The water always seems cold when you hit it but you can't climb in with all this kit on. I look round and I'm being drawn back to the surface in a cloud of bubbles. I can see the rope above me and as I surface I grasp it. I turn back to face the boat I have just stepped from where my son is waiting for me to settle. I can't smile as I have a regulator in my mouth but I arch my free hand up and touch the top of my head. The "I'm OK" sign.
I watch him put the regulator in his mouth, one hand gathers the gauges hanging off his equipment together and the other covers his face to hold his mask in place. He steps out from the deck and drops heavily into the water. In moments he too is grasping the rope and facing me. "OK" says his hand.
We pull ourselves along to the other rope that runs steeply down from the back of our boat to the wreck below us. "Down?" asks his thumb pointing the way. "Down, OK" I reply. He lifts the hose from his inflated jacket and pushes the button to let out some of the air. He starts down the rope. I follow.
The water is moderately clear but we can see nothing below us yet. Our briefing indicates a wreck standing nearly ten metres tall on a flat bottom that is thirty five metres down. We move slowly. At the bottom of this rope we will have twenty five metres of water bearing down on us and you must let your body take on the pressure slowly. He goes before me looking back to check I am all right. I watch his hands moving between the valves on his jacket as he adds the air to maintain his balance in the water and every now and again his fingers grasp his nose through his mask so he can balance the pressure building up in his ears. He is doing everything right, I know he will, but a father is allowed to watch.
The wreck begins to loom out of the darkness beneath us. It is huge. There is enough light and the water is clear enough to pick out the line of the bow stretching away up current from us. As we finally come down to the deck level we see the mass of plant life that has now encrusted this boat over the fifty or more years it has lain here.
We look about us. The wreck is remarkably preserved. The wood and ropes have, of course, long since been absorbed by the sea but the metalwork may be rusted into holes where it was thinner but the shape can still be seen. Here is a cubby hole that was perhaps once a box but the lid has gone. We point our torches inside. Something waves antenna at us crossly. A huge shrimp or maybe a lobster. We look but we can't see and so we leave it and move on round a huge piece of machinery that was once, I suspect, a winch.
A large fish leads the way before us into the vast open space of the holds. Again the hatches that closed this to protect the cargo at sea have long since been recycled into fish and plants and the way before us is open. This is the dive plan. We are proposing to enter here and swim towards the bows through one of the internal decks. The cargo of war goods is here. This is the safe hold. Towards the stern ammunition is scattered about. Some of it still clinging precariously where its crates have rotted away.
The internal walls that divided things are mostly gone but the cargo remains. There are odd pieces of machinery that are no longer identifiable, a huge pile of rubber boots that were once, I suspect, in a long gone crate. Here is a jeep or some sort of vehicle of that sort. It is home to many creatures now and in the torch light it is brightly coloured. We move onwards beginning to see the light of the next open hatch way ahead of us.
There is a movement from an opening in what might have once been a lorry near us. We stop hopefully. Our torches are perhaps disturbing something but it might show itself. A head peers out. It is a huge Moray eel. It reminds us of the congers that live in similar holes in the wrecks near our home so we wait for it to become more trusting. Fish are not exactly smart so it soon pokes its head out for a look round. I am pleased not to be a small fish because it is a magnificent specimen with serious teeth. I look at my son. 'Shall we go on?' asks his thumb. 'OK' I reply.
We come into the forward hatch way and look up at the light. We are not going to delve further into the wreck this time so we breathe in to make ourselves a little more buoyant and gently rise past the broken hatch gear. Divers do not swim, they fly. We come out from the dark of the hold to the twilight of the open water and switch off our torches. We are almost at the bow now and we swim lazily round to see it and then let the current carry us back stern-wards.
We pass the mooring rope that is our ladder back to our world above and we come to the more sobering part of the wreck. Just aft of centre the boat has suffered a catastrophic explosion. We know from the guide book that it was hit by bombs and part of its cargo of explosives detonated. The whole stern of the ship is twisted so that it lies, not upright like the bow but on its port side. Far to our right we can see the remains of some of the cargo scattered across the seabed, probably fallen from the ship as it sank. Our silent, peaceful ship is telling us about its last few violent hours.
Eleven men died here. Not even military men just ordinary merchant sailors whose boat was carrying supplies for their troops. I am a child of the imediate post war generation and I would dearly love to have the moral certitude to disapprove of war. However the horrific stories from that period leave me unable to argue that the second world war was a unnecessary war and I know that these people died to preserve things that I hold as true. A diver is naturally silent but there is an air of silence here.
We move on and round the stern seeing the rudder and propeller tipped high above the bottom. We return to the mooring rope. We look at one another. We have finished. Our air is getting low. We are now down to the point where both of us just carry enough to get us both back to the surface if one of us had a problem so we must leave. Slowly, carefully counting two seconds to the foot we begin to move up the rope. We keep ourselves balanced in the water with our fingers just holding the rope enough to save swimming against the current. Five metres below the boat we wait. Our bodies have been exposed to a lot of pressure and it is not wise to hurry things. This is called a safety stop. We watch the time pass.
We can see the ladder at the back of the boat and finally our timers release us and we can grasp it and pass up our fins to the crewman waiting for us. We clamber up the ladder suddenly feeling the weight of the tanks on our backs. We walk to the benches, remove our kit and carefully go through the strip down ritual. We are quiet. Wreck diving does that to most people. You have come near to something significant. Few are unmoved.