CHESIL BAY | TINKER SHOAL | THE SKELLY | LOCH LONG | FALMOUTH
5 easy dives

FALMOUTH JUMPING ONTO SUBMARINES FALMOUTH, CORNWALL

If anyone asks: "What happened to the German Navy at the end of World War One?" the instant answer from most divers would be: "Scapa Flow". But not all the German Navy was scuttled at Scapa. Many other ships, including the remains of the U-boat fleet, were divided between the Allied countries, to do with as they saw fit.
At the end of the war, the Royal Navy already had a large surplus of ships. There was little need to put captured German vessels into service, especially as many were old and damaged by four years of warfare. The solution was to keep them for gunnery practice.
Such was the intended fate of eight German submarines held at anchor in Falmouth Bay. In 1920 two were dispatched to the depths and the rest were left at anchor, until a storm early the next year caused their anchors to drag and chains to break. Five of them ran aground on the rocks at Pendennis Point.
With no incentive to recover the U-boats, they were left for several years until sold and broken up for salvage. Today the remains of their hulls make an easy and entertaining shore dive, ideal for a novice's first few dives, but with enough to interest more experienced divers.
It is also an excellent fall-back location should other diving in the area be prevented by bad weather.
Once in the water, it's easy to find submarine wreckage. You can jump in from the rocks almost on top of one of the subs.
The tricky bit is negotiating the one-way system through Falmouth. As with all one-way systems, the bit you want is almost all the way round it. Later in the season, holiday traffic can block Falmouth completely.
Follow the one-way system past the parking area at Pendennis Point and back along the south-west side of the point. A couple of hundred metres before rejoining the two-way traffic, a road doubles back up the hill to the castle.
About 100m before that, you'll find a long strip of parking area on the left, overlooking the bay. On the Ordnance Survey Landranger map it is marked as a picnic spot. Leave your car there - it's free.
>From the lower end of the car park it's a short walk to the beach. On the way down the path splits - the main path doubling back and leading to a small beach directly below the car park. From here, you can swim about 50m to the south-east along the shoreline, and find a submarine.
The straight-on path leads down across some rocks, with a water-filled gully leading back below the road and a concrete retaining wall. One of the U-boats lies in this gully. All the wreckage is in shallow water, less than 7 or 8m even at high tide - in fact it can be too shallow to dive at low-water springs. It's even possible to snorkel these wrecks.
After several years' absence, I had forgotten what a nice little dive this is. I was originally planning to dive on Porthkerris reef, another nice shore dive on the east side of the Lizard peninsula. But the wind was blowing a strong easterly, and huge waves were breaking straight up Porthkerris beach. It was then that someone remembered the Falmouth submarines, well sheltered behind Pendennis Point.
At Pendennis, I slithered from the rocks into a flat, calm sea. Early in the season the site was not overwhelmed with kelp, and the visibility surprisingly good - at least 5m.
Moving down the rocky side of the gully and ferreting beneath the kelp, I was soon in contact with the rusted and broken remains of a U-boat hull.
We found a narrow, round shaft and followed it out along the wreck. Used to larger wrecks, I was unsure if this was once the propshaft, which would imply that the submarine was oriented stern towards the shore. In some places decaying steel plates stuck up from the bottom to provide some sharp-edged windows, but most of the wreck was flat.
Reaching the seaward end of the wreck, we turned back and worked our way in along the edge of the plates. We peered into the crack between the wreck and the seabed, and squat lobsters scuttled away from our diving lights. Shallow, and with lots of air remaining, there was plenty of time to divert away from the wreck and see what we could find on the sand and gravel seabed.
Various bits of mostly buried wreckage poked out of the gravel. A heavy steel cylinder could have been a pressure vessel; considering the circumstances of the wrecking, it was unlikely to be a torpedo!
Further from the wreckage on the other side of the gully I found a minute, heart-shaped spider crab clinging to a kelp stem, its carapace and legs decorated with small strips of sponge. A small topknot flapped away in a puff of silt. Even without the wreckage, the rocky shoreline provided a reasonable reef dive.
The other main area of wreckage is a couple of hundred metres further south-east, along the shoreline towards Pendennis Point. These submarines are harder to reach, with no parking closer than the picnic spot, and more rocks to scramble across from the shore. The other option is to go for a long swim from either of the entry points for the first submarine.
If you need air fills, Cornish Diving (01326 311265) is situated on Bar Road, less than five minutes' drive away.

- John Liddiard


Appeared in DIVER - May 1999