5/10/2011 HMS Repulse

We arrive at the repulse at 0700, a little earlier than planned, so our gas is not ready. Dave has been mixing gas for everybody because there isn’t a dedicated blender on the boat. This is an oversight and causes a little tension .

Stu jumps in to tie in, but is unable to finish the task. The repulse is so big that the shot has  to be put in the right place or is extremely difficult .  He hits the surface after 50 min, the shot is on the hull side of the wreck where there’s nothing to tie into.

Mikko and Tappy decide to move the shot rather than reshot. They jump in in front of us. The current is not running and they waste no time. The signal bag is blown after 10 minutes  for a tie in, but the line pulls off as soon as we attach the ship. The guys complete their dive unaware of this fact,  and when they return to the area to start their ascent there is no line, so using some good thinking, they blow a bag off the wreck  and leave it tied in on the bottom.  The line is secured  15 mtr away from the bomb hole which is the normal tie in point, this makes it easy for our team to complete the task .

I descend down the reel line ,carrying the mooring line under my arm, then move hand over hand along the stabilizing fins on the bottom,  across to the bomb hole. When I get there , I look around for a suitable point. I find a spot and  tie a bow line Dave moves the shot weight close to the line so we can reattach it after the dive.  I secure the distance line and we swim down to just behind  the bridge and look around.

This wreck is huge 300 mtr long and must have been very intimidating when she flew the red ensign  helping to enforce the British policy during our gun boat diplomacy era. It  would take many dives just to scratch the surface of this immense ship. When I first dived this ship, we drew a lot of heat on the internet for diving a war grave, but our intention was to lay a wreath in memory of the loss. I do not disturb bones or take artifacts from these ships. My intention is merely to document least we forget . I remember diving here with an ex navy diver who informed me that the British government had offered the POW and Repulse out for salvage in the 70 ’s. A contract was given to a Malaysian company but  was celled after an unfortunate incident. If this is true, it seems a double standard that our politicians play.

After shooting some video  ,on 30mins, we head back to the line. When we get there ,we  splice in some extra  line  to the tie in just in case the line cuts through,  then run our deco .

Tue 4/10/2011 IJN Hatsutaka

Sea state has calmed  down as  we get closer into the coast. I watch the sun rise  and check with the captain. We still have around 5 hours to the mark so we have some coffee and snacks then I switch the back gas tanks to another twin set . As  the hatsutaka lies only in 34 mtr  we fill our back gas  with 32% and save the TMX for the deeper dives . I drop the travelled gas and take 100% o2 for the deco, we plan 60 minutes on the bottom.

We shot the hatsutaka at 11:00 and stu tied in. The sea state is calm but the current is running hard. Stu has his scooter but still has to kick hard to get to the line .He does’ well to tie in .We estimate the current to be running at around 2 knots.

We secure the boat and wait  for the current to decrease, but the tide tables are not very accurate  for this area and sometimes there is no slack, so after an hour we decide to go were carrying a lot of gas which is good for the run time but hard to make headway in a current.

Jim jumps in and we can hear him cursing. He’s not very popular with  the crew. He’s a hard new Yorker and doesn’t suffer fools too gladly, but his stance nearly causes a mutiny. Myself and Dave opt for a more  diplomatic approach  keeping the trip together.

Jim can’t make headway to the bow because  the current is too much for him, but he continues to blame the crew for not tying a granny line onto the boat so that he can enter the water with it in his hands. It’s a good point but the Thai crew aren’t listening to him. The line is running out 15 mtr behind the boat.

The engineer jumps into the water and secures the granny line to  the descent line,  avoiding the jump between the line along the length of the boat and the descent  line.

We get ready after 30 mins. As planned we jump in and pull ourselves along the length of the boat to the descent line. My manifold is leaking on the isolator and I have already lost 100 bar of my back gas. I turn off the isolator and let the other team members know .I have a side stage of bottom gas and minimum gas is 75 bar so I decide to turn the dive when I  breathe down the side . The wreck is only 33mtr deep so I will only have incurred 3min of deco on o2 for every 10 mins on the bottom, if the dive lasts longer than 30 minutes so I have loads of gas.

We run a distance line around the wreck .The viz is down to 5 mtr, but we can clearly see the  heavy damage created in the  original attack, it must have been hell .

The bow was blown off and the ship broke in two, so without finding the stern section i.e. the props, it is very difficult to know if she’s lying on her starboard or port because the metal is so twisted .

