Scapa Flow - An Internet Odyssey

by Alan Ewart

Scapa Flow, a wild, windswept, breathtakingly beautiful stretch of sheltered water in Scotland's Orkney Islands, a location reputed to offer the best wreck diving in the Northern Hemisphere. I had heard stories of stunning diving in great visibility since long before I even started diving. It's always been close to the top of my 'must do' list, but perhaps surprisingly, I just had never got around to it. It was a hole I was determined to fill during 2006.

My plan was hatched during a branch diving trip to N. Ireland in September 2005. I floated the idea to the branch but the response was distinctly underwhelming. Only one other person would commit to the trip. I was disappointed, but by no means thwarted. Now looking at the logistics when you live in Poole it's a long way to Scapa. Truth be told it would certainly be quicker to get to the Red Sea, it would probably be almost as quick to get to Truk! After some discussion it was decided that my buddy and I would spend a week at Scapa and would pad out the trip by breaking the journey with a few days diving at The Farne Islands and St Abbs on the way up and at The Sound of Mull and the Lake district on the way back. We were determined to enjoy some of the best diving the UK has to offer over the course of two weeks in August.

I was still keen to put together a party of people I knew but some were booked on a warm water trip at the time I planned to go and the distances involved put others off. I was a little downhearted when I saw a trip advertised on an Internet forum at exactly the time I wanted to go. The trip organiser had planned to do a couple of days in Scapa Flow and then head out to dive some of the less frequently dived sites around the Northern Isles. I put our names down and duly paid the deposit. I must admit I did have some considerable reservations. After all, how would you feel about going on a trip with a bunch of people you had never met. How would you feel about sending money to the trip organiser, again someone I had never met? I spent a bit of time chatting to the trip organiser on the forums and I was reassured by the fact that many trips had been organised through these forums all of which seemed to be a resounding success, I was happy to find no negative reports. During the early part of 2006 I managed to meet up with some of the other people attending the trip and having seen that they only had one head and two eyes each I began to look forward to a really fun trip.

Everything went smoothly until ten days before the trip. My buddy unfortunately had family problems and was unable to make the trip. Obviously this left me in a really difficult position. Firstly my buddy was taking his car whilst mine was staying at home with my wife. I knew that everyone else on the trip was in a buddy pair and I was really concerned about upsetting the balance of the trip. A couple of people offered to make up a three with me, but to be honest I was reluctant to dive as part of three with people I had never dived with before, nor was I keen to dive solo on wrecks I had never dived before. My buddy was very magnanimous and said that, as he would lose his money anyway, if I could find a buddy they could replace him at no cost.

There started a round of frantic phone calls, but to no avail. Some were working, some were ill; I was all set to cancel my trip. At the last minute a regular buddy managed to rearrange some shifts at work and to get the week off. I was going to have to take my car and as I was unable to get insurance cover for my new buddy I would have to drive all 780 miles each way myself. He was only able to get the Scapa week off work, so the extended trip was off, but at least we were going to Scapa.

At last the 5th of August arrived and 5.30 am saw Chris arrive at my place, a final transfer of gear into my dive wagon and by 6am we were on the road. As I was doing all the driving the plan was to take it easy, make frequent stops and have the mindset that we arrived when we got there! At least we had all day to travel as some of the group were working on the Friday and not setting out until after work. I have to say the thought of driving from one end of the country to the other on a Friday filled me with dread. In the event the journey was pretty uneventful, if you get my meaning ;-). I had estimated that, if we avoided any bad logjam the journey would take around 14 hours. The traffic gods were kind to us and we arrived at our hotel, The Weigh Inn Website at around 6.30PM. We had booked into one of the lodges which whilst they were fairly basic represented pretty good value at around £25 for Bed & Breakfast.

Arriving so early meant there was only one thing to do! It was off to the bar to meet up with a very large, noisy and excitable group of people. I must say everyone was in very fine fettle, by midnight my sides were sore from laughing so much. It was clear pretty quickly that this group like divers everywhere were keen to rub along and enjoy each others company. It looked like being a great week. Somehow I managed to avoid the games that all seemed to revolve around drinking large amounts of flaming sambuca! Breakfast showed a few people feeling a bit sorry for themselves and one or two singed eyebrows. Thankfully the ferry departure was at a very civilised 11.30.

