The Project

Project Westhinder started life early in 2017. During the yearly survey of what the members like and dislike within GUE-BE, it became clear that there was a lot of demand for project-related diving. GUE-BE and its members had been part of various projects in the past, like Project Baseline in Ekeren and the Berghse Diepsluis, the European NETLAKE project, net removal on wrecks in the North Sea, and others.

With some of those projects coming to an end, it was time for something new. A few members had been part of GUE’s Documentation Contest in Croatia a while back, where several teams competed to document their assigned wreck in the best way possible. They found that diving the same wreck multiple times in succession adds an element to the dive: once you start knowing the overall layout of the wreck, you start paying more attention to interesting details. Combining these dives with conducting research on the surface and distilling all that information into a website dedicated to the wreck and its crew turned out to be a rewarding and fun thing to do.

If we could do this in Croatia, why wouldn’t we be able to do this in our own North Sea?

We were not planning to continue with the net removal project on the North Sea in 2017, which gave us the opportunity to use the scheduled North Sea dives for this new project.

Amongst our members we also have divers with a variety of skills useful for surveying and documenting wrecks, and a willingness to learn where we were still lacking knowledge.

There was of course one problem, and that was deciding which wreck to pick. Everyone has their favourite wreck on the North Sea, but in the end we settled on one that might not be everyone’s first choice: the Westhinder.

We had several reasons for picking the Westhinder. From a practical point of view, at maximum 30 metres, it is not the deepest wreck, which gave us a decent amount of bottom time per dive. Additionally, it is relatively small, which makes it easier to survey the whole wreck.

From a historical point of view, it is one of the first wrecks to receive heritage status, and is a remnant of a time where light ships were used to warn shipping for dangers – the Westhinder sandbank in this case – and for scientific measurements like wind speed, currents, water salinity, and more, tasks that have since been taken over by automated light buoys.

The project was introduced to all members during a kick off day, where it was received very positively, with a lot of people volunteering to take on key roles in the project.

In the video below, one of the project leaders talks us through how we organised ourselves in more detail.