I take the dive out around what I think is the bridge.  This is lying off the deck at right angles, a 5 mtr gap between the hold and the superstructure.

I then swim around the hull. No props but there is current there ,so I turn the team and move back along the deck. Here I hit my reserve and have to finish the dive. My bottom time is 40 minutes so I have incurred 3 minutes of deco, but because of the exertion level of the dive I run stops at 12/9/6/and 3 making a gas switch at 6mtr.  The current is still running at  approximately 2 knots and I’m bubble trapping my muscles in my forearms , so I make the deco very conservative. Some of my regs are purging and my mask is continually flooding,so I am happy I don’t have much deco to run.

I watch Dave and Vince coming up the line. They’re getting pushed up the line with the current. Plenty of exercise on this  dive but rewarding .

We get back on the boat and quickly decide to try for another dive, hopefully on a slack. We knock up gas and I try to repair the manifold. Jim is still complaining and Dave gets a little short with him stating that “we are all customers and if he wants to change something he can do it himself instead of moaning at us”.  There are, in truth, some things that can be improved ,but you don’t build teams by causing division and his style clashes with the Thai mentality.

The water continues to run and it’s now getting late so we have to untie. There is also a storm headed our way, so we decide to jump in to untie. The captain is brought into the plan by Dave.  We get ready. My manifold is still leaking so I decide to run the back gas as twin independents, sucking down the side tank.  We decided to jump in at the side of the boat. The captain is instructed to untie, but maintain station on the buoy because the surface viability is decreasing. We will come up the buoy unless the current is too strong then we will shoot a orange smb, and he should follow that. If there is yellow one, then we need gas.

This is the same as the previous dives. Its best not to change the plan too many times with the Thais as they get confused. The light on the surface is cut making it important to maintain contact with the shot at all times, although as long as the team ascend the line we have a GPS on it.

We get ready to jump in. Dave and Vince go and my side tank starts leaking at the first stage. Now its too late to repair it and I also have a problem with the isolator so I call it a day, get out of my kit and help with the support. The captain unties and tries to recover the granny line, but the sea state is picking up and he’s struggling to maintain station, so we chuck it in, deciding to recover it at the end of the dive. This being the lesser of two evils. Not wanting to run over the divers, Jim wants to recover the granny line but it’s pointless to argue with the captain at all.  We all ignore him and the line goes over,  we monitor the line after 56 minutes the guys appear on the surface and we recover  them  into the boat.

Mon 3/10/2011 Unknown cargo vessel believed to be the Akita Maru

Today we wake up to a two meter sea state. We are at anchor, next to the wreck with the shot  tied into the bridge from the previous days diving .Good job too. We would have cut straight trough the line or pulled the cross member straight out of the ship. We wait on the anchor for the wave height to settle down. The lads try to get a weather forecast using the sat phone. I don’t think we’re diving today, but we need to recover the shot.

Wave height gets worse, 3m.  Short interval’s, some rough 4mtrs and the current is across us, so we begin to roll heavily . The captain wants to get out of here, so do I. We make a plan to recover the shot. We calculate that the shot will break through quickly in the swell, so we give it a try and tie in. Shorting the line slowly as the  captain watches his ship the pitch and roll.  I comment to Dave we might have to cut free, better to lose 4000bt rope, just then the rope gives around half the length we recover the line and head for the coast.

The swell is coming out of the south west.  I pass Jim who voices his concern about the helium tanks banging around.  I rush down stairs and they have worked  loose. I call out to the rest of the guys for help as I can’t secure 15 g size tanks on my own and they look like they’re about to give us a bad hair day! But the guys are on my shoulder and after a stressful  ten minutes we manage, between 6 of us, to tie the cylinders down.  We retire.

Diving today is canceled. The ship manages the swell very effectively and I have a couple of whiskeys and settle down for a long trip to our next mark, the infamous   Hatsutaka. She lies  close into the shore so should be flat and calm.  The wind is coming off the land.She is also shallow. After the last few days of deep diving ,a days shallow diving would be good .

The story of the Largarto and the Hatsutaka  is one of those  microcosms , that mean little  on their  own, but  ultimately helped to  shift the tide of war. It’s also a story of friendship between brothers in arms, least we forget.

We plan a 60 min dive on air. We will have to boost the helium into  one of the empty g’s ,so we don’t waste it, then fill the twinset with air. The mark is only 33mtr so we have  nice long bottom times.

