I had seen the wreck of the RMS Rhone before, in the 1977 movie The Deep. This was a production made memorable by Jacqueline Bissett in a wet T-shirt and a young Nick Nolte looking macho, fighting off man-eating moray eels, escaping from collapsing wrecks and dodging harpoons and knives.
     The wreck of the Rhone was used as the open-water set for the fictional WW2 freighter Goliath, sunk somewhere off Bermuda. This was a highly creative example of location-fixing, as the Rhone sank in the British Virgin Islands in 1867.
     Bissett and Nolte play a couple who discover gold and, more significantly, ampoules of morphine from medical supplies in the cargo, leading them into conflict with a drug lord who wants to sell the morphine through his own evil empire.
     At the time it was the biggest and most expensive undersea film ever made, filled with underwater action and all the usual diving clichés, though both expense and clichés have no doubt been surpassed by more recent movies.
     The 2738 ton Royal Mail ship Rhone was only two years old when it sank, having been built in 1865. The 95m iron hull was constructed along traditional clipper lines with masts and sails to supplement a steam engine driving a single propeller; the Rhone was one of the first screw-driven mail ships.
     On the morning of Sunday, 29 October 1867, the Rhone was anchored in Great Harbour, a sheltered bay on the north side of Peter Island. Nearby was anchored an older Royal Mail ship, the paddle-steamer Conway.
     With bad weather anticipated from the south, the two captains were concerned for the safety of their passengers.
     They conspired to transfer the paddle-steamer's passengers to the larger and safer Rhone without raising alarm by inviting the passengers of the Conway to join those of the Rhone for breakfast on deck.
     As the barometer had indicated, the storm swiftly arrived, but not from the expected direction. The hurricane-force winds came across Tortola from the north and blew both ships tight on their anchor chains towards the shore of Peter. Boilers were stoked and engines run to ease the strain on the anchor chains. Both boats rode through the first round with only minor damage.
     With the wind abating, the Conway raised anchor and headed across Sir Francis Drake Passage to the apparent safety of Road Town on Tortola, the Conway's passengers still sheltering aboard the Rhone. The Rhone tried to follow suit, but first the anchor fouled, then the chain broke. The Rhone was now under way, but with no options left except to make for open sea and attempt to ride out the hurricane.
     She steered east along Sir Francis Drake Passage, then south through the channel separating Peter Island from Salt Island. As the eye of the hurricane moved over, the wind picked up again, rising rapidly from the south-east.
     Struggling head-on against punishing conditions, the Rhone's engine was not powerful enough to make progress and the ship was pushed back and broken against Black Rock at the western tip of Salt. Of 145 people on board, just one passenger and 21 crew survived, rescued with assistance from Salt's residents.
    
     silver lining
     If a state-of-the-art steamship such as the Rhone came to an unfortunate end, what of the much less sophisticated paddle-steamer? The Conway was blown ashore on Tortola, all the crew surviving. Nearly every building on the islands was blown down.
     From all the tragedy of the hurricane, there is a partly happy ending. The residents of Salt Island were right at the bottom of the social pile, subsistence fishing and working the salt pans while living barely out of slavery. In gratitude for their efforts to rescue crew and passengers from the Rhone, Queen Victoria granted them and their descendants rights to the land for as long as they continued to live there, in return for five pounds of salt annually for the royal table.
     Over the next few years the Rhone's cargo of bullion was salvaged, together with many bottles of champagne and souvenirs. Well-to-do Victorian tourists would have champagne parties while anchored above the wreck.
     The wreck site is now essentially two dives. The stern lies down the slope, with the propeller immediately below Black Rock and the engine in 15m. From the engine a trail of debris including both broken boilers and condensers leads to the deeper bow section, lying along the barely sloping sand in 23m.
     As with most dive centres, you can dive without a guide if you ask, an option I would follow for most reef dives. But on the Rhone, diving with Burton Robson from the Baskin in the Sun dive centre really made the dive for me.
     I think I could have found all the major bits of wreckage for myself - the boilers, the engine and other machinery, the forward mast and crow's nest, and the hatch through which Jacqueline Bissett and Nick Nolte entered the bow of the wreck.
     But without Burton's help, I could easily have missed the signal cannon sticking out from under some plates near the bow, the enormous tool-kit just forward of the engine, and the well-polished porthole partly hidden near the stern.

