suitable tide.
What we discovered by going back was that the wreck we once knew as a colossal and impressive looming overhang with outsized everything: anchor, winches, hawse hole, and ore compartments, but that was also pretty sterile from a wildlife perspective has changed. Back then the outside surfaces of the steel of the wreck which sank in 1986 still had some intact anti-fouling and the shifting cargo of iron ore inside provided no firm anchor for plant or animal life to gain a foothold. Now the older corroded twisted and folded steel plates provides a maze of overhangs and hiding places for fish, as well as a surface covered in hydroids and anenomes, the preferred food of nudibranchs. If you have a macro lens bring it. I dived with a wide angle lens expecting something like the old Kowloon Bridge, but the way it is now is fascinating in a different way.

Pretty Good visibility and some reasonable weather helped make this a very good weekend’s diving. We normally try to pick a sheltered spot for Easter with some alternate sites to choose from if the wind strength or direction turns out to not be ideal. Dingle has nearby Smerwick as an option if the wind is westerly or southerly, but in the end it was northwesterly which made the dive sites around Dingle (Crow Rock, The Gravelly), and those near Ventry like Parkmore point, even the south east side of the Great Blasket accessible. As usual thornback rays were seen at The Gravelly, Octopuses are a dingle special, one was seen again at Parkmore Point. I felt a bit guilty as I tucked into a big lunchtime plate of calamari at the Dingle Marina cafe, at the fate of it’s cephalopod cousins the squid, which sort of lack that charisma. Speaking of charismatic wildlife, here is always the occasional appearance of the other star of the Dingle wildlife show: Fungi the bottlenose dolphin to entertain us on the way in and out of the harbour. Some of us may have seen a minke whale on the way to the Blaskets (too far away to be sure), and apparently we missed a basking shark at about three meters depth on the Three Brothers (which divers from the UCD club, who arrived as we were diving, spotted as we were about to leave).
The highlight for many will have been the Three Brothers, a wrecked steel trawler, off the Great Blasket, and with some excellent viz for April. The boat ride was a bit arduous, with a cold wind and some choppy waves, and long enough to put the endurance of the human bladder to the test on the way back. We would have brought two boats and two bottles except that the Humber steering had problems when we launched it on the Friday. With the Humber not exactly adrift, but not steerable, and with two other people having swum out to give advice and assistance, Lucie eventually headed out on the other boat to rescue her husband.
On the social side of events Cathy from Daunt graciously invited us to a barbeque expertly cooked by Chris Crouch on Saturday Night, and a very good time was had by all.

The trick to finding the wreck of the French steamship Hourtien, is not to look for the wreck itself, but to look for the gulley leading to it. Descending a bit north of the GPS marks and the rock that marks where the wreck lies we headed south east to find a deep wide gulley heading down to 30 meters, and with at least two congers in it. then once we had reached the maximum depth we wanted we turned back up the gulley until we came out in a flat area. A few bits of steel plate were lying about and we kept going shallower until we got to about 18 meters. There, quite close to shore is most of the wreck.
Wrecked in 1931 she lies in quite shallow water between the wreck of the Illyrian and Gascannane sound. Quite a nice spot and only a short spin from Baltimore, and sheltered from any westerly or northerly wind. We dived her near the middle of a spring tide and had no current.
As a result of being so shallow she is very broken up, even the boiler has been de-constructed more or less so that there are more holes in the casing than intact steel. Another consequence of being shallow is that despite some iffy visibility there was plenty of light for photography. I actually had to adjust the exposure of some of the photos down a bit. The light shines through the holes in the boiler illuminating the inside. Two anchors were spotted by people more interested in the exact function of bits of rusty metal than I am. Six conger were also spotted on the dive, in the gulley as well as on the wreck.

Night Dive Daunt Rock

Ling on Night Dive

It is getting to the time of year again when the dusk is soon enough for a night dive to be at a reasonable hour (neither midnight nor the middle of the afternoon). With the boat conveniently moored at brightly lit and easily navigable Crosshaven, we headed out on Friday evening to dive the Daunt Rock. The trick is to kit up while there is still some twilight and have darkness fall just after you leave the surface. We timed it perfectly. Joost had the good idea of attaching a light stick to a surface marker boy that he towed on the dive. Gerry, who was coxing was able to follow it fairly well after darkness fell. With a neap tide there was little current and a half moon to help us navigate back to Crosshaven. The fish life is fairly tame on a night dive, some of the fish are actually asleep. Others such as Congers that would normally be holed up during daylight are out and about at night. Also Ling which I was able to photograph despite some challenging lighting conditions. We saw several small congers (or maybe the same one several times !). There is some metal on the Daunt rock, evidence of the fact that it was once the cause of some shipwrecks. The rock is buoyed, with a red lateral mark (I would have expected an isolated danger mark). You have probably seen the buoy many times from nearby Roberts’ Cove.