The majority of our large group of 24 divers had elected to leave their vehicles in Scrabster and travel as foot passengers. This meant offloading all our gear into containers and finding somewhere to park. There is a fair amount of parking near the ferry but after paying the parking charge it would have been almost as cheap to take the car on the ferry, it would certainly have been more convenient. The short journey to Stromness was pretty uneventful and just a couple of hours later our group were loading their gear onto our home for the week, MV Bounteous Sea Website and meeting our skipper Mervyn. The boat is a very well laid out 25 metre ex fishing boat. The hold has been converted to hold six rooms each with two bunks. There is also a shower. The main deck has a lounge, wheelhouse, galley area and a couple of toilets. There is also a sheltered area, which allowed you to get into your dry suit in the dry, a godsend as it happened.

Diving groups can book onto the boat on a bed & breakfast basis or on bed only. Most of us took up the breakfast option. This meant tea, toast and cereal each morning on the way out to the dive site. This meant we had a huge cooked brunch to look forward to between dives. This proved great value, as the food was good quality and certainly enough to see you through to dinner (supplemented by copious amounts of chocolate of course).

Whilst we had 12 people onboard two of these were non-divers so we had loads of room to kit up and store gear on the large dive deck. This despite the fact that all but one of our group were diving on either rebreathers or twin cylinders with deco stages and all the assorted paraphernalia that we seem to drag around with us. Our group was a pretty experienced one and we were all well dived up so our plan was to start the week with a couple of days diving on the German high seas fleet wrecks. Some of the group wanted to dive the battleships, to be honest I was less interested in these as they turned turtle as they sank and I felt that the cruisers would be more interesting. That said as it was my first trip to Scapa I was happy to go with the flow.

We decided our first dive would be on the Battleship Kronprinz Wilhem. She lies upturned in 38m. Her starboard decks are embedded in silt so her port side is more accessible so the 5.9-inch casemate guns are visible, as is the mast and spotting top. Further aft along the wreck, beneath the overhanging decks are the 12-inch guns an awesome sight as are the rudders which are still intact. I was very excited as we jumped off the side of the boat. I had imagined dropping down the shot line to see this huge hulk lying majestically below me. I'd spoken to friends who had been in Scapa a few weeks before and who told tales of 20m visibility. I couldn't wait to see these enormous wrecks in those conditions. I was to be sorely disappointed. The first I saw of the wreck was when I hit the deck at the bottom of the shot. The visibility was more like 20 inches and below about 5m it was dark as night. To be honest I could have been diving on any old heap of scrap iron with a blacked out mask without knowing the difference. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. After 30 minutes of fumbling around in the dark I decided that the dive was not going to be worth any more decompression than I had already incurred. 15 minutes later I was back on the boat with a long face and a sense of foreboding. Discussions amongst the divers held out hope of better underwater conditions on the block ships. This was true, but even then the best conditions gave us only 6 - 8 metres.

It was clear that the weather conditions were deteriorating and the long range forecast looked awful. By Monday afternoon it was clear that with force 8 Westerly's blowing there was no chance of getting outside Scapa Flow. Whilst diving the high seas fleet is a great back up plan I was not looking forward to a week of high winds, heavy rain and diving in 1 metre visibility. This unfortunately was to be our lot for the week. Some of the group even gave up diving and went walking after a couple of days. Most of us continued diving and my log book says I dived The Kronprinz, The Koln, The Margraf, The Brummer, The Karlsruhe, The Dresden, and the Gobernador Borries, several of them twice. To be honest there was little to distinguish between any of the wrecks. Fortunately we had a great group of people on the boat so we could at least amuse each other by talking garbage about diving and taking the rise out of each other.

The highlights of my trip were the people on our boat and those we had travelled with who were on another boat. The Naval museum and the commonwealth war grave site at Lyness were interesting and moving.

Trips like this are very much a holiday for me and sitting around in a force 8, driving rain and diving in 1M visibility are not really my idea of holiday fun, especially given the logistics of getting there. A total of 32 hours elapsed between my leaving home and setting foot on Orkney. Where else in the world could I have travelled to in that time? So, would I go again? Maybe. This is one of the worlds great wreck diving locations, but the sheer unpredictability of UK diving conditions would put me off. I may try again in a few years, but there are so many places around the world where great diving in warm water can be virtually guaranteed.



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