Sunday San Francisco Maru

Wow ........ This has got to be my very best ever wreck dive. The 'cisco sits in about 70m of water so it needs to be planned as a technical dive as only Rob of us had the technical gear to do it justice we had the boat to our selves. For those who are interested we planned a 58m 20 minute bottom time dive with deco gas of 50%
O2 and a cylinder of 80% O2 hung on the 5m line. Checking the gas in the morning one of the deco side slings was a little light at 45% O2 but as we had calculated the plan with a lot of spare gas we decided to stick to the bottom time and extend the deco to suit.
Dropping on to the wreck you catch you first site at about 20 m when the bridge starts to appear and as you drop deeper you get a good view of most of the wreck in water of around 30m viz. The bridge is at about 42m and from there you can see the 3 tanks which the wreck is famous for. From the bridge we went over to the bow gun and down into the first hold the is still full live mines, some of which have have been stolen by the local fisherman to go dynamite fishing on the reefs. Following the hold we got a good look around the tanks before the guide left us and we carried on doing the rest of the rear holds that are still full of ammunition. The 20 minutes bottom time were over all to soon and we started our slow deco assent at 20m we changed on to the 50% O2 mix for and at 5m we moved on to the 80% O2 mix to end the dive hanging under the boat for 25 minutes may not seem like fun but we had a a few shoals fish to take our minds off the time. Before we knew it was the end of the deco and 100 minutes of the dive had gone by.

So to sum it up totally blown away by what must be one of the most amazing wrecks in the world.