March 2004
M/S Vestal- British war time wreck in 70 meters

Purpose of the project:
To find out the exact location and diving conditions for future projects.

Description of the dive site:
Dive to the Vestal wreck, found in 2003 on the southern side of Phuket, it was something we had been waiting for a long time. The M/S Vestal, British minesweeper, was sunk in 1945 by a Japanese kamikaze attack. Only a few people had been diving at this site before: Mark Ellyatt and the German guys Joerg and Andreas who originally found the wreck.
Janne and Jani went for the dive together with their trimix-instructor Mark Ellyat and a group of different tech-divers from the Phuket area, all together about 10 persons.

Details of the dive:
After about 3 hours of looking for the wreck, Mark went down first, to be sure of the location. Re-surfacing again he told us that the conditions below were pretty ruff, so most of the divers decided to skip the dive. After a really long wait we went down quickly to 70 meters, we had low visibility of about 2 meters and a very strong current, which made the dive difficult.
This 60-70 m long wreck lies on its side, broken in half on a sandy bottom. We started to swim against the current along the bottom of the wreck, only to realize after a few minutes, that doing it this way we will use up all our air just by swimming. We decided to go over to the deck-side of the boat, hoping to get shelter from the current and to make our way slowly back to the descent line. It didn’t go as planned-on the deck-side, the current was even stronger and swept us quickly along the boat and past the decent line. We realized at once that we could not reach the descent line again. We tried to hang on to the wreck for the rest of our bottom time, which was not easy due to swarms of poisonous lion and scorpion fishes. All the time we were swimming with light strokes against the current, still moving with it going backwards, not being able to reach the ascent line.
Slightly before the end of our 20 minutes bottom time, we decided to start our ascent to mid-water and put up our lift-bags from the bottom, so the boat would notice that we are doing our decompression stop in the current. In these kinds of current, during an hour’s deco-stop, you can be swept kilometers away from your boat. So we started our ascent tired, out of breath, really disappointed in the dive, cursing the per liter helium gas price…
On our arrival to the surface 1 km from the boat, nobody had noticed our lift-bags, as the evening sun was straight in the eyes of crew. We waited for about an hour and made plans as to which of us will make the swim to the coast of Phuket, about 10 km away, if the boat did not come before dark…Fortunately the boat came just before that decision was made and picked us up.
The aim of the project was achieved and the GPS location was written down for future dives.

Gases used:
Trimix 17/39, decompression gases EAN 32 + EAN 65.

Equipment used:
Wetsuit 5mm + hood
2 X 15L steel200 bar tanks
1 X 10L composite 300 bar deco-tank
1 X 6L aluminum 200 bar deco-tank
2 X ScubaPro MK25 + S600 regulator
Diverite/OMS backplate, harness, wings
Reel + SMB
Suunto dive lights