sting ray model
Off Cooper, the next island to the west, lie the wrecks of the steel tugboats Mary L and Pat. The Mary L was sunk in the early 1990s and is now beginning to look like a real wreck, small corals and sponges encrusting most of its exposed surface.
     The Pat was sunk only a few years ago. It was under tow to a planned location a little further along the coast of Cooper Island when it decided to go down early, by a fluke upright and right alongside the Mary L. The two tugs now nestle head-to-tail on the sand at 24m.
     While I happily potter around this brace of tugs, a sting ray glides in and lands on the strip of sand between the wrecks and the reef. Rather than burrow into the sand as I would expect, it drapes itself over the only small head of coral that breaks the desert of white powder.
     It seems well settled, so I ignore it for a while and finish the shot I am working on. To get closer I descend to the seabed and move in a commando crawl, angled so that my bubbles stream downcurrent away from the sting ray. It appears to be gently wriggling against the coral, perhaps scratching its underside or being cleaned.
     An older artificial reef is the Fearless, a large, wooden-hulled trawler sunk just outside Great Harbour on Peter Island. Here I encounter lower visibility than at many of the other sites, the sort of snowy "lagoon visibility" that can be such a nuisance in photographs. The wreck sits on the sand in 23m at the bottom of quite a nice reef, though I ignore the reef in my haste to get as much time as possible on the wreck.
     Since the Fearless was sunk in 1985, much of the wooden structure has decayed, leaving only frames and fittings where the wheelhouse and forward deckhouse once stood. The hull planking is a lattice of crumbling wood over the more solid frames, allowing sunlight to shine enchantingly right through the wreck.
     Back on the dive boat, I look towards a large and dilapidated steel tug moored further into the bay. This is the next artificial reef project for the BVI dive operators association, all cleaned up and ready to sink, just waiting for final approval of its proposed location.
     Also in the bay is the anchor and chain from the Rhone, only discovered encrusted in coral a few years previously. Across the floor of the bay, divers have found occasional oddments from the Rhone's table service, swept overboard from the last breakfast on deck.

still a big kid
Each day is structured as a two-tank morning boat trip, a break for lunch and an optional one-tank afternoon boat trip. It was late one afternoon that I dived at Blonde Reef, another site featuring in the story of the Rhone. Blonde Reef is a shallow and pretty knoll of coral in the channel between Salt and Peter that the Rhone had to dodge before heading for open sea and getting swept back onto Black Rock.
     The coral rises in a slope and a short wall from a sandy seabed at 18m to as shallow as 7-8m. Located in the middle of the channel, it is understandably swarming with fish and can be a site for strong currents, though there were none during my dive.
     Later in the week, I opt for an afternoon ashore on Virgin Gorda to visit the Baths. The entire south-west end of Virgin Gorda is a mound of fractured volcanic granite. With sea-level changes, this has eroded along the shoreline to a complex forest of tumbled granite boulders with classic white-powder sandy beaches in the glades. It is the first time I have seen this type of scenery in the Caribbean.
     As a child my parents could have lost me at the Baths for a week. I would have had a fantastic time exploring, crawling through some of the narrower cracks and scrambling over the rocks. But who am I trying to fool, I'm still a big kid at heart and do that anyway! My only concession to age is that I don't get lost for a week - I have to get back to the diving.
     While on the subject of canyons, there are some really spectacular underwater canyons off Great Dog Island to the west of Tortola. On the day we venture in this direction, the wind has spun round to the north. It is apparent as soon as we jump in that underwater visibility will be better elsewhere. Burton scribbles on his Etch-a-sketch slate, suggesting that we try another site.
     I am philosophical about it. Now I am in the water with diving gear on, we may as well have a quick look. I scribble back a note to that effect and he leads the way out to the point.
     All the diving so far has been fairly easy, nothing especially challenging, steep or deep, just good-quality shallow wrecks and reefs with a plethora of interesting photographic subjects.
     Today I enjoy the physical challenge of the dive, even though the photographic conditions are less than perfect. In places the canyon is just elbow-wide, the surge really funnelling through the gaps and blowing me along. A fallen boulder makes the canyon into a tunnel, fish wriggling first one way then the other to stay in the shade, as the water surges back and forth.
     Given a choice of diving the canyons in calmer sea and better viz, I suppose I would have selected the easy option and missed the more physical fun. And some of the pics did turn out nicely.
     For the next dive we head south to Carval Rock between Cooper and Ginger islands. I ask about the possibility of old wrecks here, my thought being that perhaps Carval is a corruption of carvel or caravel, the sort of ship Columbus used to cross the Atlantic, but no one has heard of wreckage here.
     The location for old wooden wrecks is Anegada Island and the reefs stretching south of it. Anegada is well out to the north-east of Virgin Gorda and generally too far for dayboat diving, though special charters have been arranged for groups wanting to dive there. The reefs at Anegada caught many an unwary sailing ship at the end of its journey across the Atlantic.
     At Carval Rock we tie off to a mooring buoy bolted into the reef at 15m. Rather than following the classic coral slope downwards, I head for the shallows. By 10m the large corals and sponges give way to the clean lines of old volcanic rock, on closer inspection encrusted with patches of fire coral, sponges and star corals. Even with an apparently flat-calm sea, I can feel the surge as I cut through gaps between boulders.

