Work in progress....more coming soon...  

There was hardly a cloud in the sky. It was slack water, it was one of those days when the conditions didn’t get any better for diving. It was for that reason Richard and Rachel found themselves on their trusty dive boat again. This time they had brought friends, Steve and Tom.  

Richard had known and respected the pair of them for years, when he first learnt to dive they had both helped out with his training and taken him on those all so important quarry dives that gave him the experience to handle the dive ahead of him.

For this dive, Steve and Tom wore twin diving cylinders, this would give them double the usual time of single cylinder dives, however at the cost of increased decompression time and the risks associated with this type of dive.

Richard and Rachel sat on the side of the dive boat and watched them don their kit and perform their pre-dive checks. Signalling to each other that it was time, they both dropped off opposite sides of the dive boat and slowly disappeared into the green hue of the depths below.

The plan was for Richard and Rachel to wait twenty minutes, this would allow the other divers to find the bottom and if necessary relocate the small dive boat anchor to help aid its recovery when the dive was over. 

Five minutes prior to their descent, they started to put their gear on. Slowly and methodically. Everything had to be checked and rechecked, they could not risk any problems. At any depth, a seemingly minor complication would be compounded ten times. Signalling the skipper that they were ready, they too dropped off the side of the boat. They drifted with the tide for a moment, meeting at the stern of the boat. Richard looked at Rachel and with an almost unnoticeable nod and a wink of the eye, it was time to descent into the murky depths below.

As they descended down the anchor line, it got dark very quickly, almost simultaneously they cracked the light stick that each had already attached to their buoyancy jacket. It didn’t make it any easier to see, but would help identify each other in the dense foggy water. 

The dark was the problem with diving in the mouth of a river estuary. The river water flowing from upstream was full of river bed silt which slowly drifted downstream and built up and covered the entire sea bed and anything that was on it. It did have its advantage too, it had had the sun on it all of its journey and the top few metres were usually warm.

At about ten metres they passed the thermoclyne, the invisible barrier between the fresh water from upstream and the salt water from the sea at the mouth of the estuary. From this point on it would be noticeably colder, they had both known about this prior to the dive and made sure that they had suitable thermal protection on under their dive suits.

Within five minutes, they were close to the seabed, they systematically checked their gauges. The depth was almost thirty metres and they had about 210 bar each left in their cylinders. Giving each other the ok signal, they followed the remaining section of the anchor line into the gloom. 

Within moments, it became very dark. Although there was little light at this depth, the wreck of the Greenock cast a deep shadow on the seabed. They had finally reached their prize.  

The Greenock had lain their since 1902, when she sank after a collision with another steamer. Collisions like this were a common occurrence at the turn of the century. She was built as a bucket dredger to keep the port of Greenock clear. Her sole purpose had been to fight the constant surge of silt deposited from upstream. 

They finally reached the anchor, they could tell it had been moved from the furrow that had been left from where it had landed to where either Steve or Tom had dragged it. It now lay a metre or so off the port bow of the wreck. Systematically placed for ease of recovery once the dive was over.  

Gently adding a touch of air into their drysuits they slowly ascended on to the deck of the wreck. After laying there for just over a hundred years she had survived reasonably well.    

Like I said, work in progress, more soon..........