A Day in Swanage
Steve Marchant and I set off on an early season trip to Swanage today to dive the Carentan, a 407-ton French submarine chaser, taken over by Royal Navy at fall of France, built 1939. 116ft x 18ft. Armed with 75mm field gun, one 2-pounder, two 20mm Oerlikons, four machine guns and depth charges. Position: 50 34.95N; 01 56.18W. Depth: 32m. Sunk: 21 December, 1943, when capsized in south-westerly gales off Anvil Point, Dorset, while escorting submarine HMS RORQUAL, Portland for Portsmouth. Six of Free French crew of 23 saved.
The weather forecast was for a cloudy sky and winds gusting up to 24mph, from the west. We arrived at the pier for 09:30 and wandered off to the café for a tea and a bun. When we got back to the pier the sun was coming out and it started to get pleasantly warm. There was a stiff breeze but this did not concern us too much as a westerly is a good direction for Swanage and the sea looked pretty calm.
We prepped and got our kit down to the floating pontoon just as Mary Jo pulled in from the first dive. I had to run back to the car to get a spare set of dry gloves as I had brought the wrong ones to the boat, but no time was lost! There were 9 divers in total so not too cramped. The trip out was fine and only 1m seas outside of the bay. The Carentan is marked with a permanent shot, Bryan tied on a larger buoy and we waited around 5 minutes for slack.
Steve and I were the third ones in. I had a bit of a flap when I got to the buoy, my right foot suddenly felt very light, I realised my fin had come off. I was very lucky, I dunked my head in the water and just spotted the heavy Jet fin descending into the depths. I didn’t have time to warn Steve as I would have lost sight of it and that would have been the end of my fins and our dive. I caught it at 15m and came back up only a few meters down current of the shot. Fin back on and a slightly bemused look from Steve with a quick explanation from me we descended the shot down to the wreck.
There was a thick, gloopy layer from 5m down to 20m and no light below it so unfortunately the dive was a dark 3m viz. Having said that it was acceptable (and expected) for a Swanage dive.
The wreck was a little smaller than I had anticipated but there was plenty to keep us busy for around 40 minutes on the bottom. There is a nice gun still standing on the deck, unfortunately the other guns have been removed as have the props. but you can clearly see the stern detail where the props were. There are ammo boxes and sundry other items scattered around along with the odd Conger, Blenny, crabs and assorted fish.
Having racked up around 6 minutes of deco I sent up a DSMB and we began our ascent, switching to 50% O2 at 21m we had worked most of the deco off by the time we hit 5m and only had a safety stop to do.
Max Depth: 29m Dive Time: 54 minutes Bottom Temperature: 10 degrees
A hot tea for Steve and a Bovril for me it was a very pleasant steam back to the pontoon and a good dive had by all.
Lessons learnt: MUST DO MORE SKILLS AND DRILLS AT VOBSTER, SPENDING TOO MUCH TIME IN CLEAR BLUE WATER AND WET SUITS!!!