At the end of a the First World War the Royal Navy already had a large surplus of ships and there was hardly any need to put captured German ships into service, especially as many were old and damaged by four years of warfare. The British solution was to store the captured vessels at anchor and then use them for gunnery practice.
Such was the intended fate of eight ex German Navy submarines held at anchor in Falmouth bay. The first two were duly used as gunnery targets and dispatched to the depths. The remaining six submarines were left at anchor until a storm caused anchors to drag and chains to break. Five submarines ran aground on the rocks at Pendennis Point.
Once in the water it is easy to find submarine wreckage. It is possible to jump in from the rocks almost on top of one of the submarines. All the wreckage is in shallow water, less than 7 or 8 metres even at high tide. It is even possible to snorkel these wrecks. But first you have to find your way through Falmouth and negotiate the one way system at Pendennis Point.
It had been several years since I had dived here and to tell the truth I had forgotten what a nice little dive this is. I was originally planning to dive on Porthkerris reef, another nice shore dive on the east side of the Lizard peninsula. The trouble was that the wind was blowing a strong easterly and huge waves were breaking straight up Porthkerris beach. Then someone remembered the Falmouth Submarines, well sheltered behind Pendennis Point.
At Pendennis I slithered from the rocks in to a flat calm sea. Early in the season the site was not overwhelmed with kelp and the visibility was surprisingly good, at least 5 metres. Moving down the rocky side of the gully and ferreting beneath the kelp I am soon in contact with the rusted and broken remains of a submarine's hull.
We find a narrow round shaft and follow it out along the wreck. Used to larger wrecks, I am unsure as to whether this was once the prop shaft, which would imply that the submarine was oriented stern towards the shore. In some places decaying steel plates stick up from the bottom to provide some sharp edged windows, but most of the wreck is flat.
Reaching the seaward end of the wreck we turn back and work our way in along the edge of the plates. Peering into the crack between the wreck and the seabed, squat lobsters scuttle away from our diving lights. At shallow depth with lots of air remaining, there is plenty of time to make diversions away from the wreck and see what we can find on the sand and gravel seabed.
Various bits of mostly buried wreckage poke out of the gravel. A heavy steel cylinder could be a pressure vessel; considering the circumstances of the wrecking, it was unlikely to have been a torpedo.