Moonray, the journey to become a dive boat
Moonray, a 35′ ProCharter P3, previously called ‘Madeline May’, started off as a recreational/sports fishing boat. Madeline May had a bit of a chequered life, with it not being properly looked after. It was fitted with twin alternators, 12v and 24v, hauler, deck wash, live bait tank and a lot of rod holders. Recently it had a new gearbox fitted and the engine had relatively low hours. We could see the potential, so we bought it. Not wanting to be reminded of it’s shark fishing background, we mixed the names of our other boats, Moonshadow and Stingray, and called it Moonray.
We had the boat name changed officially when we registered it into our business name. It was put through it mid-term MCA inspection at the same time as the change of ownership documentation was done. We needed to purchase several items, to meet the MCA coding, as expected. During it’s first season under our ownership, Moonray was only used a couple of times, as a support vessel and for a wildlife watching trip. We were so busy taking divers out on Moonshadow, we didn’t have the time to do any work on it. During October, it was taken out of the water, ready to be converted to a dive boat.
Front Cabin
The first thing was to sort out the electrics. The 12v system never worked properly, basically it never charged the battery. So the decision was made, to remove the 12v alternator and associated wiring. This included a split charging diode, a relay and wires to the excite terminal of the alternator. The general wiring all worked but there was so much of it. We removed the deck wash pump, all electronics apart from the radar and the stereo. To get to where the bulk of the wiring was, in the bow section, was a bit of a task. Moonray has a toilet, which was accessed from the deck. All ProCharters are fitted with a toilet cubicle in the bow cabin, Moonray had the toilet cubicle without the toilet, which ended up as a dumping ground. We took down the side walls, then the roof was reinforced. The whole area was made level, which included a removable panel, so we could lay full length inside. Now we could access the wiring without bashing our heads.


Firstly, we fitted a new stereo, we need some background music to work to, this one has a small screen and plays music and video media files. The front 12v battery selector switch was replaced with a newer version. Although it doesn’t switch on the battery, it supplies power to the DC converters. We fitted two DC converters, one powers everything except the lights and stereo, the other powers the lights and stereo. This will allow us to turn everything off except the lights and stereo at night time, if we decide to stay aboard. We fitted LED lights, a 12v TV monitor connected to the stereo, as well as a pair of speakers. Our little home from home. The whole area was colour resin coated, called Flowcoat or Topcoat. The helm was tidied up, unused switches were removed, the non working trim tab controls, wiring and the tabs were removed. The holes from years or changing electronics all over the helm, were filled, sanded and colour matched.
Main Cabin


In the main cabin we fitted new LED lights, new speakers, new sink and tap, water tank with pump, hot water heater and inverter. The hauler wiring, which ran through the cabin and up the galley area, was removed. The water goes through a diverter valve, so it can fill the hot water tank or out through the tap. The roof lining was taken down and the roof was covered in an insulating coating, Mascoat DTM. Several layers were applied, this not only insulates but stops condensation. While the roof lining was down, a lot of the wires were replaced, a new horn was fitted and any wires that went through the roof were re-routed through proper waterproof glands.






Toilet
The toilet was painted, a new seat fitted, the floor was Topcoated, the ceiling was covered in the insulating coating and a new LED light was fitted.


Main Deck
The main deck was where the big jobs were. The old deck light was replaced and the wiring that hung down was removed and re-routed, they were the only small jobs. We cut a hole in the transom to fit a lift. Side cheeks were fibreglassed in and the lift was fitted. At each side of the lift, a single seat was fitted. The port side rear seat was trimmed to allow a davit to be easily fitted/removed. We had custom benches made, designed to pivot away from the engine hatch, allowing the hatch cover to be easily opened. The side door cheeks were fitted, notched, so they would take the ladder. The hauler base was replaced, rewired, a floor switch was added and the wires were routed out of sight.





