Feeling the Flow

Divers on the Doyle Photo: Simon Rogerson Diver on Bow of the Dresden Photo: SR Map Photo: SR Arriving on hull of Dresden Photo: SR Gun on Dresden Photo: SR An ACAC gun Photo: SR Anemones on the Karlsruhe Photo: SR Anemones inside the Tabarka Photo: SR Wheelhouse of the James Barrie Photo: SR Propeller on the Doyle Photo: SR Inside the Doyle Photo: SR Stern of the barge Photo: SR Ascending from Kronprinz Wilhelm Photo: SR

Anyone who has dived in Burra Sound will know how it works: you jump off the dive boat slightly overweighted and execute a negative entry. Even as you drop through the blueish-green water, you feel the pull of the tide dragging you, but you have to fight your way down to the mass of kelp covering the wreck below. A few anxious moments follow as you search around for a way into the wreck, where shelter awaits.

Inside the wreck, it’s a completely different proposition. The water is beautifully clear but utterly still, and green light filters through the cracks, illuminating millions of tiny red anemones. Torch beams cut through the shadows as your fellow divers explore the blockship’s interior, and the next 45 minutes are spent finning serenely, inspecting the features and watching schools of fish hurtle past in the churning water outside the wreck. When it’s time to leave, you exit via another big breach in the hull, where ribs protrude like jagged fangs. There is a moment of calm, then you send up your delayed surface marker buoy and you are swept away, with the current howling around you. Some people call this the ‘Mary Poppins experience’, with your reel and SMB taking the place of the nanny’s famous flying brolly.

Then you surface and – hopefully – all is calm again. You can see cattle on the green fields of Hoy, and as you inflate your jacket you can hear grey seals making mournful calls. Waiting for the boat to pick you up is, for once, a pleasure. It is the complete diving experience in one magical hour.

Or, then again, as some Scapa enthusiasts may say with the humorous disdain that comes with experience, you’ve been on a ‘bloody grockle dive’! The point is that it’s too nice, too pretty, perhaps a little too obvious (a ‘grockle’ being a tourist or general lightweight). The thing is, Scapa means different things to different divers. During my visit we had a mixed group on the MV Halton skippered by Bob Anderson. The group underlined the broadness of the Scapa experience. I was there to follow my own agenda – to see if this unique place would really benefit from ‘doing a Scylla’ and sinking a new wreck, as has been proposed by the local charter skippers’ association.

Of course, people come here to dive the German High Seas Fleet, infamously scuttled on the orders of its own rear admiral in the days of confusion leading up to the signing of the Armistice. The shallower wrecks were salvaged, but much remains to be enjoyed and Scapa is still regarded as the best wreck diving hotspot in the northern hemisphere, despite some excellent diving opportunities in Norway and the D-Day wrecks of Normandy (see DIVE, May 04).

‘People come here and they are blown away by the excitement of diving the blockships,’ Bob Anderson told me. ‘But when they come back they tend to concentrate more on the German fleet, starting with light cruisers such as the Köln and the Dresden and then graduating to the big stuff. Confirmed Scapa addicts come back exclusively for the battleships, König, Kronprinz Wilhelm and Markgraf, because that’s where they find the nourishment of the Scapa experience.’

The battleships are immense, but all turned turtle when they were scuttled and now lie hull-up, making for a deeper, more complex dive if you want to explore the wreck’s features. Swim down the hull of SMS Kronprinz Wilhem and you think you are on a huge reef, as it is covered in invertebrate life. This ship was 172m long, with a beam of 30m and a draught of 20m. The steep port side is plastered with plumose anemones and hydroids, but as you near the bottom at 35m, it becomes clearer that you are diving on a man-made object.