A very early start, and the slightly early birth of a child meant that there were only five takers for this dive. Light winds and a relatively calm sea gave us the chance to dive a wreck that none of the five of us had dived before. The early start was to avoid mid-tide but in the end there was very little current. The smaller of the two club boats, the Humber, was large enough, but I began to doubt this when we started to load all the gear for two dives into the bow. Fortunately the load was evened out when we put Jim’s lunch down at the stern end.
The stern and midships section of the Sloop HMS Mignonette lies in 35 meters near Galley Head Co Cork. It is about a nine mile spin from Union Hall. She was a small warship and is quite broken up. The bow section is so far away from the stern that it is a separate dive. The stern and midships part of the wreck is just about big enough to cover in about 25 minutes, which is what you will get using a 30% mix. Being a small wreck the shot has to be dropped more exactly, but the boilers show up well on the sounder. The GPS co-ordinates we used dropped the shot a little to the west of the boiler but having seen that this was the case from the sounder we finned a few meters east to find the wreck.

She struck a mine on St Patrick’s day 1917 and sank. The mine had been laid by a U-Boat. There was either no loss of life, or casualties not known. Five days earlier the Mignonette had helped rescue the crew of SS Malmanger that had also struck a mine. The day after, the 18th, another minesweeper: Alyssum went down 1½ miles further offshore. The wreck has lots of small barrell shaped objects with rounded ends that we assumed to be munitions, shells for the gun. We had been warned that some of these contain phosphorus so not to disturb them. There is no big gun aboard, that was salvaged some time ago and taken to Kinsale. We failed to find the Prop. But there was lots of stuff to see. The Great War flower class sloops were mainly used as minesweepers and were built with an old engine design, and as a result were slow, but they were not intended to escort convoys or catch the enemy, so slow was not a problem. They had a triple hull, and obviously this didn’t save the Mignonette, but maybe it helped save the crew. She had two boilers, and two funnels, but only a single propellor. To be honest I only saw one boiler, but others saw both. There is an engine and what seems to be an electrical generator.

It is dark at that depth, and the light was a little green from plankton, but on the wreck viz was reasonably clear. The seabed was rocky and flat with a little seaweed. There were plenty of small fish on the wreck. Wildlife included Cuckoo Wrasse, Pouting, and conger.

We left from Union Hall, and lunched at red strand. We brought second bottles for a dive on the “Norwegian” that did not work out as a wreck dive but was a pleasant scenic dive.

I hadn’t dived the Folia for several years, not because club dives on the Folia are especially rare, (there had been a few already in 2009), but because I just happened to be unavailable whenever one was arranged. So I was looking forward to this. My recollection was that the wreck is really quite impressive. She lies at a depth of 33 to 38 meters several miles off Ardmore Co Waterford, and is within sight of Youghal and Ardmore. Despite some imperfect visibility it was a very enjoyable dive.
The problem of photographing and describing a wreck the size of the Folia is a bit like describing and photographing the grand canyon. It is difficult to convey the impressive scale of a wreck in a series of photographs or words, especially if conditions on the dive were not especially favorable for photography. I would like to dive the wreck again with clearer viz, like I had the previous time I dived, and a fast wide lens. The Folia is one of those dives that people like to do many times because it is probably one of the largest wrecks at a non-decompression diving depth off the south coast. There is always something new to discover. OK the Kowloon Bridge was an order of magnitude larger, but since the bow section collapsed also an order of magnitude less fascinating.

Sometimes known as the Folio, her real name was Folia. Militarily speaking the U-Boat that sank her did a pretty good job by preventing a large cargo of artillery shell casings from reaching the Western Front. The deaths of seven of the crew was the sad price paid. Despite extensive salvage that has destroyed much of the superstructure aft of the boilers there are still many of the shell casings to be found. We saw evidence that salvage continues. In effect she is being turned into a habitat for marine life. There are lots of nooks and crannies on the wreck. This is a good place to see congers. As a consequence of being a cozy home for fish, it gets some anglers, so watch out for hooks and fishing line.

I used a 28% mix, and we had about a 20 minute bottom time with plenty of no-decompression limit to spare, partly due to a miscalculation on my part, we headed back to the shotline a tad early. Launching from Knockadoon was OK, but there were waves coming around the point which made retrieval a bit challenging. Thanks to Brian for towing and coxing, and to Helen for organizing the dive, also Joost for helping us drop the shotline on the correct spot.

For those interested in the history of the wreck there is an article on the Waterford County Museum webpage: http://www.waterfordcountymuseum.org/exhibit/web/Display/article/160/4/?lang=en

