Sri Lanka a hidden shipwreck paradise

By Madushka Balasuriya

There is nothing Sri Lankans love more than a holiday. In fact, its multicultural society and the subsequent culturally specific celebrations this augurs means Sri Lanka has more public holidays than any other country in the world. 

This naturally lends itself to getaways over the course of frequent ‘long weekends’ such as the one earlier this month. However while most of us covet beach destinations or the cold weather of the hill country, Dharshana Jayawardene spends most of his weekends at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

Dharshana is a deep sea diver with a penchant for shipwrecks, and earlier this year he released his first book titled ‘Ghosts of the Deep: Diving The Shipwrecks of Sri Lanka’. The book, an illustrated documentation of over 40 shipwrecks in the waters surrounding Sri Lanka, was written and collated by Dharshana drawing on his own experiences, with each chapter correlating to a specific wreck, some of which are yet to be positively identified. 

Dharshana, who took up diving in 2003, has at present completed over 1,300 dives all over the world, but began exploring Colombo, which he describes as “the best kept secret for diving,” only a decade ago. 

At the time, he says, there was only one known shipwreck off the coast of Colombo and so he was curious as to where it came from. He began looking into whether there were more like it, and that eventually ended up with him spending a considerable amount of time conducting research and talking to fishermen.

“The fishermen knew about these because the shipwrecks are fishing grounds. Sometimes their nets or hooks get entangled in them so they know there is something there. For them the main thing is that when there is fish, most probably it’s a shipwreck or a reef,” he explained. 

Indeed, shipwrecks are some of the most hospitable environments for marine life in the ocean. Sitting on a sandy seabed with nothing surrounding it, a wreck can act as a beacon for marine life much like a coral reef. In fact, Dharshana explains that, simply dumping a shipwreck in an area with nothing but barren ocean seabed will prove a catalyst for an amazing transformation.

“Within about two or three weeks fish come and take shelter there. Then the corals start growing and it becomes a beautiful ecosystem.”

“When you’re underwater, breathing air under pressure, the nitrogen in the tanks get into your blood stream. If you just come up, basically your blood fizzes like a soda bottle and you run the risk of paralysis or death.”

However, locating these wrecks is no easy task. Using his ‘street cred’ as a diver Dharshana explained how he was “able to connect with local fisherman and build a relationship” to help locate several wrecks. Once a rough location was identified he trawled swathes of empty seabed with his echo sounder, eagerly awaiting that fateful moment when the flat line across his screen jumped signifying the end of his search. That, though, is when the real work began.

“The problem is that when you go on an exploration trip you don’t have people who are ready to come with you, so I do it alone,” bemoans Dharshana, as he explains how there are only a handful of people in Sri Lanka who have the qualifications to do what he does. While a basic diving license lets you plum depths between 18-30 metres and takes a little over a week to get, the technical or deep sea diving accreditations Dharshana has took him the better part of a decade to acquire.

Conducting a solo dive in which you spend 20 minutes at a shipwreck can take about half a day to complete. Transporting oxygen tanks, boats, and camera equipment to the dive site and back takes time, while surfacing from a 20-minute dive can take up to one and a half hours thanks to a nasty condition referred to as ‘decompression’.

“When you’re underwater, breathing air under pressure, the nitrogen in the tanks get into your blood stream. If you just come up, basically your blood fizzes like a soda bottle and you run the risk of paralysis or death.

“So when you go to deep depths and stay longer, you have to surface very slowly. You kind of come to 27 metres stay a minute, 24 metres stay a minute, 15 metres stay five minutes, six meters you stay like half an hour, and at three metres you stay like 40 minutes. So you come very slowly, and the shallower it is the longer you have to stay to get the nitrogen out of your blood stream.”

 

“Every month that passes I feel I should just tear out a chapter from the book, because the chances are it’s no longer there.”

It was this process that Dharshana underwent time and again when he made one of his most significant discoveries: the wreckage of an armed British merchant ship, the S.S. Worcestershire, 12kms off the coast of Mount Lavinia and around 57 meters below sea level. Dharshana discovered the ship in 2011 but he would only find the ship’s bell (think of it as an identification card) in 2014. It had been sunk during World War I by the SMS Wolf, a German minelayer which had been laying sea mines around Sri Lanka. The entire process of locating the ship had taken him two years.

“That is probably the most significant discovery in the west coast, but like that there are so many other shipwrecks that I have found around Sri Lanka.” 

Dharshana’s website (www.divesrilanka.com) has documented all of the so far uncovered dive sites in the country, but the most impressive ones are the ones that have made it into the book. Yet there is a hint of regret as he speaks about his life’s work, as he jokes: “Every month that passes I feel I should just tear out a chapter from the book, because the chances are it’s no longer there.”

This jaded outlook is justified when the state of shipwreck conservation in the country is taken into consideration. Sri Lanka has over 200 shipwrecks, 75 of them dive-able and 20 of those in Colombo. On top of that Sri Lanka is also home to one of only three dive-able aircraft carriers in the world – the HMS Hermes, the world’s first purpose built aircraft carrier sunk during WWII by the Japanese – which is listed among the top 100 best dive sites globally. And it is the only one which was naturally formed, as the other two which are in the US were purposely sunk as artificial reefs. This is also famous among technical divers because of its 53-metre depth.

“Tourists come purely to dive the Hermes,” notes Dharshana. “Those guys are serious divers. They come to Sri Lanka, from the airport they head straight to Batticaloa, and spend two weeks there. They do like two dives a day for those two weeks, get back to the airport and leave.”

