Today’s dive was listed on the calendar as ‘Divers Choice’, so I spoke to Mikey during the week and found out that meant ‘We’ll decide on the morning, just meet up at Ettalong Ferry Wharf and we’ll see what everyone wants to do’. Fair enough, sounds like a plan.
7am saw myself and Arthur standing around waiting for the others to turn up (was a 7:30 start) and over the next half hour Mike, Doug, Charlie & Andrew arrived and we had a full boat. We also ran into James from Scuba Shack and his guys and all had a bit of a chat about how bad the diving has been lately. Fingers crossed today would be better than the last few weeks (last week was cancelled and the week before was the Valiant??? It’s that bad!).
We decided on the Birchy (aka SS Birchgrove Park) for today, one of the old ’50 milers’ that used to run coal from Newcastle to Sydney to feed the power stations and sank in a storm back in the mid 50′s (2nd Aug 1956) that now lies in 51m. Loaded up the boat with our mass of gear and off we went.
As we came out of the bay and into open ocean we saw that surface conditions were pretty nice so a quick chat and we had a change of plans – let’s do the Tuncurry!
The SS Tuncurry is a wooden steamer that sank in 1903 after springing a leak and was carrying Explosives, Cement, whiskey, jam and other general cargo between Sydney and Brisbane.
We arrived onsite very quickly, setup the sounds and shot line and before you knew it I was getting the nod from Andrew to throw the anchor. A couple of quick passes once it hit the bottom showed that the shot was probably 10m SW of the wreck, not to bad I guess. Charlie and I then geared up and splashed into 24 degree water with 15m+ vis!
Started my descent and in true Sydney fashion, passed 30 and the water went from 24 degrees to 15 and the vis was down to about 8m. Great, I’ve got no compass and the wreck will be just out of sight! I arrived at the bottom (58m) and started to look around and could see no sign of the wreck. Luckily, Charlie was only about 20 seconds behind me and had a compass, so a quick NE bearing and we started to swim the anchor to what we hoped was the wreck. We only had to swim about 3m and the wreck started to appear out of the gloom, much to my relief. We arrived at the cement bags (which have set to stone over the last 100+ years) and I started to look for somewhere to tie us in. Found a strong looking hunk of metal, wrapped the chain and off I went for my dive.
It was a pretty easy dive, I had tied in right next to the boiler so I just started pottering around the cement bags, finding bits of brass (which I left of course – it’s a protected wreck) and a couple of interesting looking doors. Headed towards the stern past the props and then back down the other side. Did this look a couple of times, over the boiler and basically had a great ferret around the whole wreck. All to soon my 30 minute bottom time was up and it was time to start my ascent, just as Arthur & Andrew were arriving on the bottom so I waved goodbye and up I went. My deco passed uneventfully – back above 30m the water was toasty warm (to be honest, it was a bit to warm for drysuit, hood, gloves, etc, but I’m not complaining) and at 66minutes I was hitting the surface.
My first thought on hitting surface: Yay! It’s pouring with rain!
Never mind, I’ve just had a great dive, I’m in a drysuit and at least it’s not cold. If the rain keeps up it might even wash my gear for me 
We waited for everyone else to complete their dive and then headed back, all a bit tired and wet, but smiles all around after a nice easy dive on the Tuncurry.
p.s. Sorry, no photo’s today.
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