practice is that the trapeze is carabinered to the downline at a suitable depth with a transfer line – that is, a line that allows divers to transfer from the downline to the trapeze.
As the last diver comes up from depth at the end of the dive, when they arrive at the point where the trapeze or deco station is carabinered to the downline, the transfer line can be unclipped from the fixed downline. Everyone then goes for a drift, holding on to one of the trapeze bars. Drifting with the current in a fixed body of water, you now feel that you are stationary in the water – whereas, in reality, you are speeding over the seabed far below at anything up to a knot.
My group has a tag system to assist in knowing where everyone is. On the way down the shotline, at the beginning of the dive, we clip a plastic tag with our name on it onto a fixed ring on the shotline beside the trapeze carabiner that is to be unclipped to allow us to drift and ascend. On the way back up, each diver removes their name tag from the ring – so if your tag is the last one on the ring, you know everyone else is above you and that it is safe to unclip the trapeze and go drifting.
Like most technical divers, we also have a system that only red DSMBs are fired up on ascent if all is well. This tells topside boat cover that all is good. We also each carry a yellow DSMB and reel, which is only deployed to the surface to tell topside that there is a problem.
As a result of the area that Pathfinder lies in, although the underwater visibility in the shallows above the wreck can be quite good, the silty seabed can be stirred up as the tide runs over the seabed, and it is common to find that down on the wreck the particles in suspension filter out all light coming down from above. As a result, there is little or no ambient light – the wreck usually has the feeling of being very dark and moody. Divers are reliant on their torches, the rusty red brown metal of the ship being covered in the soft coral known as dead men’s fingers, which flares white in the torch beams.
For UK technical diving on wrecks like Pathfinder, where you expect it to be pitch black with often poor, silty visibility in torch beams, each diver also carries a small strobe which is clipped to the downline a few metres above the wreck. The downline itself would be next to impossible to find without it, and doing a free ascent from great depth on a tidal wreck which is known to have many nets snagged on it is not the best idea. But 5–6 strobes flashing away in the darkness can be seen from a long way off. By the end of the bottom time, a diver’s night vision will have kicked in and you often see a fuzzy halo of light from the strobes flashing well in the distance.
On this visit, the skipper having positioned his boat to take account of the tide, he then gave the command for the shotline to be deployed over the side of the boat, intentionally placing the shot on the seabed just off the wreck. Skippers are very sensitive to not dropping weighted shotlines on war graves – particularly on fully munitioned warships like Pathfinder.
Our group of divers had dressed into our drysuits some time before on the approach to the site; pee valves (or should I say, offboard urination devices) were already all connected up. With the wreck shotted and slack water approaching, we began to wriggle into our rebreather harness webbing, pulling on fins and mask, clipping on bailout cylinders under each arm, connecting suit inflation direct feeds and switching on our rebreather wrist computers to let them start going through their boot-up self-check menus. Finally, fully rigged, we simply sat still carrying out our rebreather final pre-breathe for a few minutes – if there is going to be an early problem with a rebreather, it’s better it happens on the boat than in the water. All was good, we were ready to dive.
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
