Wreck diving wonderland

Among the countless blessings that Sri Lanka has, some of the least known treasures are yet waiting to be discovered beneath our blue ocean. With 500 years of trade and commerce, the ocean around Sri Lanka was subjected to heavy maritime traffic, resulting in it hiding more than 200 shipwrecks with histories worthy of being legends.

Wreck diving for sport today has become a multimillion dollar industry, due to the mysterious allure and sense of adventure it provides. With the kind of historical shipwrecks we have, promoting this sport in Sri Lanka will be effortless and can attract a new wave of marine tourists to the country. This could be a whole new area for job creation in the post war economy. With Sri Lanka already being considered as an attractive dive destination by dive tourists around the world, industry stakeholders should look into this opportunity and facilitate the development of this process.

One of the latest findings of shipwrecks has been the SS Worcestershire (SSW), a massive British Merchant Navy vessel during World War I, sunk 30 km off the coast of Colombo by a sea-mine laid by German Mine Layer SMS Wolf on February 1917.

Founder Editor of www.DiveSriLanka.com, Dharshana Jayawardena, who has formed Sri Lanka’s only website with comprehensive information about scuba diving in the country, and has over 1,000 dives and is a technical trimix deep diver and a rebreather diver, identified the origins of this wreck after two years of exploration.

En-route from Rangoon to London when it met its demise, SSW weighed 7,160 tons, with a length of 138 metres and width of 16.6 metres. It was built by Harland & Wolf Ltd. Belfast & Glasgow who also built the RMS Titanic which sank seven years earlier. The ship was owned by Bibby Line, still one of the largest shipping groups in the UK.

Jayawardena stated: “In the quest to find shipwrecks off the coast of Sri Lanka, we researched historical records and found out about the sinking of the SS Worcestershire. For two years we searched for the ship. Then while scanning a possible location, I struck gold! Sonar produced an image of a massive object at 60 metres of depth.”

Immediately conducting a technical solo dive he was amazed to see the bow area of an enormous ship lying upright in a badly deteriorated condition. “Only the massive steel hull remained. From the bottom of the ocean, the top of the hull rose a full 10 or more metres high. The pictures I took that day were the first pictures taken of this ship after it sank,” he recalled.

Since then he has conducted 15 expeditions to the SSW and most of them have been technical solo dives to 60 metres, which required extensive planning, equipment and logistics that included carrying of four cylinders of air for just 25 minutes of bottom time at the ship which required over 70 minutes of gradual staged ascent to the surface to avoid decompression.

“In these expeditions I photographed key features and spent time exploring specific sections of the ship. When I measured the width of the ship, I was thrilled to find that it was a very close match to the actual recorded width of the SSW.”

In February this year, Jayawardena found an artefact that removed all doubts. Deep in the hull of the ship he discovered a large pot and with the inscription ‘Bibby Line’. “For me this was of tremendous significance as this was the name of the SS Worcestershire’s owning company! I later found out that this was a chamber pot used by ladies at the turn of the last century as a bedside accompaniment for urination. The pot has been lying under the ocean for 95 years! My ongoing quest is to study the ship further and recover an artefact that has the name of the ship as an inscription ‘SS Worcestershire,’” he said.

“People often ask me if I find treasure. I respond by saying that I do. I discover the greatest treasure of all, that is a healthy eco system resplendent with life, as once underwater, a ship soon becomes a thriving coral reef which is a safe haven for thousands of species of marine life to nest, feed and reproduce. The potential of shipwrecks has been understood and exploited by many other countries and they spend millions of dollars to clean up ships and actually sink them for artificial reefs! We don’t have to do that but instead protect the shipwrecks we have from wreck salvaging, and let them bring dividends to our tourism industry,” concluded Jayawardena.