We dived the SS Armenian on Friday out of Newquay. She is 50 miles out and in 95m. The trip out was 3 hours long and fairly lumpy by time we reached the dive site we were all ready to get off the boat! I was diving with a trimix of 10/62 giving me an equivalent narcotic depth of 30m in my inspiration and carrying 2 eleven litre bailout cylinders with 14/54 and 30/35 these 2 cylinders would get me to 22m if the poo hit the fan then the remainder of the gas I would need would be lowered down on a pre planned signal.
As we descended it got darker and darker and on reaching the bottom we needed torches to see however the visibility was a good 10-15m. The descent took us around 6 minutes with the shot dropping down into the inside of the wreck. The decks and superstructure had long since collapsed exposing her boilers. We swam towards the stern coming across a large winch where we crossed over and explored the other side of the wreck. There were port holes lying around everywhere I picked up 2 with the idea of sending them to the surface but I had second thoughts knowing that the time it would take to rig them up to a lifting bag would probably mean another 20 minutes of decompression at 6m.
We spent 20 minutes on the bottom which gave us a total of 80 minutes of decompression over 60 minutes of that at 6m.
This was a great dive the size and condition of the wreck is hard to put across. I will definitely be going back and paying her another visit next year.
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