MS Taurus - and a plague of jellyfish
13 June 2011
Following hard on the plankton bloom of a few weeks ago, the seas are now filled with lion's mane jellyfish which have cleared up the underwater visibiliuty immensely. As a cpontrast to last weekend's 3 foot plankton soup visibility, this weekend we had 15 metre ambient vis on the bottom 50 metres down.
Greg Booth and myself arrived down on the wreck midships and dropped in through the large skylights of the Engine Room. It's half filled with silt now but the massive 25 foot long 7-cylinder engine is still impressive in scale. From there we had a look around in the Galley before heading up the port side walkway past the row of cabins with their doors and portholes rotted and fallen out. We swam forward over a Hold and reached the 5 storey high bridge superstructure before turning the dive and heading back down the starboard side to the strobe blinking away on our downline.
For 25 minutes down on the wreck we had a run time of about an hour in pleasant 10C water. On the slow ascent we were being bombarded by jellies and were covered in their translucent stinging tentacles. We both got stung around the lips - a small price to pay though for such a fine dive.
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