Bid to remember forgotten
wrecks on the ocean floor
(From The Orcadian dated February 22, 2001)

An Orkney diver is planning to set up a registered charity to ensure that the wrecks of ships which have sunk in mysterious circumstances are officially remembered with onshore memorials listing the individual people who were lost.

Mark Reeves, who is director of operations with the Burray-based European Technical Dive Centre, is concerned that a number of wrecks around the UK and Irish coasts lie virtually forgotten, with no permanent memorial.

He hopes that this new charity will promote goodwill towards the sport diving community, and give recognition to the victims of the various shipwrecks.

Mr Reeves is convinced that divers themselves, and diving equipment manufacturers and suppliers will contribute towards the charity to provide lasting memorials for those who died when the ships went down, many of which are military vessels.

He also hopes the move will demonstrate that genuine sport divers are totally against and are not to blame for removing artefacts from war graves, something which the Ministry of Defence are keen to stop, with new controls announced last week by Junior Defence Minister Dr Lewis Moonie, during a visit to Orkney.

Mr Reeves warned against a suggestion from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to ban sport divers from using helium, in an attempt to prevent them staying long enough on the sea bed to remove items from wrecks.

He told The Orcadian: "It might do that, but it would be taking away the safety aspect of diving if we're not allowed to use helium, so we must be proactive and show that we are equally appalled by the practice of stripping items off war graves."

He added: "If it wasn't for us divers and wreck researchers like John and Noreen Steele, who wrote a book about the subject, the story of the aircraft carrier HMS Dasher would be forgotten."

She sank in March 1943, killing 379 men and the wreck now lies in 131 metres of water (428 feet) in the lower Clyde. In order to place a memorial plaque on the sunken ship last summer, Mr Reeves and his team made a record-breaking dive in cold water with open circuit SCUBA equipment, a depth which had been considered out of reach for untethered diving, until then. Mr Reeves says that the next step is to erect a memorial on Arran to commemorate HMS Dasher with a list of the names of the sailors who went down with the ship, including James Mainland from Egilsay.

Having been successful in raising awareness about the fate of HMS Dasher, Mr Reeves said that he and a team of divers now planned to lay a memorial plaque on another sunken warship HMS Exmouth which lies off the east coast of Scotland, at the end of March, and subsequently HMS Pheasant which sank in the Pentland Firth.

But the biggest diving expedition which Mark Reeves and his team are hoping to carry out later this year is to the wreck of the liner Carpathia which was the first ship on the scene after the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank on her maiden voyage in 1912. The Carpathia lies in 158 metres of water off the south of Ireland, which is 100 feet deeper than the record dive on HMS Dasher, making it an even more ambitious goal. That expedition is likely to take place in June 2001.

Mr Reeves has been invited to tell the tale of the diving expedition to HMS Dasher at the Dive Scotland exhibition at the SECC in Glasgow on March 24/25.

He also stresses that although not much has been heard recently about plans to create a major diving complex at Houton in Orphir, the project is still very much on the cards.

"It's not gone away. We've simply prioritised our efforts into refurbishing the 80-foot former navy tender Loyal Mediator. We have also been developing life support equipment and an offboard monitoring system for that, which has been occupying our minds until now. Plans for the diving complex are still progressing, but the wheels of the Orkney planning machine take some time."