A little harsh! Most of their wreck data was collected before the days of GPS. Oh what a luxury today, until somebody turns it off!

Sadly, an opinion born of many years of experience. Even without GPS sunken ships were being salvaged successfully many years before the UK Hydrographic Office even thought of trying to find them and put them on a chart so the technology existed. I’d say that for every wreck that is charted, four have been missed and if it says ‘PA’ (position approximate) forget it entirely and start from scratch. Even when a wreck is where it’s supposed to be on the chart it’s almost always wrongly identified and not the wreck they thought it was. This is of no concern whatsoever to mariners but it’s a nightmare for wreck hunters.
Ironically, GPS started life effectively ‘turned off’. It was subject to what they called ‘selective availability’ or SA for short. In effect, deliberately introduced errors meant that it was only good for about 30m accuracy on a good day and considerably worse than the old Decca system.
So DGPS came along – Differential GPS – which used a shore-station at a precisely known location to calculate an error correction and output it as a data string, which could then be received by a DGPS receiver and applied to compatible GPS receivers. Hey presto – everyone had sub-100mm navigation including those who might wish to use it to fly missiles up the high street.
That had clearly backfired so, to kill off the proliferation of DGPS technology, what did they do? They switched off the SA so now it’s good for a couple of metres accuracy even when it’s your phone receiving the signals. Hence the sudden emergence of sat-nav in all our cars – couldn’t begin to do that with the SA switched on.

So – let’s hope that rather than switch the system off, they don’t just apply a touch of SA and confuse the hell out of us all even more.

That would be Betty Jeith-Jopp. Her machine would be a good target but she dropped it in shallow water near the mouth of the Forth so it’s almost certain to have been shredded by the first decent storm. There’s others in deeper water around May Island but the positional data is very sketchy indeed so we’d have to search an awful lot of seabed. Having said that, we’ve searched an awful lot of seabed before so the Forth Barra’s remain on the list of possible targets.

I don’t think so. Metal l can do but gadgets and forums and twittering facebooks remain slightly beyond my grasp.
Email me instead. [email]KVPLtd@aol.com[/email]

That’s what I suspected. We dived a carrier out there – HMS Dasher. From memory it was 170m to seabed and 150m to the flight deck. I wasn’t one of the bottom divers, I was skippering the rescue/support boat, which is just as well because we had a medical emergency but that’s another story. The guys who dived the wreck reported acres of flight deck and nothing else for about ten minutes followed by six hours of deco.
Yup – we’ll not be looking for crashed Barras’ in there!
Thanks for the info though, it’s always appreciated.

What about Nigg Bay in the Cromarty Firth? I know there’s two in the shallows as a result of a midair collision – anyone got any info on the condition of those? And I also heard there was a practice target in the bay and that a few Barras went in there. It’s shallow and sheltered so it may be worthy of more research.
Anyone?

Interesting, presumably the other aircraft was a Barra’ too and I’m guessing they landed in the water or the bodies would have been recovered. We’re researching Barra’ wrecks in the sea and having done a fair amount of exploration and diving in the Clyde I’ve never heard of this one. It would be interesting to know roughly where in the Clyde this took place. I’d guess it happened out in the deep bit though. Is there any indication as to where in the Clyde the carriers used to exercise?

Hi there,

Are these wrecks we’re familiar with or ones we’ve not heard of – if I may ask? If there’s parts we can use we can go straight to the top people. Nothing moves quickly but we can go to them regardless.

Cheers, all.

We get a few hours here and there but our main priority at the moment remainsBluebird. However, we’re getting better at the Barra’ stuff, we have one of the tailplane leading edges almost good for the paint shop, which is pretty cool seeing as it was in many plenty pieces and it lives on the outside where everyone can point at it. One thing that surprised me when I was at FAAM a few weeks ago is that most of the WWII stuff looked like it had been bashed about pretty badly – dings and dents all over the place – and here’s us trying to make it look perfect. I guess we’ll have to stop short or it’ll look like a fake.
Good supply of bits trickling in though, stuff that’s obviously been stashed for years, it’s all very encouraging.

Thanks guys. Site suggestions/feedback, guestbook entries and even actual volunteers are all welcome.

Yes – we especially like volunteers. We get lots of folk who come and do a day here and there with the BBP and there’s plenty to do on the Barra’ Project too so if you fancy a Friday evening in the bar with the crew followed by a Saturday of tin-bashing (or any other time in between) give us a shout and we’ll be delighted to meet you.