Dive the Pasikudah graveyard of wrecks (www.DiveSriLanka.com)
Four wrecks on rock including the Gladys Moller SS!
Vakarai (Kayankerni, Mankerni, Pasikudah)

By Dharshana Jayawardena.

Depth: 4-10 Meters

27/08/2012: The beautiful Pasikudah beach lies in front of us yet miles ahead. The sea is calm. Cool winds start to blow from the west as we prepare to dive in to what seems from the surface, a pile of rocks.

But It is a graveyard of ships. At all sites, it seems to be the same story repeating over again and again. Fragments of fractured hull, boilers of triple expansion steam engines, crank shafts, propellers, rudders and massive anchors strewn all over the rocky ocean bed, like the dried up skeletal remains at a feeding site of a large carnivore from the Jurassic era. Here the dive depth is between 4M - 10M and excellent adventure site for new divers who want to embark on a life time of wreck diving.

Beneath, in several locations, we find the scattered remains of large ships spread over a vast areas. If you pick a ship, raise her 20 meters into the air and then let go, this is what she will probably look like.

In one site, we spot the long crank shaft and hopefully follow it in one direction with the intent of finding the stern or the bow; and it is the stern we bump into; or what remains of it. In these shallow waters of 10 meters, wave action has probably obliterated any large remaining chunks of the ship to pieces we find all over. Stern seems to be the only last standing piece of wreck that can be justified as the remains of a once proud ship.

In other sites we find similar remains. Boilers, shafts, propellers and remains of the hull. One of these ships we suspect to be the Gladys Moller SS.

Built in 1906 this British Transport Cargo Ship (121.9 M length, 15.9m beam) floundered off the shallow bakers rocks off Pasikudah in 1942 (Nov 7th).

This is a very easy dive for anyone and its fun to potter around the rock and discover pieces of wreck (or even new wrecks) literally all over the place.

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