The main wreck in the British Virgin Islands is the Royal Mail Ship RMS Rhone, sunk in a huricane in 1867. After the Rhone, there is a reasonably active artificial reef program.The main wreck in the British Virgin Islands is the Royal Mail Ship RMS Rhone, sunk in a huricane in 1867. After the Rhone, there is a reasonably active artificial reef program.
Off Cooper island, the next island to the west, lie the wrecks of the steel tug boats Mary L and Pat. The Mary L was sunk in the early 1990s and is now beginning to look like a real wreck, small corals and sponges encrusting most of the exposed surface of the wreck.
The Pat was sunk only a few years ago. It was under tow to a planned location a little further along the coast of Cooper island when it decided to sink early, by a fluke upright and right alongside the Mary L, the two tugs now nestled head to tail on the sand at 24 metres.
While I happily potter round this brace of tug boats, a stingray glides in and lands on the strip of sand between the wrecks and the reef. Rather than burrow into the sand as I would expect, it drapes itself over the only small head of coral that breaks the desert of white powder.
It seems well settled, so I ignore it for a while and finish the shot I am working on. To get closer I descend to the seabed and move in a commando crawl, angled so my bubbles stream down current away from the stingray. It appears to be gently wriggling against the coral, perhaps scratching its underside or maybe being cleaned.
An older artificial reef is the Fearless, a large wooden hulled trawler sunk just outside Great Harbour on Peter island. Here I encounter lower visibility than many of the other sites, the sort of snowy “lagoon visibility” that can be such a nuisance in photographs. The wreck sits on the sand in 23 metres at the bottom of quite a nice reef, though I ignore the reef in my haste to get as much time as possible on the wreck.
Since the Fearless was sunk in 1985, much of the wooden structure has decayed, leaving just frames and fittings where the wheelhouse and forward deckhouse once stood. The hull planking is a lattice of crumbling wood over the more solid frames, allowing sunlight to shine enchantingly right through the wreck.
Back on the dive boat I look towards a large and dilapidated steel tug moored further into the bay. This is the BVI dive operators association's next artificial reef project, all cleaned up and ready to sink, just waiting for final approval of the location it will be sunk at.
Also in the bay is the anchor and chain from the Rhone, only discovered encrusted in coral a few years previously. Across the floor of the bay divers have found occasional oddments from the Rhone's table service, swept overboard from the last breakfast on deck.
It was late in the afternoon that I dived at Blonde reef, another site featuring in the story of the Rhone. Blonde reef is a shallow and pretty knoll of coral in the channel between Salt and Peter islands that the Rhone had to dodge before heading for open sea and getting swept back onto Black Rock.
The coral rises in a slope and a short wall from a sandy seabed at 18 metres to as shallow as 7 or 8 metres. Located in the middle of the channel it is understandably swarming with fish and can be a site for strong currents, though there was no current during my dive.
There are some really spectacular underwater canyons off Great Dog island to the west of Tortola. On the day we venture in this direction the wind has spun round to the north. It is apparent as soon as we jump in that underwater visibility would be better elsewhere. Burton scribbles on his etch-a-sketch slate, suggesting we try another site.
I am philosophical about it. Now I am in the water with diving gear on we may as well have a quick look. I scribble back a note to that effect and he leads the way out to the point.
All of the diving so far has been fairly easy with nothing particularly challenging. Nothing steep and deep, just good quality shallow wrecks and reefs with a plethora of interesting photographic subjects.
Today I enjoy the physical challenge of the dive even though the photographic conditions are less than perfect. In places the canyon is just elbow wide, the surge really funnelling through the gaps and blowing me along. A fallen boulder makes the canyon into a tunnel, fish wriggling first one way then the other to stay in the shade as the water surges back and forth.
At Carval rock we tie off to a mooring buoy bolted into the reef at 15 metres. Rather than following the classic coral slope downwards I head for the shallows. By 10 metres the large corals and sponges give way to the clean lines of old volcanic rock, on closer inspection encrusted with patches fire coral, sponges and star corals. Even with an apparently flat calm sea I can feel the surge as I cut through gaps between boulders.
I ask about the possibility of old wrecks here, my thought being that maybe Carval is a corruption of carvel or caravel, the sort of ship Columbus used to cross the Atlantic. No one had heard of wreckage being found here.