Deep Wreck Diver

17/09/2026

Should divers still learn dive tables, or have dive computers made them obsolete?
Why?

17/09/2026

35 miles offshore. 106 metres deep. And only two of us actually got onto the wreck.

That was Day 1 on Vandalia in 2022

The currents were wrong from the start and the shot was off the wreck.

Rick Ayrton and myself scootered hard into the current following the drag marks while I paid out distance line behind. Eventually I reached Vandalia, secured the reel and set off to explore.

Almost immediately, I lost the reel.

So instead of spending my bottom time looking at the wreck, most of the dive became a search for the bloody line.

I eventually found it and reeled my way back towards the shot, expecting the rest of the team to be on their way down.

Nobody was there and the current was so strong that the shot was suspended in mid water.

Not wanting to lose the reel, I cut the line leading back to the wreck and eveything started moving across the seabed.

Almost immediately the other divers appeared. They had struggled badly getting the lazy shot in and then tried to swim into the current towards the wreck.

They made it as far as the end of their distance line before giving up.

After travelling 35 miles offshore to dive a wreck in 106 metres, only two of us actually got onto it.

And the visibility was rubbish.

Pretty much everything that could go wrong had gone wrong.

Fortunately, we still had another day - more tomorrow!

16/09/2026

This is an exceptional piece of writing about Jennifer Sellitti, Joe Mazraani, D/V Tenacious and the world of deep wreck diving.

At the heart of this, of course, is the dreadful tragedy of a life lost far too young. My deepest sympathies are with Jenn and with Joe’s family.

I never had the opportunity to meet Joe, but my good friend Rick Ayrton knew him and they dived together on Lusitania and Britannic. Rick always spoke incredibly highly of Joe, both as a wreck diver and as a person.

At the same time, I have enormous admiration for the way Jenn has carried on. Keeping Tenacious going and continuing the work that she and Joe shared cannot have been easy.

What I particularly liked about the article is the amount of space it gives to technical wreck diving itself. We don't often see our slightly strange corner of the diving world explored in this sort of depth by the mainstream media.

It gets beyond the equipment and the depths and starts to capture what actually drives people to spend years researching a wreck, searching huge areas of seabed, travelling hundreds of miles offshore and then accepting hours of decompression for a relatively brief period on the bottom.

The research. The search. The history. The detective work. The uncertainty. And ultimately that extraordinary moment when something that has been lost for decades, or sometimes more than a century, appears out of the darkness.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to talk at length with Jenn and Chris Ogden about Tenacious, the Andrea Doria and the sort of deep offshore wreck diving they do on the US east coast. I came away from that conversation recognising an awful lot of the same motivations that drive wreck divers on this side of the Atlantic.

The Guardian article captures that brilliantly, through the lens of an awful personal tragedy.

Very much worth taking the time to read properly.

After Jennifer Sellitti lost her partner Joe Mazraani, she thought everything was over. Then she inherited his ship

16/09/2026

If you’ve watched any of my recent dive videos and wondered how I get the Shearwater dive computer information onto the screen, this is the man responsible!

Eric Stott has just released Version 5 of his Shearwater Telemetry Overlay setup, which takes the data from a Shearwater dive computer and allows it to be displayed alongside the actual dive footage.

I’ve been using Eric’s system for some time now and I think it adds a huge amount to the videos. Instead of simply watching me swim around a wreck, you can see what is actually happening with the dive, including depth, runtime, TTS and other dive computer information as it changes.

For the deeper dives in particular, I think it gives a much better sense of the profile and what is going on as the dive develops.

Eric has put a huge amount of work into developing and continually improving this, and has also been incredibly helpful to me personally getting it working with my videos.

Version 5 is now out and Eric explains it all in his latest video - link in comment

If you use a Shearwater and make underwater videos, it is definitely worth a look. And even if you don’t, please give Eric’s video a watch and his channel a bit of support. He deserves it!

15/09/2026

30 MINUTES MORE DECOMPRESSION?! 😳

On a 70 metre CCR dive, my Garmin X50i was predicting almost 30 minutes more TTS than my other computers.

But here's the strange bit.

After nearly two hours of decompression, it actually cleared only about three minutes later.

So how could it apparently be so wrong at the beginning and almost exactly right at the end?

I sent the logs to Garmin and their engineers reproduced exactly what I'd been seeing.

The explanation turned out to be surprisingly simple.

Full X50i review is now on my YouTube channel.

15/09/2026

One of the best things about identifying U 672 happened after the video went live.

The family of her commander, Ulf Lawaetz, got in touch.

They told me how pleased they were that the wreck had finally been found and identified, more than 80 years after U 672 disappeared beneath the English Channel.

