‘Did you see the pit around the bow? That’s not a scour pit: she was 144 metres long and sunk by her bow in 70 metres,’ I said. ‘Looks like her bow hit the seabed whilst her stern was proud of the water – and then as she capsized to starboard her bow ground this pit in the seabed.’
‘The keel bar is severed 20–30 metres away from the stem. It’s the strongest part of the ship – so that might be where the mine hit?’
‘Right, so if the keel bar was severed and she then ground on the seabed as she capsized to starboard, maybe that’s why the keel bar is smoothly bent over to starboard and off the starboard side of the wreck.’
‘Did you see the concave brass transverse bulkhead just forward of the conning tower? That’s bent from a blast forward of it.’
‘Did you see the 6-inch guns impaled upright into the seabed? There’s all sorts of things in a large debris field that have fallen off the ship as she capsized out to the east – there’s nothing on the seabed to the west.’
And so, the chatter went on as we sipped our tea – still in our full rigs. But very soon our initial thoughts and impressions had to stop, as other divers started to pop up to the surface after completing their own deco. We quickly wriggled out of our rebreather harnesses and were soon at the lift, as the Huskyan came in to pick up the next group of divers, who were now well away from the trapeze. Over at the trapeze, other divers were now beginning to surface, slowly starting to fin away and wait for their turn to be picked up.
As other divers came up the diver lift and heavily clomped down on the dive deck benches, the level of buzz and excitement escalated. Everyone was amazed at what they had just seen – each had spotted something unique. Whilst it was a simple joy to see such experienced divers clearly blown away by the experience, immediately I could see just how gifted a group of individuals they were.
Once we had all de-kitted and changed out of our drysuits into our dry clothes, we all gathered in the Huskyan’s spacious saloon, where even more pints of tea were served along with skipper Emily Turton’s justly famous home bakes. You do get treated extremely well on the Huskyan!
In addition to Huskyan’s famous hospitality, Emily is also legendary for her fantastically detailed dive briefings and whiteboard drawings on her regular Scapa Flow dive trips. In advance of this expedition, she had had a huge whiteboard wall mounted in the saloon and as we all sipped tea and ate cake, she sketched out on it the upturned hull of the Hampshire on the seabed.
We had agreed to hold a debrief every day on the passage back south to Scapa Flow to capture everyone’s memories in a formal way, before the days began to merge into one another and memories became muddled and lost. Once the basic outline was up on the board, we went around each of the divers one by one, asking them to take their turn at the whiteboard, saying what they saw and where. Emily then added the things they had seen, like the impaled 6-inch guns and the pinnace Yarrow boilers, in the right locations on the whiteboard. The process took about an hour, and it was clear that even after Day 1 we already had a good idea of the layout of the wreck.
The following day, it was reveille at 0600 for Dive 2. We were all aboard the Huskyan and ropes were being cast off by 0715. We headed south into Scapa Flow from Stromness before turning to the west to pass out through Hoy Sound. Once through the tidal and often very difficult waters of this sound, the Huskyan turned her head to the north for the run up the coast to the wreck site. The weather was beautiful again – the sky was a crisp clear blue, the sea calm, with a long rolling swell coming in from the Atlantic.
Whereas yesterday the task had been to establish a fixed downline near the stern of the wreck and explore it from there, today we would deploy a second shotline on the seabed near the bow and start our exploration from this area. The trapeze could then be deployed on either fixed shot as required each day – divers would know exactly where they would arrive at on the wreck and it would assist becoming familiar with the wreck.
As with the day before, we arrived on site a couple of hours before slack water. The buoys from the fixed shotline deployed at the stern the day before were still floating in position, marking where the wreck lay. Arriving well in advance of slack water like this gave ample time for Ben and Emily to get the boat positioned just off the bow and drop a second weighted shotline to the seabed. This was a fully munitioned warship as well as being a sensitive war grave, and we did not want to damage it in any way with a careless shot deployment. As with the placing of the shot on the seabed near the stern yesterday, Ben and Emily spent a considerable amount of time getting a feel for the exact positioning of the wreck far below before the signal was given to drop the shot.
As the shot weight went over the side, the coiled rope paid out quickly from the deck, only arresting its frantic deployment as the shot landed on the seabed. The rope had been precut to the length required and already had a couple of fisherman’s floats attached to its end; they had insufficient buoyancy to drag the shot away from the wreck. The tide would drag them under until it went slack, when they would pop up to the surface again and make it clear it was time to dive. The first divers in would attach a large danbuoy to the shotline as they went in, to give buoyancy in case there was some sort of emergency during the dive itself. We all clustered in the saloon for our dive briefing and allocating of tasks and areas of operation for each pair of divers. Dive briefing over, it was time to start getting kitted up.
As with yesterday, Ben and Greg Booth would dive first to fix the shot near the wreck. Paul Haynes and Brian Burnett were next into the water, as Ross got the self-deploying trapeze into the water, taking spare gas and the transfer line down the shotline to clip it on at 30 metres. Next, Gary and I would splash.
As I righted myself after jumping off the boat into the water, I finned over to the downline. The trapeze was already hanging fully deployed in free water nearby – I could follow the transfer line from it all the way down into the depths to where Paul and Brian had already clipped it to the downline far below.
Gary and I had a round of OK hand signals and then started our descent into the beautiful crystal-clear water that surrounded us. We were hanging seemingly in the open expanse of the Atlantic – below me it was dark, and as yet there was no sign of the wreck far below.
The tide was now totally slack and so Gary and I let go of the downline and began to freefall deeper into the darkness. Gradually the darkness below took on a familiar form, unnatural straight lines began to coalesce to a point – the unmistakable upturned bow of HMS Hampshire. Far below in the darkness, I could see the shot sitting on the seabed just forward of the port side of the bow. There was no need for us to go over there, so we left the downline and headed over to the ship.
The ripped-open forward section of the keel at the bow, from bridge to stem, was right beside and below us. In the lovely visibility, I could see the full beam of the ship and how the two sides of tapered armour belt swept together towards the stem. The vertical armour belt plates protecting the most important parts of the ship, such as the engines, boilers and magazines amidships, were 6 inches thick, but these tapered towards stern and bow, outwith the citadel. The vertical armour plates beneath me here at the bow appeared to be about 2 inches thick. Inside the exposed innards of the ship I could see the now familiar cylindrical ammunition hoist trunking for A turret, the starboard beam torpedo tube abaft it – and the three capstan axles and circular gears nearby, ahead of it.
As I hung in free water above the wreck I studied this open area in more detail. There was still no trace of any of the keel frames, stringers or shell plating of the hull. Everything above the vertical armour belt plates of either side was gone. In the confused debris of ship’s innards here I spotted a number of torpedo bodies, a number of separate torpedo warheads, shells for the 7.5-inch main guns and for the 6-inch casemate guns, and masses of corrugated rectangular brass tins holding cordite propellant charges for the guns. Cordite propellant was stored separately from shells in magazines well below the waterline of warships.
We spent the dive as planned