 

“Our country is full of unsustainable, illegal fishing practices.”

When compared to neighbouring nations such as Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and the Maldives, it is clear Sri Lanka’s strength should firmly lie with shipwrecks. So why isn’t it? According to Dharshana, it is simply not high on the list of the government’s priorities, despite its huge revenue potential for the country. 

“The Government is not focusing on it yet as they are focusing more on mass tourism; this is niche, adventure tourism. There is a big opportunity to develop these where the country can earn a lot of revenue. 

“But what the Government is not great at doing is conservation. The conservation of reefs and shipwrecks especially when it comes to dynamite and spear fishing. These are destroying these sites.”

Illegal fishing practices have long been a problem in Sri Lanka, and indeed most parts of Asia, while one of the most destructive to the eco system has been dynamite fishing. The use of dynamite not only kills the fish, but it decimates the surrounding microorganisms and coral reefs. Dharshana though believes that action needs to be taken on land, not sea, in counteracting these threats.

“Dynamite fishing is ruining our tourism industry. It’s being done in Mannar, the North East, Trincomalee, and Unawatuna just to name a few places. The navy is trying its best to stop it, but the thing is you can’t stop it at sea. You have to stop dynamite fishing on land. How do they get their explosives?” he asks, alluding to nefarious forces pulling strings behind the scenes.

“There are certain mafias, big businessmen who invest in construction dynamite and fleets of boat. Some fishermen they hate it; if you take the case in Kalpitiya, you could see how they protested. They were on the road, blocked the roads because of the use of Lyla nets (nets with small holes in them, resulting even in the smaller fish getting caught). The young are killed as well, so it destroys the entire stock. Then there’s bottom trawling which basically wipes out reefs.

“Our country is full of unsustainable, illegal fishing practices.”

One of the main reasons for this is the vast amounts of money that is to be made through it, with any long-term benefits swiftly cast aside when the sizeable short term benefits are taken into account.

“They pay one third to the person who spots the shoal of fish in a certain location and alerts the dynamite fisherman,” he explains. “A haul could be worth around Rs. 1 million, which means someone gets roughly a lakh within a day. So obviously there’s a financial incentive.”

“The Government cannot look after everything in the sea, you need to get the local communities involved.”

The logical way to cope with this problem is for the Government to place more emphasis on marine conservation sites. Dharshana however is a realist, and acknowledges that the Sri Lankan Government may not have the adequate resources to successfully implement such an approach.

“A conservation area makes sense for fisheries. But the problem with restrictions is enforcement. It’s very hard to enforce anything in the sea unless there is a heavy coastguard presence or monitoring. The Government needs funding to do that.

“This type of holistic plan is very difficult to get to because it’s not a priority for the Government. Because us being not a very rich country, we won’t really commit resources to that type of thing.”

Instead he suggests the Government follow the example of some of their neighbours. For instance, in the Philippines – Asia’s most popular diving destination – the local community appoints ‘guardians’ for a particular area. These guardians brief tourists on how they should behave underwater and in the sea, while escorting them to their destination. This service is provided in exchange for a conservation tax, which goes straight to the local community as opposed to the central government.

“So there’s an incentive in the area for people to protect those resources because they’re making money out of it. The Government cannot look after everything in the sea, you need to get the local communities involved. 

“Also, tourism is a great way of protecting resources because when there are people going to these locations they see what’s happening. The more tourists go into these locations the better protected it will be.”

Meanwhile in Tulamben in Bali, an entire village is being sustained by a single shipwreck, thanks to the wealth of new jobs being created through diving tourism. This has been such a success that the Indonesian Government has decided to purposely sink another one nearby.

In Sri Lanka a similar approach could be adopted, according to Dharshana, but he believes there needs to be a concerted effort from all parties involved, while also a firm understanding of what exactly is at stake. 

“The problem with the sea is that no one sees what’s happening there. Only a few people speak about the crimes in the ocean and those people don’t translate into enough votes for politicians. There are some Government committees, as well as the Navy and Wildlife officials, working on creating awareness, but in Sri Lanka for change to come it takes times. People need to know there are things which are valuable to them in the sea.”

“I don’t think fishing can be replaced but it will provide alternate sources of employment. So if a fisherman is tempted to go and destroy something to make money, he would think twice because maybe his brother and sister is working towards taking tourists to that shipwreck.”

 

“The feeling of going underwater, especially deep, and especially if you’re alone and in this extremely beautiful place with corals and marine life, it’s almost like a spiritual experience.”

In the end however the real selling point is the experience. Shipwreck diving, along with Sri Lanka’s rich, bio-diverse marine life is a criminally untapped resource. While the volume of tourists making their way into the country purely for the purpose of diving is not yet enough for it be a big industry, there’s certainly potential for growth if handled correctly.

As Dharshana explains, every single dive is different. And when the experience is one which nations such as the US are artificially manufacturing through the purposeful sinking of restored ships – and spending millions of dollars to do it – there is definitely a feeling of a trick being missed.

“The feeling of going underwater, especially deep, and especially if you’re alone and in this extremely beautiful place with corals and marine life, it’s almost like a spiritual experience. And it’s a scenic place. Why would people want to go to Yala or the Botanical Gardens? You see the same beauty underwater just off Colombo.”

“The driver for me is the beauty and the sense of adventure and the mystery and history of shipwrecks; all of that makes a really great package. And for an adventurous person it is extremely addictive to dive at shipwrecks. It’s dark, it’s sometimes creepy, it’s beautiful, and there’s so much you can discover because every time you dive the experience is different.” 

- Pix by Upul Abayasekara