They have also very kindly shared some wonderful personal material, including photographs of Ulf as an older man, his death notice, and something I found particularly fascinating, a small numbered tag that he kept for the rest of his life.

The tag is almost identical in style to the one Richie Kohler recovered from U 869 during the investigation of that wreck off New Jersey.

There is something rather special about seeing an object like this preserved by the man who actually commanded U 672, particularly after spending so much time looking at the remains of his submarine on the seabed.

Wreck identification can sometimes feel very focused on positions, construction details, photographs and pieces of metal.

Then somebody's family gets in touch and suddenly you are reminded that there were real people behind all of it.

Ulf survived the loss of U 672, along with the rest of his crew, survived the war, and went on to live a long life.

To now be able to share the story of his boat with his family, and for them to share part of his story with us in return, is a really lovely outcome from this discovery.

A huge thank you to the Lawaetz family for getting in touch and for sharing these remarkable pieces of their family history. At their request, I have anonymised the names of family members shown on the death notice before sharing it here.

14/09/2026

🐬 Deco dolphins!! 🐬

Who doesn’t love it when wild dolphins turn up while you’re hanging on deco?

Spotted these just over a week ago after a 70 metre dive. After a long dive, there can’t be many better ways to pass the time than having dolphins come over for a look and make a few flybys while you’re doing your stops.

Definitely makes the deco go a little faster! 🤿🐬

Thanks to Andy Wilkinson for some of the video footage.

14/09/2026

My first real deep bailout was six years ago today, from 73 metres.

It came during what was turning into a particularly bad run of luck with AP Inspiration handsets.

About three weeks earlier I had already flooded one handset on another dive. On that occasion the HUD continued working, so although I had lost the handset display, I was able to ascend on the loop, confident that the unit was still operating and maintaining the PO2.

For this dive, I was actually using a handset I had borrowed.

Then that one flooded too.

The big difference this time was that when the handset disappeared, so did my HUD.

At 73 metres that rather concentrates the mind.

With no handset and no HUD, staying on the loop was no longer an option I was comfortable with, so I bailed out onto 14/64 and started making my way back.

There was one extra complication. The shot was off the wreck, so part of the bailout involved roughly three minutes of swimming before I even got back to the ascent line.

Fortunately, it had happened relatively early in the dive, so the total ascent time was only 36 minutes.

From there things went pretty much as planned. I stayed on the 14/64 until 21 metres, switched onto 51%, then moved onto 82% which we had hanging on the lazy shot for the final decompression.

Throughout all of this my buddy Fran was alongside me, helping with the ascent and gas changes.

Apparently we were sufficiently relaxed that she even found time to take some photographs!

A flooded handset was something I had now experienced twice in the space of a few weeks. But losing the HUD as well was completely unexpected, particularly as it had continued working during the previous flood.

My subsequent discussion with AP suggested a possible explanation. Although the pressure sensor in the flooded handset had failed, the buttons may still have been functioning. That raised the possibility that, while dealing with the failed handset, I had inadvertently managed to switch the entire unit off, which would explain why the HUD disappeared as well.

Whatever the exact sequence, the important bit was that the bailout plan worked.

Suitable deep bailout gas, the right gases waiting higher up, a route back to the shot and a competent buddy alongside me turned what could have become a very serious problem into a controlled ascent.

It was a pretty good reminder that carrying bailout gas is only part of the equation. You also have to be able to get onto it, manage it and execute the whole ascent when the failure does not look quite like the one you expected.

And apparently you should always make time for a few photos on the way up. 😁🤿

13/09/2026

HMS Victory vanished in 1744

Before anyone calls me an idiot and tells me HMS Victory is in Portsmouth ........ I know.

This is not Nelson’s Victory. It is her predecessor, a great Royal Navy first rate ship of the line that disappeared in a violent storm with Admiral Sir John Balchin and her entire crew.

Six years ago today I made my first dive on the wreck, 78 metres down and around 45 miles offshore in the English Channel.

Just getting there is a challenge. It is a long way offshore, exposed to the weather and tides, and opportunities to dive it are few. On that first trip we were incredibly lucky to get the team and conditions we needed to reach the site at all.

Huge bronze cannon lie across the seabed amongst timbers, ballast and the remains of a warship lost nearly 300 years ago. We also came across human remains, a very stark reminder that this is the grave of more than a thousand sailors.

One of the most intriguing things I found was that numerous cannon appear to have been deliberately moved away from the main wreck site. Some still had lifting straps around them and were sitting well away from where you would expect them to have ended up naturally. Whatever happened, it clearly took place before I first visited the wreck.

I have since been lucky enough to return on two further occasions, but that first descent onto Victory is one I will never forget.