UKRS Poole
July 20th & 21st 2002
For this trip we were booked aboard Beowulf, we were also
fortunate that there were only 10 of us on the boat due to a couple of drop
outs. Those on the boat include, Andy Cox, Jasmine Sharp, Jason Poynting, Ken
Tomkinson, Neil Weller, Daniel Taylor, Louise Thompson, Steve Jones, Rich Meese
and Keith Sabine.
I traveled down to Poole on the Saturday morning due to the
later than normal start, and the fact that I couldn’t find a room for the
Friday night.
The first dive of the day was on the wreck of the Kyarra.
She was 415 feet by 52 feet and weighed 4,383 tonnes. She was en route to South
Africa when she was torpedoed on 5th May 1918.
We set off in plenty of time to ensure that we were ready
for slack water and got in at 1:45. I had a problem as soon as I hit the water
when my computer decided to shut down and take a holiday. I continued the dive
on my back up computer, which unfortunately is not a nitrox computer. This meant
that at the end of the dive I had to do some extra time to clear it for the
afternoon dive.
As for the dive itself the Kyarra is a nice wreck with lots of fish, Bib being about the only one that I can recognise. The wreck at its deepest is about 30 metres, but various sections of it rise 5 metres or so above the seabed. My run time here was 40 minutes despite being on EAN28.
Fortunately my nitrox computer decided to behave itself for
the rest of the weekend, so I didn’t have to dive air profiles.
Only one item of kit was despatched to the depths this
weekend, and that was when Neil decided that he really needed to buy himself a
new reel and DSMB, and threw the old one away. Well maybe the order of the 2
events was somewhat different.
The dive for the afternoon was on the “petrified
forest”. We dropped into about 9 metres and then just drifted over this area,
some nice fish to see in this area, but nothing that I would particularly want
to return for. After a little while we drifted onto a sandy bottom where there
was very little life apart from crabs and other shellfish. The only other thing
of note was a nice size dogfish. After a while sheer boredom set in and we
surfaced with a run time of 55 minutes on EAN28, to find that the boredom
threshold of the others was considerably shorter, as we were the last out of the
water.
The following day we were scheduled to leave the harbour at
midday to dive on the Eleanor. This wreck is apparently sometimes mixed up with
a wreck called the Ajax which was originally believed to sit on this site.
The Eleanor was 270 feet by 36 feet and 1,980 tonne ship
which was torpedoed on 12th February 1918 while en route to Falmouth.
She was a cargo ship which was carrying depth charges and anti shipping mines at
the time of her sinking. A very interesting target for the shot.
The wreck itself makes a nice dive with the bottom at 38
metres, and rises 5 metres or so in some places. Quite a lot of conger on the
wreck, well that’s what everyone else reported, I managed to see one which was
right at the bottom of the shot line. Plenty of Bib to see again, eventually I
may report on seeing other fish, when I learn their names.
Total run time for this dive was 60 minutes on EAN28
Unfortunately there are no pics available of this trip as
no one brought along a camera.