The ladder comes apart into two pieces. These are stored in the hatch that was the live bait tank. Inside the hatch, the old water inlet was removed, as was the old transducer. The new transducer was fitted and the old holes filled/repaired.
Engineering
The low hours 5.9L Cummins 355hp engine runs smoothly and was serviced. When the 12v alternator was removed, all the brackets and wiring were removed as well. The main 24v battery switch is under the engine hatch. We fitted an electronic remote switch, which meant a small switch near the DC converters, could turn on the engine start batteries on/off remotely. An electronic split charger was fitted. Due to the heavy load of the water heater, we fitted a 60A battery equaliser. This allows 12v to be taken from one of the batteries of the 24v battery bank, the current draw is balanced between the two batteries. This effectively means the batteries are in series and parallel at the same time.


The Hull
A new propeller was fitted, the hull was sanded and smoothed out, then anti-fouled. The blue gel coated hull was polished, any nicks in the fibreglass were filled, several old skin fittings were removed filled and blended in with the blue hull.


A lot of work but it has been worth it. This is a reduced list of things we have done to Moonray, lots of small changes and improvements have been made, it would be enough to fill a small book. Five months of work by us, plus hours by Jake Powell of Fal Fibres, who did all the GRP work. Tom Stovell of Lugo Marine made the benches (bench tops by Fal Fibres), lift brackets and the ladder. Alex Brinnen of ABC Vinyl Works added the stripes and signage.
We now have a very usable boat, that we will run from Mylor with the options of re-locating to other ports. Having enough space in the front cabin, so we could comfortably spend the night, it will give us more options to run from.
It will also be a very good all round dive boat.

Epsilon Dive Brief

The Epsilon detonated a mine laid on Jan 22 1917 by German submarine UC-17. On Voyage from Buenos Ayres to Amsterdam with a cargo maize. The Epsilon wreck is very broken, it was dynamited after being designated a hazard to shipping. At sometime during the 1980’s, some local divers found a large parachute mine, they persuaded the bomb squad to move the UXB to the Epsilon to help ‘open her up’. It did more than open her up.

What remains of the wreck are 3 boilers, 2 large and one smaller boiler and lots of twisted metal. If you head in a south west direction, away from the boilers, you head towards the stern. The stern is well broken with lots of twisted metal, with some plates standing a few metres above the sea bed. The large steering quadrant is visible amongst the broken wreckage. With resident conger eels, wrasse and pollack cruising around, it is quite a nice dive.

Shotline on the Boilers – The shotline will be dropped close to the boilers. Being the centre of the wreck, you can swim in a South Westerly direction towards the stern or North East towards the bow. The wreck is very broken but you can follow parts of the wreck in either direction. The boilers themselves are quite interesting, with several resident Conger Eels.

Shotline on the Stern – The shotline will be dropped by the highest part of the stern, it is only a couple of metres high but usually has a school of Bib around it. The area is quite flat but parts of the wreck are discernible, like the steering quadrant and the propellor. From the stern head North East for the boilers, then North East again for the Bow.

DSMBs to be deployed before leaving the sea bed, unless it has been pre-arranged to leave the shot line in.
Stanwood dive brief

The Stanwood was a 4158 ton steamship, that had been confiscated from the Germans at the end of the Great War (WW1). It was used for carrying cargo for many years, until one day in December 1939, it went into Falmouth docks for repairs.
The are several stories about her exact final moments, my favourite is that when she was being welded, the cargo of coal caught fire. She was towed away from the harbour to the North Bank, the sea cocks were opened to scuttle her and put the fire out. The idea was that she would sit on the shallow ledge, 12m below. It would be easily re-floated. Instead on landing flat on the sea bed of the North Bank, they missed, she turned over and slid down the bank of the deep channel. Over the years, she has been heavily salvaged. Then, the remains were blown apart, she had been deemed a danger to shipping.