Four divers from Cork SAC, Steve Clare myself and Brian went to Cocos Island and Costa Rica in August. Since then quite a few people have been asking me: “when are we going to see your photos from Cocos?”. You see the problem has been that, after my old camera gave up the ghost in 2008 I kinda lost interest in underwater photography for a while, before buying Graham’s old camera to try out an SLR. With one thing and another I only got about half a dozen dives with the SLR before I went to Cocos, and really only decided to bring the camera at the last minute, so I have been a bit shy about showing the photos which I know to be not the best. Nevertheless the dives in Cocos were brilliant and I hope the photos don’t do them too much of an injustice. Anyhow Brian has the better photos, so ask him too!
If you ever saw the start of ‘Jurassic Park’, the jungle covered island that the intrepid dinosaur seekers fly into is Isla Del Coco: or Cocos island. The island, and the waters around it, are a national park of Costa Rica. Eight park rangers and maybe some coast guard are the only residents. To put it in an Irish context, Cocos is about the size of Valentia Island, maybe a bit smaller. It is a thirty six hour boat trip from Puntarenas (The main pacific port of Costa Rica). It is steep with dense foliage, and volcanic in origin. The coastline, apart from a few bays, consists mainly of steep cliffs down which numerous waterfalls cascade. According to Wikipedia it gets an an average annual rainfall of over 7,000 mm (275 in). That is about seven times the annual rainfall that Cork gets. There is a dry season and a wet season. We went in the wet season. The boat has a rainwater collection system. Long hot showers are not a problem, the tap water is drinkable, and unique in my experience of liveaboards elsewhere: in Egypt or Australia; there is a laundry service aboard ! But it didn’t rain that much, a bit for the first few days, the sea was 27 to 29 degrees C, and we were glad of a bit of cloud cover because when the sun shone it was almost too hot. All the waterfalls are very atmospheric, like a lost world, but the amount of fresh water during the wet season tends to affect underwater visibility a bit. Dry season it seems is clearer but with fewer fish.
Enough about annual rainfall and laundry, what about the sharks? There are many to see, on every dive, and sometimes your field of vision is filled with them. So dense that the hammerheads almost look like flocks of birds wheeling and swooping above. Not just Hammerheads, but also silver tips, white tips, black tips (which we didn’t see), galapagos sharks, silkies (which kinda look like galapagos sharks except to an expert), whale sharks (which another boat saw). The difference between white tips and silver tips is that white tips have white tips just on dorsal fin and top of tail and are smaller, silver tips are larger and have a silver trailing edge to all their fins. I have seen big sharks before, even hammerheads, but never the huge schools that you see at Cocos. Plenty of rays too including manta, marble ray, and mobula. The usual reef wildlife that would amaze you elsewhere: moray, turtles, lobsters and all, seem almost to be bit players, with the sharks as the stars of the show.
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Octopus

Declan Garnish Pier

The first Saturday was the only day that no diving was possible due to weather. Sunday and Monday followed the pattern of a brief respite from overnight winds in the morning and early afternoon before it blew up again later. But two dives (albeit with lumpy boat trips) were possible both days. From Tuesday we were able to travel further afield round to the south side of Dursey Island.
Drift dives proved to be unexpectedly popular. I have seen four planned drift dives ever with Cork SAC (intentional ones as opposed to mis-timed slack water) and two of those were last week. It is something we should do a bit more often because they are a blast. We calculated that on the second drift dive on Friday, one buddy pair must have traveled almost two miles in 45 minutes. Unlike in Renvyle, when the first night dive was a highlight, this year the traditional night dive was nothing to write home about, so I won’t blog about it either. By Thursday things had calmed down enough for a dive at Crow head (where the octopus posed for the camera). By Friday my favourite dive site: the Cow was dive-able and that was a fabulous dive. Saturday we went back to the dive sites nearer Garnish Pier to allow the boats to be pulled earlier. The best diving was Thursday and Friday.
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Fivebeard Rockling

Bullen’s Bay lies to the east of the Old Head of Kinsale so it is a good spot for a shore dive, snorkel or night dive if the wind is Northerly westerly or south westerly. There is a mixture of sandy and rocky sea bed types with a reef a little offshore that is exposed from mid to low tide. Depths of between 5 and 7 meters are normal at high tide. During the summer there is plenty to see with pipefish being fairly numerous, and dogfish, even cuttlefish. During the winter it is a bit more sparse but there is always the chance of finding something a bit unusual such as the fivebeard rockling pictured opposite.

If the posts on this blog have tempted you to take up diving and you live near Cork then:

Cork Sub aqua club is looking to recruit about fourteen beginners with no prior diving experience to begin instruction and pool training in November 2008. The training will be towards CFT and CMAS one star and two star certification. Training is free of charge except for pool costs (should be about 100 euro); but you will have to join CFT and Cork SAC. Training nights will be Mondays 7PM ( a little bit earlier on pool nights to allow time to get changed), with theory classes and pool work on alternate weeks. The training will be in Ringaskiddy near Carrigaline about 15KM from Cork.

A medical will be required, you should also be able to swim 200 meters in a pool (any style and not timed).

You will eventually be expected to get your own equipment but for initial training we can borrow from existing members. If you had a wetsuit or semi-dry to begin with that would be good.

The one star course is planned to run until mid December 2008.
This qualifies you to dive to 25 meters (obviously after some qualifying work in the sea, and becoming dived up to that depth) with a two star diver, or thirty meters under certain limited conditions.

The CMAS certification is recognized world wide.

Two star course will run in February.

We will also take people with prior qualifications but as part of a separate crossover course to run in January 2009.

Contact 086 1089435 if you are interested.