The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Rod updates diver guide to Scapa Flow wrecks
Mearns man an expert on scuttled and sunken Orkney battleships
A Mearns man who became an international expert in deep-sea diving has published the definitive guide to Scotland’s largest maritime graveyard.
A sheltered anchorage with easy access to the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean, Scapa Flow in the Orkneys was first used by the Royal Navy in the 1800s.
Brought back into use as a heavily guarded base in the First World War, the Grand Fleet sailed out against the German High Seas Fleet in the Battle of Jutland – the war’s largest naval engagement.
The base witnessed great tragedies – the sinking of HMS Hampshire with a loss of 737 men and the HMS Vanguard with 843 souls, and the Second World War torpedoing of HMS Royal Oak with 834 fatalities.
Rod Macdonald has dived the seven remaining German ships in the deep, dark waters and has published Dive Scapa Flow, a collection of in-depth studies of three battleships and four “kleinen kreuzer” which accompanied them.
He has charted the changes to mammoth dreadnought battleships with 12-inch main guns, and the rapid degeneration of the cruisers, which were among 74 scuttled in 1919.
Rod said: “The Konig, the Markgraft, and Kronprinz Wilhelm are 575 feet long, twice the length of Hampden Park and they rise from the sea at 45 metres deep to 15 or 20 metres from the surface. “They are phenomenal things.” Rod said the remaining ships were too difficult for salvagers to lift but they still stripped off as much armour as possible.
But the dive remains on every enthusiast’s “bucket list”.
“In the 1980s when I started diving these were seen as a bit dark, a bit dangerous but now they are reasonably pleasant dives nowadays,” he said.
“Is there any other place in the world where you can see three World War 1 dreadnought battleships?”
Rod first published his study in 1990 and has rewritten and expanded the book for the centenary edition.
“There are very few places you can see this sort of stuff and it’s the collection of ships that makes Scapa Flow such a draw for divers,” he said.
Based in Stonehaven, Rod leads shipwreck expeditions around the world with Wreck X.