Spring – Autumn 1942, Malta was locked in a fight for survival that would determine the whole course of Word War 2. As Britain’s main Naval Base in the Mediterranean, located in the narrow channel between North Africa and Sicily, the island’s strategic importance was huge. Malta’s airfield formed the base for an English squadron of Spitfires whose air support was so crucial to Montgomery in his North Africa Campaign against Rommel’s Dessert Rats. The Axis forces of Italy and Nazi Germany realised that the campaign hung in the balance, and the key was disabling this air support from Malta. The island, even now, has very few of its own natural resources, and was totally dependant on convoys of supplies arriving from the UK.

In early 1942, these supplies were running very low, but most crucially, fuel to keep the Spitfires flying. The convoy of April 1942 had been all but wiped out by Italian and German submarines and MTBs out of Sicily, plus the many minefields laid around the Maltese Islands and German Stuka Divebombers who relentlessly attacked the supply ships and their escorts.

In one final desperate attempt to get supplies through to Malta, Churchill ordered the largest convoy ever assembled at the time: Operation Pedestal consisted of 14 merchant supply ships, that were to be protected by no less than 77 warships including 4 aircraft carriers. The mission was simple and specific: get supplies through to Malta at any cost. Only 5 of the 14 were to make it, 9 lost along with around 20 of the warships either sunk or heavily damaged At the centre of the merchant convoy was the then largest oil tanker in the world: The SS Ohio, fully laden with 15,000 tons of fuel for the spitfires. Under requisition from the Americans, with an all English crew lead by Captain Dudley Mason, who was later awarded The George Cross for his gallantry in commanding what basically amounted to a floating bomb under almost unimaginable and constant attack from Axis forces.

The Ohio took countless hits from bombs, torpedoes and aircraft fire, but refused to die and was eventually limped into Valetta harbour, straddled between two warships, her back broken. Every last drum of fuel was removed from her, before she finally sunk onto the harbour seabed, moments after the last barrel was removed. It was like she knew her job was done and she could stop trying.

The fuel kept the Spitfires running, and the allies vanquished Rommel and the Axis forces 8 weeks later at the second battle of El Alamain. This freed up the allies to invade Sicily, and this chain of events turned the tide of World War Two.

It perhaps too dramatic to say that one convoy, and in particular one ship: The Ohio, won World War Two, but one only has to look at the importance that Churchill attached to Pedestal to realize its key historical and strategic significance.

Some of wrecks created by the campaigns of 1942 have been found in the waters surrounding Malta, but many remain, the sea surrounding the island gets deep quickly, and until recently the diving infrastructure wasn’t really developed for deep Trimix diving. With all of this history in my thoughts, plus the burden of trying to pull together a world class exploration team for the forthcoming week’s diving, my mind was buzzing.
I landed at Luga airport on the Sunday morning at around 1am – to be greeted by a lot more buzzing: About five text messages from Phil Short, Paul Toomer and Martin Stanton

Oi Fatboy Fat – get your arse down to Huggins – we’re on it and we’ve broken Martin"

The taxi dropped my bag off at the hotel in Paceville and I walked the the few yards round the corner to Huggins only to find a scene of utter carnage. Martin Stanton, the head of IANTD UK was indeed broken. A sustained, two pronged, red wine and shot fuelled attack from Phil and Paul Toomer to celebrate the end of his Sentinel Mod 1 course had left him in a crumpled heap on one of the sofas. Phil was looking decidedly more sober and rather pleased with himself. He was clasping an 8” mirror ball that he had head butted off the ceiling of the bar and was keeping as a trophy. Toomer was making David Lee Roth look like Julie Andrews. Business as usual then.

Oliver Reed had died a few years previously, under similar circumstances only miles down the road in a bar in Valetta whilst filming Gladiator. We can only speculate how things may have turned out had he focused more on filming and less on celebrating his Mod 1 course with Phil Short and Paul Toomer. And they say diving isn’t dangerous.

Sunday was taken up with Phil conducting an IANTD Instructor update and evaluation. All the UK team right up to IT level are required to do an annual re-evaluation with Phil which includes in water teaching skills, classroom teaching and a standards and new courses update. A great idea which will help to maintain standards and keep everyone on the same page. Plus a chance to get together and see who can outbanter who Monday came and we collected Grahame Knott from the airport. For those of you who don’t know Grahame, he’s probably one of the best if not the best Wreck Hunters and Dive Skippers this country has ever produced. His past successes speak for themselves: The M1 Submarine, HMS Limbourne and HMS Charybdis, the list goes on. He looks like something out of a Hemmingway novel: the perfect combination of a lifetime’s experience and calm wisdom, but an unexpected positive energy and humour that carries the whole team through during the more frustrating moments that are inevitable with this kind of exploration diving. When you’re more than 100m deep and several hours from the surface, it’s a good feeling in the back of your mind knowing he’s taking care of things on top. Graham will be working with the founder of this project: Stuart Keasley to research and target marks for exploration as we move forward on what is likely to be a 3-5 year project. This research has uncovered 30-40 undived marks in the 100m range, including 4 undived wrecks of great historical importance. We aim to find them all.


