Those who came along were Nick Chipchase, Ash Boxall, Steve Chaplin, Megan Clarke, Stuart Miles, Mike Robinson, Adam Bolton, Paul Hennessey, and Me.
We had an 8 am meet time on Seeker and we soon had the boat decorated with our, no expense, spared team banner. Here are some of the TOSSERS.
NICE SHIRT eh??
At 8:30 we set off to do the Eastpoint which weighed in at 5,234 tons, was 390 feet in length and 51 feet wide. She was torpedoed by U 48 in 1917 while on her way from London to the USA.
The trip out wasn’t too bad although we did have a few technicolour yawns from Stuart, Paul and Adam. In fact Adam improvised on one of his later chunders when he was kitting up and he used his fin to spew into, rather unusual but his fin slipped onto his foot quite easily after that. This is the same Adam who earlier had gone flat on his face when going out of the wheelhouse.
The shot was put in towards the stern and just on the starboard side. Ash was first in to tie in, more about this later then, Stuart and I took in, and attached, the lazy shot. The viz was reasonable, about 8 metres in my estimation. After going towards the bows for a while I turned and went back to the stern. This area has a net over it and rises up quite high, depth here is about 54 metres whereas the sea bed is at about 66 metres. Right on the stern there is an anti aircraft gun and a little further forward on the port side there is another bigger gun lying on its side.
So then it was back to the shot only to find that tying in shot lines is not one of Ash’s skills, there was no sign of the shot so after looking around for a while we bagged off instead, for a bottom time of 38 minutes.
Stuart had managed to bag a nice lobster which was delivered back to the boat the next day, along with some bread rolls, a “tossed” salad (well what else what you expect) and a balsamic dressing…very tasty.
After the dive we had a look around at some marks that Nick and Ash had come up with. We managed to hit both of them within minutes of looking for them, so the numbers were spot on.
For the second day we decided to go for the second of these marks, we agreed to let Ash go in first to tie in, (he was secretly hoping it was going to be a sub) and me and Stuart taking in the lazy. However Ash was the last to kit up and kept everyone waiting,
after he and Nick had gone down Wrighty said the shot had come off the wreck so
laid it again.By this time we were getting late so we abandoned the plan of the lazy and went in, careful not to touch the shot line at all in case of a repeat, and what did we get when we got to the bottom…the seabed, so Stuart and I did a 60 metre scallop dive. I did point out a couple of nice flatties to Stuart, but he tried to pick them up instead of ramming a big knife through the head.
Steve and Megan saw a torchlight as they were descending and so they got onto the wreck, as did Paul. So it was just Adam, Stuart and me that spent time looking at the sea bed instead. However I must say it was a very interesting sea bed
The wreck turned out to be a single screw, upside down coaster about 60 metres long, approx 700 tons. The verdict from those on the wreck seemed to be that it was a nice dive, but not one that anyone would hurry back to. The wreck has been named as the SS St Katharine
And finally just to mention that Nick fell asleep in the wheelhouse and pissed himself, and don't let him try and convince you otherwise. He will probably have some bullshit story about how it happened.