Plymouth June 9th & 10th 2007

I had signed up onto a trip run by Clive Alldred and a group of guys from Manchester to do 2 days diving with Steve Wright on Seeker.

On the Saturday we had an 8 o' clock meet to be away for 8:30. We had a 30 mile trip do dive the Trentonian which is just off Falmouth. The Trentonian was a Canadian Corvette (K368) which was torpedoed by U-1004 in 1945 when it was an escort ship to convoy BTC 76. 6 men died in the attack.

The Trentonian was 208 feet long and a displacement of 980 tons, she carried one 4" gun, one 2pdr anti aircraft gun, and 6 20mm anti aircraft gun.

We didn't have much prior info on the layout of the wreck but I went in first to secure the shot and found her to be lying on the port side, and the deepest part of the wreck in 70 metres. The viz was quite good, a respectable 8 metres. However the wreck is what I would call quite dirty, in that it is covered in silt.

I found a number of 4" shell casings but none were in ideal condition, as they were either bent along the length or badly dented. I did 30 minutes bottom time before heading back up the shot line, for a run time of about 2 hours.

The second day there were only 6 of us on the boat so we decided to do a small steamer in the outer patch, to date it has not been named.

Prior to the dive one of the guys had forgotten his contact lenses, so a certain person who frequents this newsgroup decided to offer some "useful" advice. Now this advice should have been taken with a pinch of salt especially when his name on here is "Skipbollux"

Anyways Steve (oooops sorry I mean the unnamed person) suggested that the best thing for the myopic diver to do was to take the arms off his specs place them on his nose then press his mask firmy in place over them. Yeah I know fcuking stupid idea. But he went for it.

He told us later that he went down the shot, everything was blurred, got on the bottom and tried to flood the mask and clear a few times, all to no avail. By now the specs had also twisted so he couldn't look through both lenses. Eventually at 73 metres after swimming around seeing nothing he had to take off his mask and remove the specs. We were so sympathetic.....NOT!!!

Anyway I was first in again, first thing to notice was that the viz was fantastic on the bottom, at least 20 metres. The wreck sits upright at 73 metres. The stern is the highest point and one blade of the prob is visible, the others being buried. There was no deck structure to the wreck so my impression was that it had 2 holds and there was a mast midships that was draped in trawl net. The boilers were close to this point so I assume they must have been moved forward. At the bows the wreck breaks up and there is a fair bit of debris in this area.

All in all a very nice dive, I left the bottom after 29 minutes.