Day 3 2/10/2011 Unknown cargo vessel , believed to be the Akita Maru

The sea state settles down a little in the last few hours  and at 12:00 we arrive at the marks. The crew shot the wreck and myself, Dave and Vincent jump in and drift into the shot. We leave the surface quickly and descend down to tie in. Dave drops over the side and to move the weight, I secure the wreck and we signal the surface.

Our attention then turns to the fun part .We run a distance line out around the front of the bridge .That holds, there are lots of cross members – easy places to places to tie in. The bridge has collapsed in on itself. A twisted collection of iron and coral. We drop over the side, continuing along the side of the ship. Dave gets hooked on some line around the manifold and flashes an attention signal in my direction. I unhook him then I reach the end of my reel line.  Dave  gets his reel out and secures it though the first one and we continue,   across the top abaft of the bridge we drop into the hold and look around.

The holds are huge here, giving an idea to the size of this wreck. I hit my turn pressure and Dave recovers his reel,  then I take over and recover mine.

About 4mtr from the ascent line Dave picks up his staged o2  we then start our ascent.

The profile is 60 mtr for 30min. We move along the line at 3mtr per min.A  controlled ascent from 48mtr up to our gas switch at 33 m,  onto 36% then up to 6mtr and o2 deco. The sea state is running at about 1 mtr with no current. At 3 mtr we move over  to the bars and start breathing the o2 supplied from the surface,  but the intermediate pressure is set too high and  reg blows off the hose connector,  so we go back on the stages. A line is passed down by the crew and we  pass up the empty  bottom tmx stage then the 36% ,This makes it much easier to get onto the boat in the 1m swell ,as we only have to carry the 6ltr o2 tank.

I hit the surface  and pull myself onto the ladder so that the boat moves with me instead of into me.  Once on the boat ,my attention turns to the possibility of a second dive, and we quickly top the remaining back gas with air and make a 18/30 we then make a 18/35 side tank this reduces the potential for an ibcd hit. Top up the deco gases 36 and 100% then wait, we get back into the water at 16:00 hours. The current is running at two knots .An ambitious  undertaking with 5 tanks on and we manage to pull ourselves half way down the boat before giving up. Sometimes you just have to admit it when you’re getting your arse  kicked.

Day 3 2/10/2011 unknown Cargo?

0700 We cross over an unknown mark ,the sea state is the same as the  day before. We decide to wait to see if she will settle.  Only one team are ready to brave the conditions to go and look. Mikko and Tippy are keen to find out what is making the large return on the sonar and get ready. We agree to wait for a signal bag from  the bottom team who will tie in if the wreck is  interesting, then we will go in.

The mark rises 10 mtr off of the bottom, with some of the return being hollow, indicating a hold.The bottom team are to shoot video using a “go pro” mounted in a head strap, the target depth is 65 mtr with the top of the mark at around 55mt

Team one enters the water  at 0750  and starts the dive. We wait  expectantly  for a signal  buoy  which does not appear.  After an hour we recover the divers .

Mikko and Tappy were on a trimix top up from the day before. This makes their accounts more credible.  We listen  when all are safely  on the boat, then we get the video in and watch the wreck unfold. The visibility on the bottom is poor.  Mikko said he “couldn’t remember anything except it was metal and he didn’t realise that he was swimming on the ship for the first ten minutes” .When we check the video, it appears to be a small cargo vessel,  lying on its side with not much coral growth, this indicates  that she hadn’t been down long. The video didn’t show anything interesting.  The current was running hard, so we decide to move off to another anomaly and leave this mystery for another day. After consulting the charts, there is a possibility that this could be the wreck of the Akita maru, sunk by the same group of torpedoes fired by the USS Hammerhead during the attack on the Tyray Maru, but this will have to be confirmed at a later date.  The time is 0900,  I hope the sea state settles down.

Note :- whether a ship sinks vertically or drifts for some distance before settling on the bottom will depend on some factors, namely how quickly the water enters the vessel and with cargos, how much  water the cargo displaces .I have a first hand experience of this, having been wrecked on a Thai wooden boat.

This was holed in a storm and left the surface in 15 minutes. As it did so, I GPS marked the position after getting into a safety RHIB, we  then  waited three weeks to return to salvage what we could from the wreck . We located her a nautical mile away ,being made of wood and not having too much ballast, she had drifted that distance before coming to rest.