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The Kyarra off Swanage is a popular dive but strong currents can make it tricky. On dives like this it's vital to concentrate on the detail, as Maggie Cainen learned to her cost |
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The Kyarra has to be one of the most frequently dived wrecks out of Swanage. BSAC 99, also known as Swansea Yacht and Sub Aqua Club, arranged to do four dives there a year or two ago.
Rachel, our organiser, had been down, dived the site a few times, tested out the different diving organisations and hired a hardboat and a RIB. But the best-laid plans always unhitch somewhere.
Slack water was perfect for our morning dive. We were up at the crack of dawn, determined to enjoy every second of time on the famous Kyarra.
The hardboat set off with the A team's complement of divers. Then our hired RIB limped into view. Our hearts sank as it stalled dramatically by the pier. No amount of persuasion could get it to start again, though just about everyone tried.
It was decided to fetch in a second RIB, but it wouldn't be available until the afternoon. Those of us in team B agreed to dive the pier, which teemed with marine life. We spent about 90 minutes in around 5m of water, diving all along the arms of the new and old piers.
We were gutted when team A returned waving gold watches (allegedly), scent bottles and other goodies from the Kyarra, making our pier dive look very small beer indeed.
Pier-diving is all very well. My buddy Maggie and I love "scenic" diving, which can be a euphemism for what you do when everyone else is off doing the big boys' dives. We have done more than a 1000 dives between us, ranging from seriously deep wrecks to hundreds of shallow "scenics" all over the world.
Slack was almost over. It was going to be tough diving the Kyarra that afternoon. Maggie and I studied a diagram of the wreck. The usual approach was to moor onto a fixed buoy at slack and go down the line, as the currents were pretty fierce and you could easily be swept out to sea.
We're not school-teachers for nothing. We always have dive plans. We would go down the line, take a compass-bearing, dive for exactly 40 minutes, then follow the bearing back to the line and straight back into our RIB. Neither of us was keen on surface swimming.
Some of our cheekier cadets call us "the old biddies", and spread malicious rumours that we don't dive at all but simply go down the line, sit on the bottom, do our knitting and have a good chat, and after 20 minutes go back up.
We think they're just jealous of our superior navigational abilities.
We boarded the oddly named The Big Dinghy and dived the plan. Exactly 40 minutes into the dive, BC pockets brimming with broken perfume bottles and exciting bits of pottery (but no gold watches), we followed our compass bearing back to the line and surfaced.
The buoy was swinging around in horrendous currents about a metre below the surface. At the surface there was nothing but rolling shoals of dirty brown water. No dive boats, an awful lot of empty sky Ð and we felt very, very alone.
"What shall we do, Maggie?" asked Maggie 2, as she did a fruitless 360. We were in one hell of a current, but had to release the buoy, which was far too deep beneath us to be of much use. We were screaming along way out to sea.
"Don't worry," I said. "I'm ready for all emergencies. I've got a whistle, a torch, a blob and my screamer. We've even got our snorkels on us. Even if we end up in France, I can speak French."
However, there was no one to hear the whistle or the screamer, and a torch is hard to spot in sunlight. Fortunately for us, an offshore sailing dinghy race hove into view, half a dozen racing dinghies screaming downwind. I pressed my air whistle and it made one hell of a screech.
One yacht, a small lightweight affair, changed course to see what was wrong. "Are you hurt?" asked its owner.
"No, but we've been on the surface for more than 10 minutes and there's no sign of our diveboat," I replied.
"What's it called? I'll radio them to pick you up."
"The Big Dinghy," was my reply.
"The sea's full of big dinghies. Look around you. Don't you know its name?"
The sea was now full of big sailing dinghies but not our dive boat. In the end, we convinced our saviour that it really was called The Big Dinghy and he called it up on his little hand-held radio.
"They'll be here in around 10 minutes. They're picking up all the other divers downwind. Hang on here."
Maggie and I bobbed up and down, hanging on to each other until eventually The Big Dinghy returned.
"Didn't you hear my briefing to surface and drift?" We hadn't, of course. We'd been so fed up with our lengthy pier dive in the morning that we'd been first pair in and were determined to "dive our plan".
Is there a moral to this story? Always get a dive briefing before you jump in, perhaps. I notice that John Liddiard recommends putting a DSMB up after diving the Kyarra and drifting, as the buoy is not much use in a full current.
Of course if we'd dived in the morning, it would have been a different story!
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