04 - 09 - 2001.  SOA 

With our fresh water supply still hovering somewhere between a cupful of brine and a teaspoon of brown sludge, tensions are rising at SOA base camp. Anyone smelling slightly clean comes under immediate suspicion of having taken a forbidden shower. The discovery of a ‘secret pipe’ leading to the dwelling of Zafer and Semra nearly led to violence. There are no tea bags left, and the last 15 cookies are being watched so closely that no one dares to eat them. Some very hungry person (not mentioning any names) has chewed through a couple of regulators on the oxygen deco stop. Finally, Murat Effendi is protesting the water shortage by doing strange things to the beans, a recipe for some dangerous unscheduled ‘off gassing’ during decompression. It is definitely time for a day off!

This morning we went to work on the Byzantine wreck under Inayet. For Tufan and Berta, veterans of the 1997 INA survey, both wrecks were familiar territory. Almost. In 1997 there were ten complete amphoras visible on the Byzantine wreck. Today all that remains is an anchor, a scatter of broken amphoras and roof tiles, and a few empty depressions in the sand. Looters have destroyed our last opportunity to obtain complete measurements of the amphoras, and now we can only make a guess at their date (the remaining fragments closely resemble the wine amphoras from the 7th century AD Yassi Ada ship). Only a couple of days earlier we witnessed a suspicious-looking boat hovering over Inayet, but without seeing any obvious sign of scuba diving we did not take a closer look. It is terrible to think that we might have missed our chance to record the last intact remains of the Byzantine ship by only a few days.

The second dive exploring Inayet was an eerie experience. This is what you imagine a shipwreck should look like: a vast ghostly hull disappearing down into cobalt darkness. Inayet is a weed-encrusted gangrenous corpse of a ship, and where her metal flesh has fallen away from the skeleton, the blackened tangle of her innards spills out onto the sand. Here you may find fragments of Ottoman porcelain and fine-stemmed glassware, dominos made from wood, bone, and brass, broken bottles, and twisted piles of rusted metal that crumbles in your hands. Inayet is an historical ship, and we know quite a lot about her design and her history, so we focused our efforts on making a visual record of the wreck in its present state.

The first steam engine was used on board a ship near the end of the eighteenth century. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the compound engine began to replace the traditional steam engine, a phase of experimentation that culminated in the introduction of the turbine. Originally built with a 2-cylinder double expansion engine, the Inayet belongs to an interesting period in the evolution of the Steam Age. She also has the distinction of being the most recent victim of our ‘Bermuda Triangle.’ We are starting to develop some theories about why this seemingly innocuous bay has accumulated so many shipwrecks, and diving off the exposed end of our cape has presented us with new factors to consider. At almost exactly 9 am in the morning, a strong southerly current started up, so that divers on the decompression stop suddenly found themselves clinging to the shot line like strung fish. Then a couple of hours later the current stopped. The water here is significantly colder and murkier than in the sheltered southern lee of the peninsula, but the sand below 30m has strange warm patches.

Inayet had one more creepy (or amusing) experience for us as we ascended from the last dive. When we were about 15m above the wheelhouse, a thin stream of bubbles began rise from the ship. Although our bottom time was up and decompression mounting alarmingly, Bridget darted down to take a look, convinced there must be a diver still inside the ship (and as it happened we were one diver short, as Orkan had been forced to abort near the surface – but at this point only his buddy Guzden knew this). Tufan, always ready with the correct emergency response, started the camera rolling to capture the panicked search for the ‘trapped diver’. Afterwards, as we hung off the shot line for what seemed like an endless decompression, we had time to appreciate that the ghosts of Inayet were having the last laugh.