Site Last Updated : 2nd August 2002

2002: Scapa Flow, Orkney Islands

Day 7: Thursday, 25th August 2002

SMS Brummer (Dive #9)

The light cruiser, SMS Brummer was designed to lay minefields and was scuppered on June 21st, 1919. She now lies between 30-37m with her midsection blown out during salvage work.

Today's buddies were: Stew and Simon Barney and Steve Rick and Donald Nigel and Jason Jon, Paul and Gilles as the threesome.

With Stew borrowing Dougie's dry suit for the day following his zip failure, he was in for a lesson in diving without proper suit dumps; whilst wearing his trusty dive mittens. After a slight struggle against the surface current, we reached the marker buoy and started our descent. Having problems dumping from the cuffs, Stew reverted to the his elegant approach with the neck seal and pulling himself down the shot. Dropping onto the Brummer, lying on her side, she didn't look as impressive as some of the other cruisers we'd dived. We saw one of her main guns between midships and the bow. Continuing towards the bow we swam through along the deck before doubling back over the hull. On reaching the blasted section behind midships, Stew popped up the DSMB and we finned over the top of the wreckage before reaching the stern section; this was in a worse state than the bow, with the hull plates loose and falling away into deeper water, we decided to ascend up the DSMB line. Stew had problems with his control buoyancy at 6m in the 'suit without dumps'. As I tried to grab hold of his fins and dump air to keep him down we both ascended to 2-4m with computers beeping madly. As we hadn't incurred any decompression penalty throughout the dive we weren't overly concerned about the safety stop but it certainly woke our dive computers up.

With the weather still overcast and drizzly, divers were either catching up with sleep, or their dive logs, after another superb breakfast provided by Davey (including black pudding today).

V83 (Dive #10)

Torpedo-boat destroyer, V83 lies away from the other German wrecks on the east side of Rysa Little. Today she is broken into two distinct sections, her stern at around 20m and the bow section at 5-8m.

Descending the shotline onto the stern section we were one of the last divers down. By the time we reached the seabed the bottom had already been kicked up and visibility was reduced from around 10m to 5m. Passing over the rudder and stern section we decided to venture off the wreck leaving the other divers behind. Following along the seabed at around 12m Stew spotted a decent-sized edible crab that couldn't be left behind. The only problem was that neither of us had a goodie bag, so innovative Stew tied the crab onto his line and shot him up on the end of his DSMB. We continued along the seabed up to 6m to deco as we drift along. Making our way between the kelp, and over submerged boulders, we decided to end the dive and made our final ascent.

Tonight's exploits would inevitably be a little more sedate than the last with an early morning wake-up in order to catch slack water for the Dresden. After a light mackerel snack, the group settled down to 'The Fan' on video with Robert DeNiro and Wesley Snipes. A quick trip over to Stromness Hotel for a couple of drinks, followed by a crab sandwich back on the Sunrise. An early night by all; to the disappointment of Paul who was blown out by the blonde from the night before.

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