We only dive the wreck on High Water slack, it needs to be slack and it’s best for visibility. The shotline is usually dropped in the middle of the wreck, between 12-18m. The site is more wreckage than wreck, it has been heavily salvaged but it is a haven for wildlife. It is not a site for wide angle photography, macro is best. Divers should make their way to the shotline and stay on the line until they reach the bottom. The area is quite silty, so try and stay off the bottom, it will ruin the visibility for everyone. Once there, there is a choice depending on your qualification. To restrict the depth, head slowly north, east or west. For greater depth, head south, criss crossing the wreck, to get to a maximum of around 30m. The wreck reaches a maximum depth of around 26m, after that the sea bed is quite flat but scallops can be found. After that, you can come back up the wreck towards the shallows, which runs out at around 8m. Continuing north, you can finish the dive on the oyster beds in around 6m. DSMB’s must be deployed before ascending.




Scuba diving agencies
If you want to dive with us, whether it’s just for a shore dive, or from our boats, we accept all agencies. Most of our staff are multi agency trained, most of our instructors are multi agency instructors.We know quite a few representatives from several agencies, we are friends with most. We have just returned from the Go Diving Show in Coventry where we spoke to SDI, TDI, PADI BSAC, SAA, NAUI and RAID.So, whatever your agency, we accept you all.
WILDSEA Europe Atlantic Ocean Heritage Route – WAOH
We have been asked to join the WAOH project as a stakeholder. Whilst the project is open to all, creating a sustainable scuba diving route around the Atlantic coast of Europe, is the main aim.
Taken from the Wildsea.eu website:
The WILDSEA Atlantic Heritage Route is a discovery journey along the best diving destinations in Europe‘s Atlantic coastline. The Route celebrates the unique natural and cultural heritage of European coastal territories washed by the Atlantic Ocean, discovering a rich mosaic of adventures, tastes and amazing travel experiences.
The Route is currently under development through a broad stakeholder consultation process in Portugal, Spain, Ireland and the UK. In 2019 we will be delighting you with an amazing selection of diving adventures and other marine ecotourism and travel opportunities along the Route. Until then, get acquainted with the Route’s fantastic landmark destinations!
With our environmental credentials, we have been awarded 5* as a service provider. We are also attending the conference of stakeholders in Portugal, during November 2018.
If you want to know more about ecotourism, there is a good explanation on the Wildsea website – https://www.wildsea.eu/blog-en/what-is-ecotourism-and-why-is-so-important.html
Marine and Natural History Photography (MNHP) in Falmouth.
Penryn Campus of Falmouth University teach a course called “Marine and Natural History Photography” (MNHP).
For the marine side of this course, students must be qualified divers. We have taught quite a few MNHP students to dive. With our experience with underwater photography and filming, we can also help with the course projects.
We have also been the subject of a couple of films for final projects, as well as part of final photo portfolio projects.
If you are thinking of doing this course, please contact us to see what we can do to help.
Darlwyne – the forgotten tragedy of 1966
SOMETIMES THINGS CAN surprise you. Something catches your attention, and you might even wonder how you missed it.
One day this May, we were having a lunch-break at the marina between dives when a guy from the sailing school came over. He had just taken out to sea a journalist who was interested in events surrounding the Football World Cup of 1966 – the one England actually won.
The journalist wanted to visit some of the places where the Darlwyne had been. Had I heard of the Darlwyne? I hadn’t.
He explained what he knew of the story. Fifty years ago, on 31 July, this pleasure-boat had left Mylor for Fowey, overloaded and unfit to be in the water. The passengers spent the day in Fowey, and the Darlwyne set off back to Mylor.
The winds had changed direction, so it would be a rough trip home for any boat.
A few people said they had spotted it making way, but it never arrived back. It disappeared with no survivors.
The man from the sailing school had never heard of the Darlwyne either, before taking the journalist out. The quay it left was only 100m or so from the sailing school, but that was before Mylor was the yacht harbour it is now.
He also mentioned a book by Martin Banks called The Mysterious Loss of the Darlwyne: A Cornish Holiday Tragedy.
I found nothing at wrecksite.eu, so I created a record for the Darlwyne.
Using Google I found the original Board of Trade report, which was quite detailed, but to sum up:
• The Darlwyne was not fit to go to sea;
• There was very little safety equipment and no radio;
• It had a capacity of 12 but was carrying 31 people;
• The wind forecast changed between leaving Mylor and the return voyage;
• Darlwyne was a 25-year-old timber ex-Admiralty picket boat;
• It was 13.5m long with a 3.5m beam and weighed 12.35 tons;
• It had two Perkins P6 diesel engines and had been re-propped;
• There was a massive air & sea search but only some wreckage recovered;
• Nobody survived;
• The 12 bodies recovered were of people who had died of deepwater drowning.
I WAS STRUCK by the massive loss of life in what was a relatively recent incident that, occurring the day after the World Cup victory, had somehow been overlooked. We had to try to find this wreck.
The Board Of Trade report also stated that 912 objects had been identified by the Royal Navy, which was involved in the searches, and that divers had investigated 142 of these. Historic England located within the National Archive the records we needed to see. By spelling Darlwyne as “Darlwin”, it found several other reports.
Google searches also revealed a recent interview with one of the RNLI crew who had searched at the time.
We knew him, a local ship-researcher and retired ship’s pilot.
The Darlwyne would be a small target to find in an area of mostly rocky seabed. An expert told us that we would need a caesium magnetometer flown 6m from the bottom to locate the relatively small boat-engines, which weighed around half a ton each.
This wouldn’t be a practical method, however, because the caesium tow-fish was likely to be damaged or lost among the rocks and pinnacles.
With potential depths of up to 60m, side-scan sonar would be better, though with that rocky seabed any results were likely to be unclear.
Without any actual real sightings of the vessel, the area to search was far too large, especially taking into account the depth of water. The area in which the wreckage and bodies had been found was 10 miles long and possibly two to three miles out to sea.
The report concluded that the Darlwyne had sunk in the Dodman Point area. The reef there is subject to strong tides and regular tidal overfalls – waves caused by strong currents at peak tidal flow. Under water there are many rocks and crevasses.
Nick, one of our team, put out a call for information on a local radio station. Someone who had worked on a scallop-dredger called to say that during the 1980s his boat had dragged up a wooden transom with the name Darlwyne on it from a gully SSW of Dodman Point, at a range of a third of a mile.
In another report, a fishing-boat had trawled up a propshaft and one or two propellers about two miles south-west of the Dodman. The items were left on the quayside at Mevagissey for the Ministry of Defence to identify.
According to the report, inspectors had confirmed that they were from the Darlwyne, but there seemed to be no official record of the visit. How would the MoD identify the Darlwyne from the propellers when it had been re-engined and fitted with smaller props?
LOCAL FISHERMEN also came up with the location of an unidentified timber wreck, very close to where the transom was supposedly trawled up. These locations also happened both to be in a wide gully, in which a wreck could easily be missed by normal surface-detection methods.
So we would have to try a diver-led search in the gully. If a trawler had been through the wreck, any timbers left would be spread around.
The engines and ballast could be anywhere, so we would have to look for anything that didn’t fit with the surroundings. There might be small corroded iron or steel objects, the engines, anchors or even the granite sets (square paving granite blocks) added for extra ballast after the Darlwyne was re-engined.
None of these were big targets, and everything but the granite blocks would be encrusted, so it would have to be a slow, studious search.
We left Mylor and made our way to the Dodman. We had planned a day with the winds offshore and neap tides – the Dodman has some notorious currents, and we needed as few of those as possible.
We trolled the boat up and down and, using a combination of the newer, higher- resolution electronic charts on the plotter and our echo-sounder, studied the seabed.
Our echo-sounder has a high-definition “downscan” that is part of its side-imaging system, with a multi-split-screen function to show the downscan beside the sidescan images, displaying
the charts and sonar simultaneously.
We used our back-up plotter for the charts once on site.
The gully we had been looking at on the charts had a rocky bottom with a sandy strip that would not be wide enough for a scallop dredge, so we carried on searching.
