Report - August 2024
The Orianda was the first of the minesweepers to be lost in the minefield laid by the German light cruiser Kolberg during the bombardment of Scarborough. The mines began sinking ships on the evening of the bombardment itself and the losses would carry on until March 1915. The Royal Navy sent minesweepers to begin dealing with minefield almost immediately, on 19 December 1914, this highly dangerous work saw the Orianda fall victim to the very mines she was attempting to clear.
As part of the project that is investigating the minefield, the Scarborough Sub Aqua Club have put together a multi-year dive programme, where known wrecks will be further investigated and the wrecks of five missing ships will be searched for. Earlier in the summer the wreck of the Orianda was scanned using a side-scan sonar.
The imagery helped plan the dive on the wreck, which took place on 11 August 2024.
Matt Newsome takes up the story:
The visibility was pretty poor, about 2-3m. But it was light on the bottom. The wreck lies on a very silty area of the seabed, so good visibility is hard to come by. What has struck me is just how accurate the side-scan image is relative to what we witnessed.
The big inverted ‘U’ is the gunnels of the wreck. The site is well silted up, so only the outline of the wreck is visible. The steering quadrant stands up distinctively. The stern of the wreck is scoured out, so the counter stern is exposed. The silt builds up about where the rudder is, so the rudder and propeller are buried. On the port side gunnel I saw a mooring cleat, I didn't spot one starboard side oddly enough, but it may have been pulled off.
Moving forward I saw the top of the triple expansion steam engine and the top of the boiler. The boiler only stands about half a metre out of the silt. To give some perspective I would expect the boiler to be around 2-3m in diameter on a trawler of this size, which goes to show how much of the wreck is buried.
We then headed forward across open silt and, strangely, I never found the main trawl winch. This is the size of a car and should have been on the main deck, about level with the top of the boiler. I saw something in the sand, I think it was some deck plating, it was just a lip barely poking above the silt, with a couple of lobsters living inside. I went further forward again and found some structure. It's over at the starboard side of the site and is a section of the hull. I could see the frames on the inside and it had a right angle to it. It's possible this was the starboard bow, along with some of the bulkhead. Unfortunately, there was some trawl gear wrapped around it, which may have hidden some more features. The 'smoking gun' which would have told me it was the bow would have been finding the anchor and, more prominently, anchor winch, which I didn't find. The trawl net wasn't big enough to hide something as big as the winch. By this point we didn't have enough air to scout around any further. But looking at the side scan image, I think we visited everything on the image.
There is one concession to all this, as we were sounding the wreck to get anchored, we did see a small target about 10m off the starboard side of the wreck, sticking up about a metre off the seabed. It's possible that this may be the missing trawl winch and that it has been pulled off by a trawler. However, I wouldn't rule out it being a shoal of fish. It hasn't shown up on the side scan image.
A couple of members have shown interest in visiting the Orianda again. With a bit better visibility, we will make a bit more sense of the bow section and maybe find the elusive winch. I was surprised just how much marine life was on what is a small wreck site. Crab and lobster were everywhere! Plumose anemones covered all the superstructure.