Monday and Tuesday were spent at our base of operations: Divewise in Paceville. Divewise is run by Alan & Viv Whitehead and is one of the biggest dive centres on the Islands. The gas logistics for this kind of diving can be a nightmare, but their fill station is brand new and state of the art with constant flow Trimix blending, banked Nitrox 32 and a brilliant panel. Fills were literally only an hour every day. Likewise for convenience, Alan now owns one of the best dive boats on the islands: the ex Owen Buhagiar 10m RIB Diversion, which is now moored 50 feet from Divewise’s front door – super convenient with so many bottles, rebreathers and scooters to lug backwards and forwards. Many thanks to Owen for all his help and support with finding us marks and skippering so many previous trips out to Malta The boat had literally just gone back in the water on the Monday, so Graham took most of Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning ironing out a few little bugs and getting things to his satisfaction. He was particularly fond of of the “£120 Lidl Fishfinder” which we were expecting him to identify and shot 100m plus marks with.


Tuesday was spent with Graham running over the marks with the sounder trying to form a better picture of what we were dealing with. The final mark of the three he declared to be “***** huge”. Toomer informed everyone that he had a “half nasty” from just looking at the screen. I sincerely hope it's subsided by the time we share a room together at Tekcamp in July, as the South African “half nasty” can be particularly troublesome after a few beers

We had previously been told the marks we were diving were in around 80-100m of water, so it's always refreshing to see 115m on the screen when you're armed with nothing but a set of 12's on Open Circuit. The CCR guys were particularly supportive in this regard with many helpful comments on gas costs and the size of my testicles. Alan Whitehead and myself opted to dive 10/65 in the twinsets with AL80's of 18/40 travel gas plus 40/10 and 80%. The gas margins were tight but doable. We had to use custom mixes because the gas volumes just didnt work with my preferred choice of 21/35, 50% & O2. We opted to overstay the gas switches doing more of the deco at a high PPO2 with back gas breaks before the two shallower switches. The CCR team consisted of Toomer, Phil and Al Wright on a JJ-CCR and two Sentinels. The boys ran 8/65 diluent with 8/65 bailout plus 20/30, 70% and O2, employing a team bailout strategy which gave them a ton of gas. Al Wright rocked up in his lucky Britannic 97 baseball cap just to piss everyone off



Wednesday arrived and it was pretty rough, but Graham reckoned doable. The shot had gone in late the day before so we could avoid faffing around too much on the dive day itself. Graham had reshot the wreck three times until he was happy that it was well in. His love affair with the Lidl Fish Finder was growing stronger by the day and by this stage he had christened the RIB “Denise”. He repeatedly mutter something about fearing for her anal chastity unless she found him a new wreck pronto.


We were fortunate to have Jason Reynoux, a French IANTD cave Instructor now working Alan at Techwise, to help us with support diving. On arriving at the site, we helped the CCR boys kit up and clip bottles, whilst Jason went in to attach the deco trapeze to the main shot. As he exited the water, I was checking my P Valve at the back of the boat. I reflected that it's not every day that you get to do a 115m dive on open circuit and piss on the French, all in the space of a few hours. And they say Gillette is the best a man can get? We put the CCR teams in the water first with an old orange toilet ball cock attached to Phil's butt D ring, for use as a pellet to confirm shot in, game on. Apparently the ball cock imploded with a huge bang up Phil's arse at about 65m and scared the crap out of everyone. Fortunately the legendary Short gonads took the full force of the explosion, and no harm was done to any of the team or the units.


The CCR team has planned a longer 25 min bottom time, so we delayed the OC Team's entry into the water by about 40 mins to try and sync the runtimes of the two groups. This worked well and meant that both teams exited the water within about half an hour of each other avoiding a lot of waiting around. It also enabled us to detach the deco trapeze and drift gently, watched over vigilantly by Jason. Although there's relatively little current and no tide out there, it's nice not to be fighting even a gentle current and it made the long stay at 6m a little more fun with pisstaking via wetnotes.Runtimes were a little under 3 hours for myself and Alan on OC and around 3 ½ hours for the CCR guys. We ran VPMB +2 modfiied using GUE Ratio Deco principles. Alan had a VRX Computer, set for our OC gasses, as a backup, and I was surprised to find it mimicked the VPMB+2 cut profile, almost to the minute.


Toomer also ran a VRX in CCR mode, to stay with Al and Phil, and consequently the guys were only 3 minutes apart on deco. I must confess that as someone who swears by VPM-B as the benchmark for my decompression – I have come away with a different point of view on how the VRX, running VGM, works for extreme diving for both OC & CCR

To enhance safety, all bottles had be double checked by another team member when analysed and then clearly marked in a consistent manner. We had clearly agreed orange and yellow bag protocols for Jason to follow in the event of something going wrong. We staged some isotonic sports drinks on the trapeze at 6m to stay as hydrated as possible on deco which were very welcome. Back on board I had brought a complete medical kit including IV Fluids, Advanced Airway Management and Defib. We had called the chamber at Mater Dei hospital near Valetta and spoken to the super helpful DDMO Steve Muscat to advise him what we were doing, and agree a rendevous point at a known jetty should we have to bring one of the team back in a hurry. In short nothing was left to chance, but fortunately, none of the precautions needed to be put into action.


