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.
The old cliche about Irish diving is that, even though you’ll spend ninety percent of your time diving in pretty poor conditions, wondering why you even bother, every so often you’ll have a dive that makes you forget all the hardship of lousy viz, leaky drysuits, seasickness, changing in the rain, crawling through kelp, losing expensive equipment and everything else, and you’ll just think “this is what it’s all about”.
Our Indian summer struggled on for another week and the club headed west again this weekend. Some dived the U260 on Saturday, while others helped the leading diver candidates to prepare for their upcoming ordeal. On Sunday we launched from Baltimore, starting off with a pleasant dive off the Kedges. By lunchtime flat calm sea conditions and a propitious turn of the tides were starting to make it look like too good an opportunity not to do something special, so for the first time in my five odd years diving with the club, we headed to the Fastnet.
The Fastnet Rock lies about four or five miles southwest of
Clear Island. Sailors will know it well, and most people will have heard of it, but most of the time it’s just a rock you glimpse on a fair day when you’re diving out of Baltimore and joke about going there for a dive. When the conditions are right, as they were this weekend, it’s a forty-five minute trip by RIB (each way). The rock itself doesn’t have quite the grandeur of Skellig Michael, but it’s pretty imposing upclose, nonetheless. There’s a small landing area at the base, so you can clamber up to the top for a view of Roaringwater Bay.
We dropped in due south of the rock in about fifteen to twenty metres. At first it seemed a little kelpy, but we quickly found a nice gully which brought us below the line of the seaweed. Although we were diving as close to slack water as we could manage, we could still feel the current pushing us along at a steady clip. By keeping down in the gully though, and sticking close to the walls, we were able to have a comfortable dive. I guess our training battling currents in the Red Sea earlier in the year paid off here.
Shoals of fish seemed to accompany us almost constantly throughout the dive, but for me the highlight of the dive was the gully walls. The bright sunlight and clear visibility made a torch almost superfluous. Combine that with such a varied terrain where life could flourish between the nooks and crannies, and the remoteness of the location which no doubt plays its part in keeping things relatively unspoilt, and it adds up to a spectacular display of colour that would be the envy of most above-water gardeners.
Shoals of fish seemed to accompany us almost constantly throughout the dive, but for me the highlight of the dive was the gully walls. The bright sunlight and clear visibility made a torch almost superfluous. Combine that with such a varied terrain where life could flourish between the nooks and crannies, and the remoteness of the location which no doubt plays its part in keeping things relatively unspoilt, and it adds up to a spectacular display of colour that would be the envy of most above-water gardeners.
