The skipper asked if Paul and I, being the most experienced, (what he meant, I suspect, was the oldest) if we would splash first and make sure the shot was near the wreck. We heavily stood up from the kitting-up benches on the dive deck and in the rather clumsy, ungainly gait of a fully rigged technical diver, carefully clumped our way over to the dive gate through the stern gunwale. At a signal from the skipper, it was one stride forward and we were splashing heavily into the water.
Righting myself, I dumped air from my buoyancy wings and drysuit and started to sink slowly. As the water closed over my head, I looked around and was surprised at how good the underwater visibility was. After an OK signal with Paul we started the descent down the line in about 20-metre visibility.
My optimism for such good visibility down on the wreck was abruptly smashed at about 40 metres down, when the water started to get rapidly murkier. By 50 metres down it was a silty brown with only about 5 metres visibility. This was most likely the result of the trawling in the channel that had been taking place up-current earlier.
We pressed on down into the gloom, our torches struggling to punch through it. At about 60 metres, the seabed began to materialise a few metres beneath me, at 64 metres. I shone my powerful torch around, up against the gentle current, and there at the limit of my vision was a brooding dark mass that seemed to be ominously rising up above me. Or at least that’s what I thought I was seeing – most divers looking for a wreck in dark conditions are familiar with the feeling of thinking there’s a dark silhouette out there, which recedes as you approach it; it’s just an illusion.
We clipped a reel onto the downline and reeled out as we moved across what turned out to be a gap of 5–8 metres until we arrived at a solid wall of rusted steel. We had arrived at Pathfinder’s starboard side, the hull disappearing down into the silty seabed. Shining my torch up the hull plating here, I could see where the wall of steel ended at the horizontal main deck above me.
We rose up this vertical wall of steel until we were able to pop over the bulwark onto the main deck at just under 60 metres, and here we tied off the reel line. The other divers wouldn’t need to go all the way to the seabed and rack up unnecessary deco – they would just come down to the reel and then move straight across to the main deck. I looked up the downline and thought I could see the faintest trace of their torches far above us as they descended.
We appeared to have arrived halfway along the ship, between the bridge and the stern. We moved off slowly on our scooters, forward along the starboard side of the hull, past the open circles where her three smokestacks had stood on top of a slender superstructure that was one deck level high. Dotted along the starboard side of the deck were lifeboat davits – some of these still with the original ropes hanging from them despite more than 90 years on the bottom.
There is a pronounced rise at the back of the bridge superstructure: the hull rises up a deck level to the fo’c’sle deck and two rows of portholes were studded along the side of the ship here. The stump of the foremast rose up, directly abaft the bridge. It had been brought down by the force of the explosion in 1914, along with the foremost smokestack.
Moving up on top of the remaining bridge superstructure, we made out the circular outline of the conning tower. This wreck is a military war grave and British divers have shown great respect for it over the years; there has been no pilfering of artefacts that I am aware of. As a result, small personal items were still strewn about here in the bridge area – I spotted a brass sextant and brass cage lights and lanterns.
A number of brass 4-inch shell cartridges littered the ship here, and immediately beside the empty grooved circular mounts of her 4-inch guns, a number of non-ferrous boxes were stacked side by side. Each box still held six ready-use 4-inch shells – the circular bases of some of the shells had corroded away to expose the rods of spaghetti-like cordite propellant inside.
I left the bridge area and moved further forward and downwards, into the gloom. The fo’c’sle deck seemed to begin to slope downwards abruptly – and then it just ended, sheared clean across by the secondary magazine explosion. It looks as though the ship heaved upwards as the massive explosion blew the bow off, bending the leading edge here over and downwards.
Ancient large gauge heavy netting was snagged over the break. This may have been old commercial fishing net – or something more poignantly related to the loss. For after the sinking, the Royal Navy put a net over the vessel to catch bodies floating out of the ship. This was a common practice with Royal Navy vessels, and one that would be repeated during World War II with, for example, the sinking of the battleship HMS Royal Oak at Scapa Flow in 1939.
Paul and I turned the dive here at the sheared-off fo’c’sle deck. There was no point venturing out into free water here – we knew the bow section was missing and lay almost a mile away.
We moved aft down the port side of the wreck, past more empty lifeboat davits, the three funnel openings and the skeletal one-storey deckhouse from which they rose. As we moved aft we began to see the torch beams of the other divers moving here and there like light sabres, the divers themselves invisible in the darkness.
As we got to the very stern we found more scattered 4-inch shells beside an empty 4-inch gun mount. Was this the mount for the 4-inch gun which had been fired after the torpedo hit and had gone over the side taking its crew with it?
Moving round the stern, I shone my torch downwards and could see the three-bladed starboard prop in free water where the tide had created a scour pit round the stern of the ship. I traced the free section of shaft forward from its support bearing until it disappeared into its hull tube and forward to the engine room.
After 25 minutes exploring her remains, Paul and I called the dive and began to scooter back to the downline to ascend. The downline was easily found off the starboard side – a number of strobes were flashing away on it 5 metres off the wreck in the gloom. We retrieved our reel and wound in our line as we moved towards the downline and began to ascend.
As we rose above 50 metres, our surroundings began to get brighter again. We were rising out of the cocoon of darkness that shields Pathfinder. Then, at about 40 metres we seemed to pop out of the cloud of silty gloom into bright water. We suddenly had 20–30-metre visibility again.
We reached the transfer line and moved slowly across it towards the trapeze that we could see hanging in the water high above us. As we rose we started slowly going through our decompression stops, all the time moving towards the trapeze. As we got shallower, every now and then one of the other divers would appear from the gloom far below us, carefully carrying out their own deco stops.
Finally, the last diver up disconnected the transfer line and we all began to drift under the trapeze, moving slowly upwards as we carried out our deco stops at 12 and 9 metres before the long hang at the last stop, 6 metres. As it was getting a bit busy on the trapeze, Paul and I came off the trapeze and whiled away the deco time circling the other divers on our scooters.
Here at the end of the first dive, it is perhaps the right time to explain, in case you’re new to this, a little about breathing gases and decompression, to start breaking you in gently!
The open-circuit (OC) divers in our group arriving at the deco station were breathing from standard diving regulators, where, as you breathe out, your exhaled breath is vented as bubbles from your regulator that rise up to the surface.
As the dive was deeper than the safe recommended limit for diving standard compressed air, they were using a helium-rich breathing gas for the deep part of the dive, known as bottom mix. As they ascended at the end of the dive and began their decompression stops at about 20 metres or shallower, they were able to switch over to a cylinder of enriched air nitrox (EAN) slung under their arm on their webbing and designed purely for use during decompression; it is called deco mix. Perhaps it is best if I also explain a little about diving gases and accelerated decompression at this early stage.
Basically, the more oxygen in your deco mix, the more you can shorten – or accelerate – your decompression stops. But there are certain depth limitations for different levels of oxygen