Above water, on deck, it’s a mess. The main bottles are heavy, most of the dive suits are uncomfortable, you have gloves and diving masks and extra bottles and reels hanging all around. The amount of ungainly equipment reminds you that we are not made to dive. On deck there is rolling and tilling. Other divers are busy with their own equipment, the skipper looks out for the buoy, the crew moves all over. But then is your turn, the skipper signals, and you jump out of it and into the waters and is all gone. You are free, swimming down to the wreck just under you. You are free.
A line goes down, and you follow it. We don’t dive in particularly clear waters, so some meters under the line disappears in the depth. You follow it all the same, and soon enough all references are gone. It’s you and your buddy being anywhere, green all around you. Down it is, down and down along a line without start and without end, not on sight anyhow. Down you go.
Diving. What is actually diving? We talk about ungainly equipment and about references gone, and that is true. Actually, that loosing of references would be already enough for you to dive. Going down to a wreck is to be loose from land, loose from home and work and concerns. That would be already enough, but there is more. There is that shadow forming under you. There is the piecing of details, the slow coming together of a picture that you know you will not be seeing complete, not quite right now. Later, back in the boat, you will assemble the bits and the pieces, and you will know, you have been in a big wreck. But not quite yet, no. Now it is about that big shadow. Not a whale, you hope. Not a whale, surely not. Much bigger, much much bigger, and then suddenly, it’s not big anymore. Now you are on the wreck, on a human made surface. All the preparation is for this moment, the dive actually begins now.
It’s easy to say that for us, divers of murky waters, a wreck is about seeing all those fishes that are nowhere else to be found. There aren’t any natural reefs in the North Sea, but there are wrecks all over. Empires long gone have left their traces in the sea. The sandy bottom of the North Sea is just like another dessert. The sand prevents all animals and plants to find a hard place to grow. On the sand plants get covered, eggs never hatch, corals don’t grow. But here in the North Sea there are wrecks. A wreck is an oasis, a break in the monotony of rolling sand. Around the ship there will be schools of sardines and whitings, There would be the odd couple of cods nibbling at them now and then. If you are lucky even a darting seal might pass by. In between the planks of the wreck there will be multi colored wrasses, and heels and galatheas. All covered in fields of anemones, soft corals, kelp. A wreck is a concentrated picture of what lives out there in our North Sea, and that’s -also- reason enough to go and dive it.
But that’s not quite it, not yet. There is more to dive a wreck, it’s more than impending equipment and freedom and fishes and plants. Wreck diving is about organization and long trips, it’s about finding capable skippers and safe buddies, and having the right weather. It is more than a little money and more than a little time. All has to happen, and coalesce. Wreck diving is an enterprise, a complex matter that has to work out together. Today all of it has worked out, and you exchange ok signs with your partner. Here you are, facing the remains of what used to be a ship, a proud ship. You are looking at yet another failed human enterprise. And still you can hear your own boat, waiting for you above. Still we try. No matter how many wrecks are out there to dive, more ships are crossing the waves right now. To dive a wreck is also to remember that no matter how we fail, we still try.
To dive the wrecks of Scapa Flow make all of it sharper. Some time ago, not very long ago that is, there was the german war fleet of the high seas. Ships and crew, engineering and training, all as good as you could get. Proud admirals and sharp mariners, the pinnacle of industry, academy and nobility. Bound to be destroyed, or course. A war fleet has no other purpose that destroy and be destroyed. This particular fleet, at the end of the first World War, was defeated and captured and moored at Scapa Flow. History tell us that the crews were tense, the commanders were facing revolt. The war was over and lost, and now it was for them to wait for the last blow, to wait for an armistice to be signed so that their ships could be handled to the winners. Being in Scapa Flow today is possible to read the local newspapers of the time, reporting on the troubled minds<span class=”Apple-converted-space”> </span>of the defeated. The fact is, we know today, that even in defeat the german crew and their command had one last stand to make. At one signal of their admiral all the fleet went down, scuttled by their own crews and commanders. A last gesture of defiance from the losers, a challenge to the flabbergasted english laurels, who saw their bounty be swallowed by the calmed sea, and could not possibly do anything about it.
It is said that to be a soldier, or a marine, is to put yourself between home and the desolation of war. It is also true that in our years the wars fought by our soldiers are far away, being little more that unreal messages in our newspapers. But the desolation is still our there. The desolation and the chaos of people destroying each other, destroying their work, attempting to destroy the history of the other. And that, that is certainly a part of wreck diving. To face the chaos and try to make sense of it. To realize that not so long ago those gangways covered in anemones, inhabited by congers and crabs, were alive with our forefathers fighting for what they though right, doing the work that they know better. From that order and coordination, from the grand machinery of water warfare a wreck is all what remains today. A wreck, chaotic assemblage of planks and cables, decayed wood and brass unpolished by half a century. A wreck diver faces the chaos of history.
History, though, is not the first that you see, in those first minutes of arriving to the wreck. The first impressions are the many anemones, the growth on the wreck of unmoving animals and plants. There is a forest out there, if you try and see it. Slugs and shrimps, small eggs of bigger things, shellfishes. All occupying their own little space of wreck, all fighting their own war for survive and reproduce. A porcelain crab carefully prunes the delicate isopods grown on a small algae, meanwhile an anemone waves at the rhythm of the tide. Your dive time might get expended there, looking at few square centimeters. But you yourself, or your buddy, remembers that there is a whole wreck to see, and eventually your eyes and sights are raised. From the small porcelain crab to the fleeting cod, to the schools of whitings and to the colored wrasse. They are all there, waiting for you to see them.
Diving a wreck is to assemble those many levels that we see. From the currents that shift the sand and cover or uncover a wreck, to the minute animals and plants fixed to the planks, to the bigger ones eating then, to the yet bigger ones, to us looking at it all. In a wreck on the North Sea the idea of a codependent ecosystem is sharper than anywhere else. If any of the levels would we wiped out, all of it would collapse, as many failed fisheries have shown us once and again. Destroy a reef, or a wreck, overfish a bank: Then it all collapses, and we humans suffer the consequences. Old fishing towns have many histories to tell about their collapsed life, about their young ones leaving, the staying ones frustrated with old boats incapable to fish elsewhere. We all know today that people is not independent, that we depend of the sea and all what it contains. Diving a wreck brings that idea sharply to the front of your mind, to your eyes feasting on it all.
And actually, that’s it. Mostly sooner that you realize, and always sooner that you want, you gotta go up. You still have to remount the deeps and make your stops, you need to change to the proper gas and maintain the proper depth. So you breath again, perhaps harder than you would want to, a sigh. Follow the line, up now. Looking at your gauges, of course, but also looking at the little things, and the bigger profile, at the shadow. You are leaving it behind, and you don’t want, and you promise to come back. The shadow is gone, and it is all over again, a buddy and a line, the stops, the promise of a hot cup of soup.
The pulse of the diesel motor is now under you, and not above. Equipment hangs, log books are filled, your cloths are normal again. You walk to the higher deck, find a place, sit. The sea is all around you, grey and green, blue and dark. How much more is out there, under you? How many more theatrical wrecks and blue wrasses, canons covered by anemones and congers slithering around?
Many more. More than you will ever see. But tomorrow is another day, and you are diving. Tomorrow.
