VSAG added 93 new photos.
3 days ago
I make no apologies for the size of this album as the SS Yongala truely lives up to it's reputation as one of the worlds best wreck dives. The passing of 10 years since my last dive on it had dimmed my memory somewhat. The sea conditions were perfect, the sun was shining, the water was 26 degrees and we could see the wreck at 30m from the surface. We were delighted that owing to some technical issues with the onboard compressor the previous day we were given an extra dive on her making it three dives instead of the planned two. The only drawback was a 4.30am wake up call but it was owe so worth it.
Here is a little bit about the SS Yongala:
On the evening of 23 March 1911,under the command of Captain William Knight, one of the most capable and experienced captains then working the busy Australian coastal route, the SS Yongala, a stout and the well-maintained vessel, sailed past the lighthouse on Dent Island in the Whitsunday Passage and was never seen again.
As the eight-year-old S.S. Yongala steamed leisurely out of Mackay, aboard were 49 passengers, 73 crew, a racehorse named “Moonshine” and a prize bull.
What the 14-year veteran master didn’t know was that a cyclone warning had just been received and with her brand new Marconi radio still on its way from England, the frustrated keeper could only watch her sail away. He was the last person to ever see the Yongala.
In the raging cyclonic seas, a wave or waves broke over her side, immediately filling her with water and sending her quickly to the bottom.
Three days later, concern escalated and Yongala was posted as missing. Every possible vessel was thrown into the search but apart from some debris washed up on the beaches, no trace was ever found and the subsequent inquiry was inconclusive.
The doomed racehorse washed up in a creek three miles south of the Ross River, near Townsville. This was the only body to be found.
During WWII, a minesweeper fouled on something 11 miles east of Cape Bowling Green and a subsequent postwar search by an RAN survey vessel, HMAS Lachlan, all but confirmed the Yongala’s location in around 30m of water. But the Navy did nothing more.
It wasn’t until 1958 when local skin-divers, Don Macmillan and Noel Cook, brought back a steel safe from a wreck that the world was forced to remember the Yongala.
The anticlimactic opening revealed only mud, but the safe’s serial number was traced back to Chubb in the UK who confirmed it was installed in the purser’s cabin aboard S.S. Yongala in 1903.
Launched in Newcastle, England, in 1903, the 3700 ton S.S. Yongala was named after the tiny South Australian pastoral town of the same name.
It remains Australia's worst maritime disaster and as a grave site and protected wreck, quite rightly but a little frustratingly, no penetration inside is allowed. Unfortunately Nitrox was not available on our Livaboard. We were supposed to do no decompression dives and some of us allegedly may have taken a few small liberties on the day - but hey, it was fantastic. We were even lucky enough to have a Bull Shark swimming around on one of our safety stops but not close enough to make a picture worth while ...
