Northwest Dive Club

Had a great dive yesterday. Got inspired to write a peotic :-) dive report.

Four bold men brave flat seas
Sun rises over Cascades
The Mighty Elfin planes
Off the throttle
Oy, drop the ball!

Splash, splash, splash, down the line
Three divers and four lights
Thirty fathoms below
The Success meets
Cabin intact

Peering down the smokestack
Crawling under cabin
No engine yet is found
Clock is ticking
Trimix is breathed

One last glance in through hole
Deep under pilot house
Thar she is! yells Peo
Walter films
Sharps observes

Four bold men brave the rain
Steve topside, rest below
Slowly doing deco
Breaks surface
Happy grins

"All aboard!" someone yells
Ball's up, throttle forward
Back to Sand Point boat dock
A great day
With good friends

Sweet... Good Stuff!

Bravo!

Geek.


Tell us about the "Success"! A lake Washington wreck, I presume? Boat? Plane? VW van?

The wreck was found a few weeks ago on side-scan sonar by John Sharps and Innerspace Exploration.

The SCRET team of Walter Jaccard and I dove the virgin wreck a few weeks back to try to identify if this really is the Success or not, with surface support from Steve Coffman and John Sharps. We came back from the 200' dive in Lake Washington with 25 minutes of video and more questions than answers.

Yesterday, the SCRET team of Walter Jaccard, John Sharps and me, and again with excellent surface help from Steve Coffman, did a second dive on the wreck to get some more video from the inside of the cabin and trying to locate the engine inside the hull, under the cabin. The starboard side of the stern is gone on the wreck, so we hoped two holes into the hull below the cabin that we noted on our first dive would lead to a passage into the engine room. But we were just greeted by bulk heads in both passages. Just as we were getting close to thumbing the dive yesterday, I found another opening under the pilot cabin, after entering a small collapsed area, that I could look in through, and there was the engine block. We didn't have time to get video of this, nor to do a deeper penetration of that area, so I guess we'll have to go back again at a later time to explore that further. The fact that there seems to be an engine left on the boat gives us some clues on how she went down, which was the important point for us.

We still don't have a 100% positive ID, and there are a couple of questions we need to find the answers to, but several things point to the fact that this is the wreck of the S/S Success.

The Success was a 50' steamer, built in 1868, which "foundered off Madison Park" in 1907 according to some sources. We have some doubts this is the entire truth of her demise.

More information together with historical and current photos will likely be published as a SCRET newsletter (http://www.scret.org), together with some more data on other new interesting wrecks. Stay tuned.

That's neat. Thanks for sharing that. Good luck with the ID!