The Steam Ship Yongala was built in England at 1903. It was a huge ship, 110 meters long and 15 meters wide, and it served on the Sydney-Cairns line until its fatal sailing in March 1911, just 8 years after it first saw the ocean.
As always in these incidents, the captain was very experienced; in fact, he was over 30 years at the sea and this was supposed to be his last journey before retirement. So when they left the port of Maccay, just one hour before the cyclone warning arrived, he probably didn’t think much of the fact that the long promised radio system they designed for the ship in Europe still didn’t arrive (a note for all you project managers: schedules do count! see what happens when you ignore them…) and sailed the ship directly into the eye of the cyclone. We will never know when exactly they realized it wasn’t just a normal storm, but I guess they had some really bad moments before they all died - the ship just vanished, with no survivors, and the only clue to its fate was the dead body of a horse that was washed ashore a few weeks later. Other than that - all 121 people onboard died, and with absolutely no communications nobody could tell where.
Here is a short geographic background. When Australia’s east-coast mainland meets the sea, the continental shelf (which is wider in the south where it stretches some 200k”m insea and much shorter in the north) forms this canal, around 30 meters deep, that goes all the way from the mainland to the Great Barrier Reef. This canal can be safely used for marine transport (no coral reefs in it) and most naval transportation indeed takes place here. The poor Yongala sank straight in the middle of this canal, which means that with no corals, sea caves, or in fact any other structure on the otherwise flat seafloor, it immediately attracted a vast amount of marine life that made it their home. This is the primary reason that it is so packed with lifeforms - they have no other close place to go. The other implication of this geographical structure, is that there are relatively strong currents there: no obstacles stop the northern wind from creating large southern currents over dozens of kilometers (a terminology note: a northern wind is a wind that comes from the north and goes to the south. It creates a southern current, which is water flowing from the north and going to the south. This terminology difference once helped me to go through a most funny geography lesson at school, in which I mocked my poor teacher who didn’t know this difference - I hate it where people try to teach me things they don’t know). This implied, that the dive there was technically difficult, and that the sea was very bumpy on our way there - so I didn’t feel very well during the sail and didn’t eat anything throughout the day.
I was by far the least experienced diver on boat. As I said, it was technically a difficult dive and almost everybody had a history of at least 50 dives (most of them much more) - it was just a different league. I used a rope all the way down, and even like that found it hard to go through the wave level and down through the currents. Luckily they hanged air tanks on the ropes at some distances so I used them for my safety stops (even like that, I returned from the first dive with only 30 bars of air, and from the second dive with only 45 bars - also below the 50bar safety limit). Since it was two deep dives, we had to wait a surface interval of more than a hour between them (which some people used to eat lunch but I didn’t - the sea was just too bumpy and I was just too cold). The wreck itself was some 3 hours sailing (one way) from the shore, which probably explains why this dive was so expensive.
It was worth it, though. The ship lies on its side, fully intact, with the highest point around 15 meters deep and the lowest point below 30 meters. From above you see nothing (Actually, it was discovered by accident only at 1958 by a sonar; it was identified only when they managed to take a safe off its board and check its serial number - always good advice to keep long records). It first appears as a black, huge, shadow upon reaching a depth of some 10-12 meters. When you come closer, it first looks like a huge coral - the sea have totally taken it, no peace of uncovered metal is visible. You can, though, see the details. So there is a coral bed in the shape of the anchor, a coral in the shape of the captain’s chair, a coral in the shape of the toilets, a coral in the shape of the engine room, and so forth. Between the corals there is a vast amount of fish - and this place they go BIG. I mean, really big. Even huge. There are huge versions of all the normal coral reef fish - for example, I saw Grupers over 2.5meters long (usually they are measured in centimeters), some rays (a Shovel-Nose Ray went just above me - I first mistaken it for a shark, because they look similar from below; I also had some excellent swimming with two big Bull-Head Rays), and some excellent reptiles - not just the regular giant turtles, but also several Olive Sea-Snakes (It was very nice: my guide stretched his hand into the corral, and dragged this huge snake out of it by the tail. Then we all held it and made some fun with it before letting the surprised snake go). There were also some open-water, silvery schools of fish: Barracudas, to name one.
They claim that there are some Femur bones in the ship, but I didn’t see them. Anyway, it is a most remarkable cemetary. It is nice to compare it to the Mahoney shipwreck I saw on Fraser Island (read my notes from there). The Mahoney - which is on the shore - is rusted and slowly dissolves, though still intact and recognizable. The Yongala - which is also fully intact - is slowly becoming a living coral. Raises some philosophical thoughts about life and death.
The tour has taken all the day: I left the guesthouse before 7:00a.m. and returned to Magnetic Island only at 17:00. At the evening I went to see a toad race - but this deserves a different post.
