Diving Beyond Comfort Zone, Team Brings Wreck Back From History Books
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday November 22, 2003
Laden with five scuba tanks filled with a special mixture of nitrogen, oxygen and helium it took Mark Spencer and seven colleagues just five minutes to travel back more than 86 years.
Two weekends ago an elite local amateur diving group called Sydney Project became the first team to dive to the World War I shipwreck of the Cumberland, off the far South Coast town of Eden.
Reaching nearly 100 metres below the surface, the expedition was the deepest dive to a shipwreck undertaken in NSW.
No one fully understands the physiological risks of reaching such depths, and the dive was considered so dangerous that, despite intense official interest, government maritime archaeologists were unable to participate.
The NSW Heritage Office is analysing the photographs and information collected during the two descents made to the ship.
A 140-metre merchant ship laden with frozen meat and copper ingots, the Cumberland struck a German mine as it steamed past Gabo Island on July 15, 1917. The ship ran ashore and was helped by a Japanese Navy cruiser, Japan being an ally in World War I.
A salvage operation was tried but the ship sunk in August as it was being towed to Eden. In 1951 a salvage team guided by a diver in a chamber exploded the hull open and retrieved hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ingots. The location of the wreck was lost until 2000, when a CSIRO crew identified a wreck in the area with sonar.
But it was not until the recent dive that authorities were able to confirm that the shipwreck was the Cumberland. The team found a copper ingot and the letters from a ship name plate U, M and E and the bones left after the frozen meat had decomposed or been consumed by local marine life.
``I feel that I have been transported back in time to that period of the ship's life," said the dive photographer, Mark Spencer.
``I felt as though I was exploring a time capsule belonging to another world."
Mr Spencer was one of three members of the team equipped only with five regular scuba tanks, weighing 100 kilograms. After spending a mere 12 minutes on the wreck he had to spend 105 minutes slowly decompressing on his way to the surface.
A maritime archaeologist with the NSW Heritage Office, Tim Smith, said the dive was ``outside observed occupational health and safety rules". ``It's the first time divers have obtained detailed information about the size, condition and marine life associated with the wreck."
The assistant Planning Minister, Diane Beamer, said the wreck site was protected by the Commonwealth Historic Shipwrecks Act. She urged commercial fishing crews and deep wreck divers to respect the fragile remains.
© 2003 Sydney Morning Herald
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