dolphin experience
Nearby on Ginger Island we dive Steps, a series of pristine coral terraces on a gentle slope ending in sand at 26m. Visibility is exceptionally good, even for the Caribbean. In such conditions it is easy to be tempted by the overall scene and miss out on the beautiful small detail of the reef.
     On my deco day I am glad not to be diving, as the wind has picked up from the south. I watch the boat leave the harbour at Prospect Reef for a rough crossing to the shelter of Peter Island.
     I have saved something special for last, a swim with the dolphins at the opposite end of the resort. It's a relatively new and remarkably low-key thing, located just 50m from my room. I knew that it was somewhere in the resort, but not that it was right next to me.
     The dolphins are captive-bred and live in a fenced-off lagoon. Once they are used to the area they will be free to come and go, returning for their meals as they have never learned to survive by themselves.
     No coercion is involved. The one male and three female dolphins are fed first, then invited to do a few "behaviours". Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't - it's the animal's decision. Visitors are invited to get in the water and join them, in this case me with a mask, snorkel and camera.
     Again it's up to the dolphins, and sometimes they want to play and sometimes not.
     Today they are curious and swim in close for a look. With wind from the south, visibility in the lagoon is milky. I am sure they know where I am all the time, because I can hear their sonar clicking. From my point of view they suddenly appear from a metre away, then depart just as suddenly.
     It's a memorable experience. I have encountered dolphins before, but never nose-to-nose like this.
     All that is left is a taxi and ferry to St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands and the flight back to Gatwick. I didn't find sunken treasure or ampoules of morphine, get mauled by a moray, trapped inside an unstable wreck, shot with a harpoon or even encounter Jacqueline Bissett's stunt-double in a wet T-shirt.
     Other than that, I had a pretty good week's diving.

Grunts and squirrelfish by the bearing housing on the Rhone


the signalling cannon


and the tool kit


On the bow deck by the wheelhouse of the Mary L


Sting ray seen near the same wreck


Snapper beneath the stern of the Fearless wreck


squirrelfish on Blonde Reef


and corals under a boulder at Carval Rock


Fire corals and stony corals on top of a boulder at Carval Rock


colonies of yellow-headed jawfish live on rubble areas among the coral at the Indians site


dolphins in the lagoon at Prospect Reef Resort

GETTING THERE: John Liddiard flew with Air 2000 to St Thomas, US Virgin Islands. Transfers are by ferry from St Thomas to the West End of Tortola, followed by taxi to Prospect Reef Resort. DIVING: Baskin in the Sun is located at the dock in the Prospect Reef Resort, www.dive-baskin.com. A 10-dive package costs £235, booked through Hayes & Jarvis. ACCOMODATION:Prospect Reef Resort, www.prospectreef.com WHEN TO GO: Diving is available all year round, though access to some sites is seasonal. The British Virgin Islands are on the edge of the hurricane belt, and late August through to early November can be stormy. MONEY: It seems strange in a UK territory, but the currency is the US dollar. Cash machines accept UK bank cards. COST: A one-week trip with Hayes & Jarvis, including flights, transfers and room-only accommodation, ranges from £699 to £1159 (0870 903 7737, www. hayesandjarvis.co.uk) FURTHER INFORMATION: BVI Tourist Board 0207 947 820, www.bvitouristboard.com