Freesteel Blog » Diving the Resurgum

Diving the Resurgum

Thursday, July 25th, 2019 at 3:46 pm Written by:

Stop doing and start blogging!

Yesterday I got out on the wreck of the Resurgam in 1879, which then sank while on tow in the Mersey Bay, only be discovered 116 years later. It was propelled by a coal powered steam engine and was lit by candle light.

You’d think that the people of the day would have seen that electric power had to be the way forward for submarines. The inventor, George Garret, appeared to have done a lot of marine tech in a life that was shorter than mine, but then emigrated to America in 1890 to become a rice farmer, which seems a bit of a waste.

I dived it with a half empty tank (on a 100bar) because I was too incompetent to fetch the right one out of the garage. Luckily it was a shallow dive and I could go easy on the breathing at the cost of giving myself a headache for the rest of the day. The water was pretty warm, so I skipped gloves, which meant that I got nipped by crabs when I forgot to look where I put my hands.

Here’s the remnants of the propeller in my hand:

Here’s the other pointy end:

Here’s the remains of the conning tower:

Maybe if I took off my tank I could have jammed myself down inside. It’s pretty tight.

There was one hole on one side by the sea bed, from which this lobster made a successful escape from the other diving pair who were trying to catch it for their dinner:

Then I bothered a tompot blenny by poking it out of its hole. It slipped round to the other side of the tower only to meet a second blenny who was not pleased by the territorial incursion:

I wonder if there’s been any experiments with territorial species to find out whether they use natural boundaries to demarcate their areas, and to what extent a nipped intruder understands where the line is drawn. Or maybe the animal territories are not actually areas, but instead single perching places from which to leap out and attack intruders that they can see, and that’s the key.

I remember a talk about fiddler crabs on the beach who have little burrows that they run back to for safety. The experimenter wanted to find out how they navigated to their hole and put down piece of sandpaper and fishing line which they used to quietly drag the unsuspecting crab away from its hole and prove that the crab used its sense of direction in a polar coordinate grid centred on its hole.

Then I surfaced and got fetched by the boat.

Wreck of the Calcium

Quick subsequent dive on the Wreck of the Calcium, also not deep, but with a proper fill in the tank.

First we fall overboard backwards so that our mask is not swept off by the water.

Who doesn’t love a good swim-through filled with fish?:

Here’s a short video of a flatfish with its funny bulbous eyeballs slipping away beneath a school of other fish.

There were a couple small shy conger eels in the boiler:

The lobsters were too numerous and brave to be frightened away and saved:

I used to think the gopro was a waste of money, but compared to the alternatives it can be a lot clearer. You can see the red camera light flashing on my forehead. All four of us divers had headcams.

At one point I lost my headcam (the retaining string wasn’t properly on round my neck). Here’s the episode of it falling off and being kicked around.

I found it quite enjoyable watching this video, though shame it wasn’t the right way up so it saw me coming back to fetch it. These blur-o-vision FPOV headcam movies don’t seem to be as engaging as you’d expect. Next time I’m on a dive where I’m absolutely sure I’m going to get back to where I started, it would be neat to just park it somewhere looking out so it could see the divers receding from view, leaving everything to the fish and wandering crabs, before gradually seeing the divers emerge back from the distance.

Reminds me of a trip a few years ago when someone’s helmet cam came off his head on a kayak dive in Loch Sunart, and it was filmed the perfect express elevator to the surface where it was picked up by Becka:

I got to think of some way to stop it floating off, and securing it to whatever I’ve made. Maybe I’ll have to line off from it to be safe. The jiggling on the line when the divers are out of sight might add a bit of suspense and anticipation.

I got back with a horrible Diesel fume headache, attempted to play underwater hockey, but gave up. Then went round to DoESLiverpool to check on my robot, which had gone offline because somebody had left it out of the charging dock.

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