The only other gully that matched the information we had been given was on the north side of a reef known as the Bellows. This was much larger, 400m wide and more than 800m long, stretching out into the sea. It would take a lot of searching, and we found nothing on our electronics other than the end of the gully.
ON OUR FIRST DAY of diving, five of us did two dives each. The first pair went diagonally across the gully, marking the entry and exit points on the chart-plotter and looking for scallops and scallop-trawl marks to confirm that the gully fitted the criteria, which it did.
The second group followed the edge of the gully, hoping to find anything that had fallen off the edges of the trawls. One granite block was found, its sides around 30cm long, so larger than a granite set. The records had stated granite sets, but anything could have been used. Nothing else was found, and we returned to Mylor.
We decided that next time we would try to find the end of the trawl-marks, where the dredgers would have stopped and turned back because of rocks or a change of seabed. Parts of the wreck might have been deposited there, after being dragged along.
A few weeks later we returned. The weather was good, but the tide was still running quite fast when we arrived. We decided to let it do the work and entered the water on a rocky seabed. The tide would take us to the sand, where we hoped to find the end of the trawls.
We soon came across an area covered in stones. It was what we were looking for. There were rocks of all sizes, various pieces of concrete and encrusted iron, all hard to tell apart from the natural rocks. The tide was pushing us along fast, and we were quickly dragged away.
We came to the scallop ground on coarse sand, and could have ended the dive there and waited for the tide to stop, but we were already down and the vis was good, so we decided to carry on.
After about 45 minutes we came across very low lines in the seabed. As I got closer, I could see that this was steel or iron, partially encrusted and some of it looking rusty. Looking around, we could see more items – a fisherman’s anchor, some worm-eaten wood and some recently exposed wood.
There was also a large lump that looked like a winch, plus some other iron or steel objects. The current was still running, so I took some photos as best I could before it took me away. I then started my ascent, as I needed to let them know on the boat. The tide stopped during our ascent.
I TOLD EVERYONE on the boat what I had seen and photographed, and they were excited. We dropped a shotline where we thought the wreckage was, allowing for my having drifted off the site before the tide stopped.
The next group planned to do a circular search with the shotline as a starting point. They descended and searched, but found nothing.
Had I found the Darlwyne? The location was as described by the fishermen who had trawled up the transom – scallop grounds that had obviously been dredged in the past.
The bearing from Dodman Point was almost exactly as described, although the distance was out. We often find that distances at sea are hard to get right, as endless seas have no references.
From the location both Hemmick Beach and Portloe were visible, and there had been eye-witnesses from both locations at the time of the sinking.
The spread of visible material was over an area within the dimensions of the Darlwyne. The anchor was of the type carried and the right sort of size.
There were some timbers exposed, though we had expected to see very little timber remaining. There would have been several iron and steel parts, including the tender’s davits, fitted aboard, which could account for the random pieces of encrusted steel littered around the area.
No other possible wrecks in the area were known of by Historic England or our other resources. Short of going back to search for the engines, which could take days or weeks, we’ll never know for sure.
The engines could have been trawled up and scrapped at any time, and the granite sets mixed up with stones at the end of the trawl, or miles out at sea.
Taking everything into account, it’s likely that what we found was what was left of the Darlwyne.
THE DARLWYNE was a special search in several ways. The ship sank within living memory, with close relatives of the dead still alive. There were plans for a 50-year commemoration service with the Bishop of Truro and surviving relatives at Mylor church.
We had very little time for our search – the winds and tides played their part and we had only until 31 July to find the wreck. On what was almost the last dive of the last suitable day before the service took place, I found an unknown wreck.
Was it the Darlwyne? We may never know, but a commemorative service took place above the wreck we found, which may at least give some measure of closure to the families.
Since this story more evidence has come to light, increasing the likelihood of this wreck being the Darlwyne. I am now 95% certain that it is.
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