HMS Sapper - Selsey - 18th June

[Lou]

The alarm went at 3:00am and I proved to myself that it really does get dark in the summer. Leapt out of bed (well, almost) and Caroline and I grabbed a quick shower and a coffee before hitting the road half an hour later. The car was packed up the night before in anticipation of the early start and we managed to stick to the leaving schedule for almost the first time!

The reason for this painfully early start was a booking with Skipper (Dive Eclipse – Selsey) on the 6.30am dive on HMS Sapper. It took us just over 2 hours on a clear road to get to Selsey, but that is the closest diveable salty stuff (except for Horsea Island, which doesn’t really count).

We arrived at the East Beach carpark just after 5.30am to find the gates locked. Oh dear. Looking around we spotted another couple of people parked up by the toilet block, idnetified them as divers by the kit spewing from the back of the car and drove up to join them. We thought that this was a ggod spot as after a long drive we could do with availing ourselves of the facilities – they were locked too. Apparently vandalism and youths doing doughnuts lead the council to lock both the toilet s and the carpark at night. Dave has te car park keys and he arrived to open up at about 5.50am, but the toilets stayed out of bounds. This forced 3 concerned looking women to eye up the scrubby bushes that border on edge of the car-park – only one of us was brave enough (or desperate enough) to go for it though, and it wasn’t C or me!

The weather was glorious and the sea was calm as we looked from the beach. Dave pulled Eclipse up to the beach in the usual way and, kitted, we boarded via the two ladders. There were only six booked for this early dive, so lots of room on the benches and we tied the twins on. Dave then came along, called us "girls" and re-did them . Apparently he has designed them with a method in mind and we free-styled it!

Once all were on board we turned and whizzed out to sea. A few hundred metres later we stopped. It was the return of the cursed Honda outboards again. Luckily for us, this time it was only a leaky water pipe and Dave effected a temporary repair with the help of some insulating tape until he could replace the section properly whilst we were diving.

The trip out to the Sapper re-started and I noticed with some concern for stomach that although it was calm there was a long swell present. I had been optimistic about the seastate that morning and hadn’t taken my seasick pills and therefore felt a little apprehensive about what kitting up would be like. I needn’t have worried. Dave shotted the wreck, and then gave us his usual thorough briefing. We got reay at a leisurely pace waiting for slack. The line disappearing down throught the green water gave good indications of some nice viz. This was "a good thing" – we had dived the Sapper once before and mostly we were being lost on it in poor, dark viz.

HMS Sapper was an armed trawler that was torpedoed in 1918. It is a small wreck with bows that are intact and standing upright in about 32m, the area behind the bows was the first hold and is collapsed outwards. There is then a boiler, stood on end with a debris pile next to it and behind that the stern appears far more broken.

On this dive Caroline and I had decided to run some simulated deco with both of us launching SMBs. We there had a slate of run-times to stick to. The plans were based to make it no deco for 28%, which was what we had in the tanks, but run stops as if we were on air. This gave us just short of 20 mis bottom time and we could happily have spent much, much longer on there. The shot was just off the bows and the 8m viz and white sandy bottom made it wonderfully light. We could see the bows rising up from the sand and on approach a peek into the inside revealed a shoal of very large bib. They blocked out the far side of thearea but I could see the opening to the collapsed sectionabout 4m away. Mindful of Dave’s warning of the silt on the bottom I pulled myself through the hole in the bow and carefully swam to open. Caroline made her way along the outside to meet me where I exited. We both took a quick look back into the forward section with our torches. There are very flares to be had here if you like to look for that sort of thing and then decided to make our way along the wreckto see the leetle feeshes. The open, collapsed hold looks spartan when you just glance at it, but we saw cuckoo wrasse, swimming crabs, edible crabs, fan worms and lots of other life as we moved towards the boiler.

During the briefing Dave had told us of the huge conger that lived in the mud-hole on the boiler. I didn’t actually know what a mud-hole was and was too shy to ask in front of the others on the boat so we thought we would just have a mince around and see if we could see anything "hole-like"…..then we got distracted. On the port side of the boiler is a pile of debris about 3m by 3m by 3m. This debris has lots of holes and cracks and small caverns and a flash of my torch caught something moving. I couldn’t make it out at first as it was quite far back so I jiggled the torch light a bit and it moved forward. There, in front of me, was the most enormous conger I have ever, ever seen. I know that we, as divers, go on about the size of conger but this one was so big that I was quite shocked! Then I turned to find Caroline – I could see by the look in her eyes and the hand-signals that she had seen it!

More suprising was that in this pile of debris, living in close proximity we saw at least another 8-10 conger of all sizes. As the conger isn’t a communal animal by nature it indicates that the wreck has a healthy amount of edible life on it and plenty of suitably attractive conger-style lodgings.

We poked around this area for a few more minutes, slowly making our way around the back of the boilers before a time check gave us the prompt to deploy the blobs. Back on the boat and a cup of coffee in hand the early start was well worth it.

The better news was that we were booked on the next dive too so the kit could stay on the boat for the SI and we didn’t have to drag it up the beach at Selsey!………

[MATTBIN]

I spotted it was a 6.30 dive last week, thought you were on it and wondered if you had gone mental. Glad the dive went so well, nice write up and a good day out. Good to know that Dave is getting rid of those cursed engines very soon. He deserves a good run of weather and dives this year, reliable engines would help his bank balance no doubt.

Was thinking about you at the weekend and how you fared, spotted some bad news over the weekend and kept my fingers crossed you'd be OK. Was the Wrasse in breeding colours, they are such beautiful creatures when they are plumed up.

Matt