With Graham's help we identified the wreck as a previously dived converted Mine Sweeper although the name as yet alludes us. Al Wright recognised it from some video shot by Scandanavian divers on a trip the previous year.
The second mark which was the one Graham had identified as being the largest, was of more interest. Even with the sub-optimal echo sounder, Graham believed we had found one of our four major targets, and everyone was fired up. Sadly the weather refused to co-operate for the next 48 hours and we had to sit on our hands waiting. On the Friday we saw a weather window opening for a dive the following day, so we took the boat out in filthy conditions to get a shot in. Eventually Graham was happy and we were game on. Again – 115m – so I opted for a bottom stage and an extra bowl of Shredded Wheat as did Alan With 4 AL80's each, swimming was out of the question, so we decided to use the Halcyon T16's and they proved to be effortless at depth, comfortably towing 4 large bottles without a glitch.


By this stage, fellow Chimp, Lanny Vogel had joined us to give Jason a hand and having two support divers to remove dead bottles and take scooters made the deco a lot more bearable.
Sadly the wreck was not what we'd hoped, but a large, impressive cargo ship nonetheless and a cracking dive. Viz at depth was around 10m with reasonable ambient light so she was quite a sight. Our efforts to identify her continue.
Two and a half hours of OC deco was made all the more pleasurable by a P Valve that failed almost the moment I got into the water. Having hydrated myself to within an inch of my life - by the time I reached the 6m stop - there was so much pee in the legs of my suit that it was actually interfering with my trim. Magnificence compromised, I wrote the CCR guys a short note to this effect, along with something about taking up golf. The wave of sympathy was almost tangible in the water, as was the kind offer of a man sized nappy which seemed to materialise out of nowhere about 5 minutes after I got my kit of the boat back at Techwise

One of the problems we need to overcome is getting stills and video to work at depth. We took both in top quality deep housings, but at such extreme depths, the buttons weren't working, so sadly, we got no footage.

Toomer had taken one of the new Fourth Element Halo 3Ds we'd been given to test on this dive and, even with a minor suit flood through a rucked neck seal he “blown away” by how warm it was for it size and bulk. Clearly it's not often that you get Gurus of this stature together and there was much discussion throughout the week on the philosophical issues that have been bugging the world of Technical diving for some time: Issues like: “If a Tech Diver doesn't like AC/DC – are they a real Tech diver?” One thing that wasn't in dispute was that “The Big Blue” is definitely the best film of all time. To this end - very time Phil surfaced – he would shout to our resident Frenchman: “Put me back in the wateur Jasonne – it is a betteur place”


Phil flys literally hundreds of thousands of miles a year training people on VR Technologies CCR's and it was great to see him chilled out and enjoying some diving for himself for a change.

On returning to port – Lanny inquired of his long suffering wife Clare whether she'd mind if he and I “retired into town to one of the local Gentlemen's Relaxation Venues in order that we might rest our weary heads upon some breasts” She didn't even say no – the very definition of marriage material in my opinion. Both the Sentinels and Paul's JJ-CCR performed faultlessly. It was interesting to see the the temp stick indicators on the Sentinel scrubbers showed that the stacks were only between half and two thirds used after what was such a big dive. Phil took some time to show us through the new Opticom electronics on the Sentinel which uses redundant infra red rather than hard wired cabling for transmitting data within the unit. A very neat solution which makes everything much more modular should a part need replacing or service. With the new Apeks BOV and first stages – it feels to me like the unit has evolved in some very interesting ways recently. So an excellent if slightly frustrating week came to a close. Graham and Stuart are now researching the next batch of marks for us to dive on our planned Autumn trip.

The Project is also delighted to welcome new members Rich Stevenson and Clare Pooley as we move forward. If this is starting to sound like something of an Instructor's pet project, to an extent, that is true, but we've also been very clear right from the start that any diver who wishes to be involved who has the right skillset and team approach will be most welcome. We are also very keen to involve some local Maltese divers and expertise where possible and have been speaking to renowned local wreck hunter Emi Farrugia to help in this regard.

We will be presenting a fuller roundup of the Project thus far at Tekcamp 2011 at Vobster in July for those that are interested in more of the details.
We would very much like to thank our sponsors: Fourth Element, IANTD UK and VR Technologies who's generous support helped ease some of the costs of getting the Project started.

Likewise – huge thanks to Alan, Viv, Jason and all the team at Techwise who worked tirelessly behind the scenes handling the considerable logistics without fuss, and to Paul's Diving Matrix who provided additional logistical support.

Last word goes to Jacques from the Big Blue:

 "You go down to the bottom of the sea, where the water isn't even blue anymore, where the sky is only a memory, and you float there, in the eternal silence”