THE MANY FACES OF WRECK DIVING
NIGEL EATON, EDITOR

Want to boost your wreck diving? Look no further than this issue of Diver magazine, in which we bring together divers' experiences of wrecks of all denominations - merchant and military, old and not-so-old, UK and overseas - to guide you and to inspire you.

In addition to his regular Wreck Tour feature (page 56), which this month describes the Britannia (not the former Royal Yacht, but a 740-ton steamship sunk in the Farne islands in 1915), John Liddiard provides two special reports.

For the first he pays a visit to the South Coast to explore a wreck-rich but little-dived area off the Isle of Wight (page 35). For the second he travels to the British Virgin islands (page 67), where the remains of the 2738-ton RMS Rhone, the open-water set for the 1977 movie The Deep, was one of several wrecks he was able to add to his impressive logbook.

Elsewhere, another regular Diver contributor, Scotland-based Mike Clark, dives two unusual vessels sunk in the Clyde estuary (page 94). The Iona and the Champion were nineteenth-century paddlesteamers of very different designs, which met their ends within a few miles of each other. Mike probes the underwater remains of these sturdy examples of Victorian engineering.

How do clubs do it nowadays? London-based Aquanauts is by no means a typical UK club, but wreck diving appears to be well up on its agenda. Nicola Tyrrell joins the extraordinarily enthusiastic Aquanaut members for a diving weekend out of Plymouth (page 47), recording their experience of diving the James Eagan Layne (and revealing what they do with a guitar during surface intervals).

Meanwhile, a fascinating example of 'forensic' wreck diving is provided by Louise Trewavas in her feature on HMS Manchester (page 40). Was the court marshal of the 9500-ton warship's captain following her scuttling in 1942 a miscarriage of justice? Louise travels to Tunisia with a team of technical divers to examine the tangled evidence 75metres beneath the waves.

Finally, in her column this month (page 73) Louise offers a lighthearted account of a liveaboard trip off Ireland which dispels the notion that real wreck divers don't eat pizza. It's a tale of strange bedfellows brought together by a shared love of UK wrecks in which some preconceptions prove to be mutual....




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