Paul Marvin
12 years ago
Very interesting the pinnacles stuck up out of the water are now submerged with the top at 22m also the metal structure in the foreground is lying on a submerged road at 40m... Love them :thumbsup:

Photograph:

🔗Dorothea-Slate-Mine-Archive-Album-Image-018[linkphoto]Dorothea-Slate-Mine-Archive-Album-Image-018[/linkphoto][/link]
"I Dont Know Where I am Going, But When I Get There I will Know Where I am"
TheBogieman
12 years ago
Ahhh! Good to see this picture as the Twll was still filling up. I was shown around Dorothea in it's last year of operation by the then manager (can't remember his name after all these years). Going down to the bottom in a large Cat dump wagon to collect slate blocks was an experience - through a tunnel at the bottom of the pinnacles! Beneath the Blondin tower is a gallery with an abandoned Ruston Bucyrus digger on it. I sat in the cab and played with the levers. In about 1975, I again sat in the cab playing with the levers but was wearing scuba gear and had about 50ft of water over my head...

The top of the pinnacles is what causes all the diving deaths IMHO - unskilled divers have heard about it and go looking. As you see in the picture, the top is very small in cross section. Unfortunately, the top is currently about 90ft beneath the surface and this is just about where the 'narcs' hits them (Nitrogen narcosis - it's just like you had 10 pints of lager but the effects come on instantaneously). If you've not been trained in deep diving and the effects the narcs has, then it's bye-bye... They get disorientated and then sink. It's over another 300ft to the bottom and that's that...

BFN

Clive the (ng railway) Bogieman
Explorans ad inferos
Paul Marvin
12 years ago
Sure right about the diving hear after about 20m (66Ft) it is a black as night with very very cold water usually at 4 Deg this is severely cold and a combination of the dark and cold is what can catch a diver out, one of my buddies who is a technical diving instructor has dived to the bottom and recorded a depth of 108m (356Ft) this is serious S..t 😢 and with a bottom time of just 14 Min's had deco stops in excess of three hours.
We will be diving it next week to see if we can get some good images of some of the shallower tunnels :thumbsup:
"I Dont Know Where I am Going, But When I Get There I will Know Where I am"

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