…with Vitez Wrecks in Premantura.

Dive one – Klinker aka Pjeska aka Draga

A 28m long, 6m wide sand cargo ship built in 1913 that sank just west of cape Kamenjak during a storm in 1960. It now lies topside up between 30 and 39m of depth. The structure is pretty much intact with a few holes here and there.

Plenty of small fish, some lobsters and a handful of larger fish specimens. The bridge and the mast are pretty much the only things that stand out, the cargo hold is open with the cargo (sand) and what I suppose was a scoop on an excavator still neatly inside.

Access is possible inside the engine room but it’s not really reccomended as you have to take the gear of to squeeze inside. You can take a peek to see the engine in excellent condition, pretty much as if it sank just a few years ago.

The viz was not all that great as I had hoped but quite average for the area. It was damn cold though. I couldn’t believe that I was cold in the middle of the summer with a 7mm wetsuit on me. Turns out it’s 13°C down there and 25-27°C on the surface! With air temperatures in mid 30’s it’s a tough choice what to wear. First you go through a heat stroke and dehidration on the surface then, below 21m, your teeth start chattering.

We spent some 25-30min on deck, photographing pretty much every angle but nothing I’m terribly proud of came out of it.
The time spent at depth lead to somewhat long deco stops but it was also the first time I got to try the deep stop approach suggested by DAN.

Supposedly it’s better to do a deep stop at half the maximum depth and a shallow stop at 6m combined with a faster ascent rate compared to a slow ascent rate with no stops.

International DAN research studies have recently clearly confirmed these hypotheses: 15 divers were enrolled in a study and each given eight possible combinations of ascent rates, and either a shallow stop, or a deep and a shallow stop. The repetitive dives were to 80 feet (25 meters) for 25 minutes; the surface interval was three hours, 30 minutes; and the final dive was to 80 feet for 20 minutes. Ascent rates were 60, 30 and 10 feet per minute…. …Clearly, the best decompression schedule is Profile 6 (see highlights in both tables). With an ascent rate of 33 feet (10 meters) per minute, and two stops at 45 feet (13.5 meters) and 9 feet (2.7 meters) respectively, this profile had the lowest bubble score of 1.76.

We did a 3-4min stop at 15m, 6-7min @ 6m and 25min @ 3m to finish it off. All in all the dive took 59 minutes and I came out with just over 10bar of air left in the tank (a 10l backup was waiting @6m but nobody needed it.)
At least we had lots of little jelly fish floating by in the current during our stops to keep us occupied but none of the photos is any good.. 30min of hanging on a rope is boring…

Dive no.2 – near Levanic island

This was a plateau/reef that comes up to 20-25m from 40-50m or so and it’s riddled with holes.
Appparently we came on a bad day and appart from an octopus and lots of small fish we didn’t see that much. A day earlier and we would have witnessed a large group of tunas hanging around.
Viz was a lot better than on the earlier dive, about 15m or so. Once again it turned into a deco dive but a lot shorter than the one before. I didn’t mind though coz the temperature was still just 13°C below 21m.

Max depth was 34m and we did a 5min stop at 15m and a 15min deco stop at 3m with total time spent underwater of 46min.