Читать книгу Into the Abyss. Diving to Adventure in the Liquid World онлайн

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The seabed was an almost uniform litter of flattened bits of ship. Sections of ship’s side plating, beams and struts lay all around, sometimes part covered by rippled sandbanks - driven there by winter storms. Then in the distance two large black circles appeared, some five metres high. As we approached them I saw that they were boilers, about seven metres in length. I swam around them trying to work out how they had functioned in life.

All around the two boilers were the remains of an engine room. Large steam pipes competed for space with mangled bits of catwalks and other unidentifiable pieces of machinery. And all around in all the nooks and crannies provided by this mass of bent and buckled steel, the seabed teemed with all manner of crabs, lobsters and the occasional conger eel.

I was also surprised to find several golf balls in varying states of decay amongst the debris. Cruden Bay, a small coastal village a few miles down the coast, has a very fine and well-respected championship golf course, which I had played, right down at the seaside. These golf balls had been lost aeons ago and had been driven here along the sandy seabed by the current before becoming trapped in the wreckage.