Much of the superstructure is embedded in silt, but it all makes for a fascinating dive under the hull, albeit one where a torch is absolutely essential. The gun barrels have fallen from their mounts and can be found on the sea bed, but the turrets are still in place and, aft of the bridge, the main mast stretches out on the sea bed. The battleships are epic dives but for many, the light cruisers are a less intimidating introduction to Scapa diving. The classic ones are SMS Brummer, SMS Köln, SMS Karlshruhe and SMS Dresden, all of which lie on their sides. Although they are smaller than the battleships, it still takes a few dives to get to grips with them. The big advantage for those in search of a visual dive (light penetration is often excellent at Scapa) is that the cruisers all lie on their sides, so you can enjoy the detail of the wreck and ferret around at average depths of 20–28m, enjoying a fair degree of ambient light.

My favourite was probably the Dresden. Bristling with guns and heavily armoured, she was launched in Hamburg in 1916 and is more than 150m long. The maximum depth is just 35m and the wreck sits on its starboard side. DIVE wouldn’t recommend that anyone actually enters the Dresden, but there are parts where the deck has opened up and peeled away, creating new vistas.

I descended right down to the sea bed and swam along the base of the bridge, where a 5.9-inch gun turret and barrel rested on the bottom, surrounded by sand eels. It’s an underwater photographer’s trick, to get under something and look up, in order to make the scene look even more impressive, so I gazed up from the sea bed and saw green light streaming down through the bridge superstructure. Even with good visibility, it can be hard to appreciate the immensity of Scapa diving.

It’s part of the experience to see how time and salt water are slowly eating at the wrecks, gradually changing the face of these fallen giants. On the Brummer, plates are peeling away at the stern; in the beautiful blockship Tabarka, the famous boilers that once hung from above have fallen and sit on the bottom. The most popular of the blockships, the Inverlane, collapsed five years ago after bearing the brunt of the Atlantic for more than 60 years. The blockships were sunk as part of Winston Churchill’s plan for shoring up the defences of the Flow after the sinking of HMS Royal Oak by the U47, while at anchor on 14 October 1939.

Scapa is changing, but the process is slow – it takes a long time to eat into an armoured battleship. And for those who feel the need to swim around a wreck in a single dive, there is always the James Barrie, an Icelandic steam trawler that ran aground and sank while being towed towards Scapa pier. It’s a relatively deep dive, with the port rails of the trawler at 35m and the bottom at 43m (an old Scapa hand referred to it as ‘the bendy Barrie’). The Barrie is popular because it provides a contrast to the military wrecks and often has very clear water, with an average visibility of about 20m. Well, that’s what they tell you, but it was 5m tops and as black as night by the time I made my way down the shot-line. I took a few cursory pictures of the wheelhouse and winch, then floated around in the blackness for a while before returning to the surface.

Scapa’s most famous blockship is the Tabarka, but I was even more impressed by the Doyle, a single-screw steamer built in 1907 and sunk as a blockship in 1940. The maximum depth is only about 18m and the wreck still bears a flaring propeller, which is coated in small red anemones. Wildlife is rich around the wreck, particularly crabs, lobsters and ballan wrasse.

It’s one of those wrecks where you can get your head into countless nooks and crannies, not to mention swimming down companionways strewn with smooth pebbles. I would urge underwater photographers to visit and revisit this wreck, as it is visually one of the most rewarding dives in the UK – I rate it alongside the Robert on Lundy Island or even the Hispania off Mull.

So Scapa has all these wildly different diving experiences, all across one diverse body of water. Why, then, has the Orkney Dive Boat Operators’ Association started investigating ways of sinking a new wreck? Would it be an insult to Scapa’s ‘genuine’ wrecks? Having dived some of Orkney’s finest, I now think it would be entirely in keeping with Scapa’s extraordinary heritage, or what David Doubilet once jokingly referred to as ‘Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter’s artificial reef programme’.

Put more simply, if you’ve done it once, why not do it again? The charter skippers have their own reasons for wanting to sink a new wreck, but the knock-on effect for the visiting diver would be a complete catalogue of wrecks from the end of the First World War to the present day. To that extent, sinking a new wreck in Scapa would be a way of closing the circle. Does Scapa really need a new wreck? Not especially – there’s more than enough there to keep you occupied. But would Scapa and its visitors benefit from sinking a new wreck? Undoubtedly.