2 Divers Die on the HMS Scylla
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June 18th, 2009
TWO pals who dived a shipwreck died after they got stuck in a tiny room and were unable to find their way out because of muddy water, an inquest heard today.
Tragic David White, 42, and Kaye Moss, 43, ran out of air as they desperately tried to escape a small compartment on the HMS Scylla off Whitsand Bay in Cornwall.
They had dived to the artificial reef for a "poke around" and entered a room via a hatch but stirred up silt as they went in.
The sediment made it impossible to see and they were unable to find the exit, an inquest in Plymouth, Devon, heard.
They were trapped in the "very small" compartment and eventually ran out of air and both bodies were later recovered from the room, with Kaye's buried beneath the silt.
Despite being experienced divers with hundreds of dives between them, they failed to attach a safety line which could have led them out of the wreck, the inquest heard.
The couple died during a trip with three other divers from the South Gloucester Sub Aqua Club on August 2, 2007.
They failed to resurface and were eventually found by Richard Stevenson, a diving instructor who was teaching a class nearby and heard the group's mayday call.
He told the inquest: "I felt that down the central passage would be a challenging part of the wreck and so I went there. I saw that one of the small hatches was silted up.
"I could see there had been disturbance. Any wreck attracts silt and swimmers disturb the sediment. It looked like someone had been in there recently.
"I dropped into the hatch to have a look and that is when I found a pair of fins. I found the first person, the gentleman, and we took him out.
"By then the silt was awful and we had to leave it for an hour before going back in for Kaye. There was not very much room inside there."
He added: "I think it is a tragic case of two divers getting into a very small room with no line to retrace their steps.
"Basically they got disorientated and disturbed visibility to the point where they could not find their way out."
David and Kaye were the first of the group to enter the water and told their friends they planned to dive the stern of the sunken ship before "poking into" some rooms.
The three friends surfaced and waited for Kaye and David but when they became overdue they grew worried and called coastguards.
PC Peter Goss, a police diver who examined their equipment, said: "There are numerous points where you don't have to go in very far to lose the light and where there is a large build up of silt."
Post mortems revealed they both died from drowning and both of their air tanks were completely empty.
The couple were carrying surface mark buoys and reels which should have helped them find their way out - but the equipment had not been used.
HMS Scylla was bought and scuttled by The National Marine Aquarium in 2004.
Thousands of tonnes of dredged material is dumped near the Scylla from the nearby Devonport Naval Base to keep the River Tamar clear for ships.
Environmental campaigners say dredged waste from the dumping site, just half a mile from the Scylla, is not dispersing out to sea but polluting inshore waters.
source: The Sun
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