Sunday, August 26, 2007

Empire Harry / Persier

After seeing off the first wave there was time for a snorkel, and I went over to Beacon Point to look for the boiler of the Empire Harry. Wearing a 3mm longjohn and a thermal rash vest it was bloD cold (and this was the end of August!), but I had gloves, and wore my hood so at least I didn't get 'ice-cream head'.

On the way over there were several compass jellyfish, some of these had small transparent fish swimming about them; also wrasse, shanny, sand eels, the usual sort of thing. There was quite a variety of weed, the red rags and ferny looking ones particularly striking. Mostly though I was swimming over kelp and I could see that it was starting to look a bit manky and chewed up. Arriving at the Point I soon found the boiler. I shouldn't have been surprised at how big it was, but it is quite big and stands upright 4m or so on the sea-bed. I took a few pictures round and about and headed back, keen to warm up a bit, and on the way found some spiny starfish.

The second wave (Mir) returned to the Persier, we were Paul L and Debbie, Brian and Simon. Chris boathandled.

Brian and I went down (I took a while to get under– I had same weight as usual– so very likely a bit of excess air in my suit), and arrived near the steering quadrant to begin our swim round. We found one of the gun mounts and Brian spotted a very large conger in one of boxy holes beneath it. The pictures I took revealed it to have swallowed a very large fishing hook, injuring it internally (its eye appears spotted with blood). We swam over the forest of pink sea fans that cover the collapsed hull plates and swam through the propshaft from the stern end. After our zig-zag along the wreck we arrived at the boilers, and had a look round them before sending up the blob.

We had bit of a get together around Chris and Debbie’s abode, which was quite jolly, and Sunday night was nice and quiet and I actually got a good nights sleep; a few drinks, ramming the ear-plugs in as far as possible - just in case - and being fagged out all helped too.

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