In an unexpected end of season closer, a Red Sea Explorers dive team, comprising myself and Faisal Khalaf assisted in a project undertaken by the Egyptian Coastguard with HEPCA divers to recover some recently found ammo boxes of unknown origins in the vicinity of Hurghada. M/V Tala was the diving platform for the operation, along with the usual crew as surface support in addition to the HEPCA party.

The HEPCA teams were divided into two diving teams, diving single tanks of air, which alternated in short bottom time dives to recover the boxes. The RSE team ran two back-to-back dives diving 25/25 backgas in double AL80s (and one AL80 bottom stage) and carrying deco bottles of EANx50 and Oxygen. Maximum depth to the sea bed was 39m, making 25/25 an ideal gas for providing all the benefits of Helium and a safe working PPO2 of  1.2 at the absolute maximum depth. Considering the physical exertion involved, this really helps. Of course, it’s also easier to blend than 30/30 as it’s just the Helium plus EANx32 (like the other Standard Gases we dive…). But enough on the details, what about the dives?

Given the nature of the operation, unfortunately I can only be minimal on the details as far as the location and the like goes, and dropping down to the sea bed we had only the HEPCA divers information on what to expect, which was basically a lot of boxes (around 20) spread across the reef. The ammunition we were collecting were for small arms, so not too much to worry about. Our first dives intentions were primarily to film and document HEPCA’s operations, but we ended up getting in the water as the first team was getting out, so we decided to start lifting ourselves (I will try to upload some of the not-so-exciting video at a later date). No idea on dates, no idea on origins (there are no known wrecks in the area).
Unfortunately, we were also without our scooters for this dive, which were out on rent.
The first thing that struck me as we followed the shot down to the sea bed was just what a perfect placement the HEPCA team had secured with their shot line – a quick glance around showed at least 10 boxes in the close vicinity of the shot line.

As Faisal is more proficient with his knots than I, it was decided he would run the lifting process, with me helping out and filming where necessary. Given the excellent visibility and vicinity of the shot line (within 10m at all times) we decided to make life easier and ropped the O2 deco tanks next to the line, whilst I carried both of our Nitrox 50s on the leash so they were out of the way. Having not planned to lift before we dropped in, we didn’t carry sacrificial air stages for inflation of the lift bags. This gave us less bottom time than we could have otherwise managed, although with the depths as shallow as they were it wasn’t too much of a hinderence.

For the first dive we managed a total bottom time of 50 minutes, average depth 36m, for which we did 40minutes of deco and a total run time of 95 minutes. The deco was split between the 21m bottle and the O2. We lifted a total of 10 boxes.

Back onboard we checked out what we had and cleaned up one of the bullets to reveal it date-stamped as manufactured in 1940. Interesting. But no clues as to where they came from.

We refilled with the same gases and jumped back in, this time with an extra couple of air tanks to aid the inflation. No camera this time. We had a total surface time of 55 minutes. During this dive we lifted 4 more boxes before calling it a day. Same depth, bottom time 40 minutes, with 30 minutes deco. Total Run Time was 77 minutes. Back on board we repacked everything and set off back to port where the Coastguard removed the ammo presumably to do their own investigative work on it.

And that was that.

As far as personal opinions go, I found it pretty fun to get the chance to be involved with something like this and to see roughly how things are set up and run. And it was fun to do extended bottom times in the 30m range like this. Certainly there were new things / tips / tricks that I learned from watching the setup and that we can hopefully apply to other projects in the future, as well as maybe organising a search for a wreck in the area if it seems feasible.

I’m also really interested to find out what happened to have the ammo there in the first place, but we’ll see about that in time.