MORE
JUNK,
PLEASE
It's that man again: John Liddiard gained a lot of support with his recent plea for DIY regulator servicing, but will he win as much backing for an increase in rubbish-dumping?
Let's face it, one thing that attracts so many of us to UK diving is the number of wrecks in our home waters. From archaeological sites with a few rotting timbers and rusty nails to intact behemoths of 20th century shipping, you can usually find a diver to champion a particular wreck as his or her favourite dive.
The trouble is, wrecks don't last forever. Storms, rust, commercial and amateur salvage and diver erosion all play a role in slowly breaking our favourites apart. Those that were once intact are now skeletons, those that were skeletons have been reduced to piles of flattened plates.
The earliest shipwrecks resulted from bad weather and navigational errors. Modern ship design and navigational aids have put a stop to most of that. With a few notable exceptions, such as the Cita in the Isles of Scilly, ships simply don't steam into rocks as often as they used to.
Even when a massive environmental disaster occurs, such as the Sea Empress rounding in the entrance to Milford Haven, the ship is eventually re-floated and repaired. OK, the oil slick was not the sort of thing anyone would welcome, but they could at least have left the wreck there for me to dive on!
We divers benefit from disaster in the form of wrecks from a couple of world wars in our home waters and worldwide. Submarines have sunk many ships in convenient coastal locations; one torpedo hit below the waterline and a ship can go down almost intact and on an even keel. This might have created environmental problems, but a few decades on it gives us a prime dive site.
Shipping losses like these don't happen any more, either. The longer ranges of modern aircraft and weapons mean that ships get sunk in deeper waters in far-off corners of the world. And although an Exocet missile might blow the superstructure off a ship, it won't necessarily sink it.
A winter or two ago, an old, rotting oil rig came loose from its Portland moorings in a storm. It bumped about a bit, damaging piers and harbour walls, was beached and eventually salvaged. Why not just clean it up, tow it out into 40m of water and sink it? How about to the east side of Portland, where it could provide a fall-back site for those days when the weather is too rough to get round Portland Bill to dive the Salsette?
And what about all those other oil rigs being decommissioned? Remember the battle between Greenpeace and Shell over the Brent Spar platform? The original plan was to sink it in deep ocean water - out of sight and out of mind. Environmental protests led to it being moored up inshore for dismantling, decontamination and disposal ashore.
What a waste! A platform that size offers the prospect of an almost perfect dive site. It could be sunk in water deep enough for tekkies to explore the base with trimix, while air divers prospect beneath the platform, cave divers venture into the cabins and corridors, and basic open-water lessons take place at 6m on the helicopter pad. A few years in the right location and it would be covered in marine life and home to thousands of fish.
Elsewhere in the world, old ships and other junk are regularly disposed of in handy diving locations. Off Florida there are hundreds of wrecks in the artificial reef programme, and it isn't only divers who benefit; anglers have a great time fishing on them.
Now, I have to admit that in some parts of the world artificial reefs have been bad for fish stocks. They provide a nice habitat for many species of fish and a structure on which anemones and corals can grow. But if the reef is over-fished, it siphons off fish from the surrounding area.
This has led to artificial reef projects being banned in the Philippines. However, the problem is uncontrolled fishing, not the reefs themselves.
In Britain, boats, helicopters, buses, aircraft, armoured vehicles and cars have all been deliberately sunk by inland site owners to provide something on which divers can play. The only wreck I know of to have been downed deliberately for divers here is the Glenn Strathallan off Plymouth. Sunk in 1970 as an "underwater classroom" by the Fort Bovisand diving school, it turned out to be too shallow and had to be dispersed a year later. Since then, nothing.
Perhaps British law is too complex. Perhaps there are too many interested parties with conflicting views. Perhaps no one knows how to organise it. Perhaps we need a diving MP to champion the cause of dumping more junk at sea.
We are starting to see some moves towards creating new wreck sites. Groups in Plymouth, Orkney and Girvan on the Clyde have plans in various stages of development, but none have actually sunk anything yet.
So if your employer owns an old oil rig or super-tanker he is seeking to dump, put in a word for divers. We have to think of our future generations: if we don't act now, there could be no wrecks left on which they can dive.
Appeared in DIVER - December 1999
