After more than a century of mystery, technical divers from the community-led initiative, ProjectXplore, have conclusively identified the wreck of HMS Bayano, a First World War armed merchant cruiser sunk by the German submarine U-27 on 11 March 1915. The 126-metre vessel now rests at a depth of 106 metres in the North Channel, between Scotland and Northern Ireland.
From 1 November 2025, Scotland’s underwater heritage gains new protections: the shipwrecks of Scapa Flow and the 1745 wreck of the Swedish East Indiaman Queen of Sweden are now designated Historic Marine Protected Areas. The move ensures these powerful symbols of maritime history remain preserved—and accessible—while defended against disturbance.
The SS Tobol was originally built as the SS Cheltenham in Sunderland in the early 20th century. The vessel featured a distinctive turret deck design and was operated by a British steamer company. In 1904, Russian warships seized the ship, and it was later transferred to the Russian Imperial Navy, where it was renamed SS Tobol after the Tobol River in Russia.
HMS Hawke was discovered earlier this week after an extensive search by Lost in Waters Deep—a group that searches for WWI shipwrecks—about 70 miles off the Aberdeenshire coast. It was found to be in "remarkable" condition, lying at a depth of around 110 metres (360ft).
The abrupt discontinuation of NHS funding for the Oban Hyperbaric Chamber has been confirmed, prompting substantial concern within the diving community. This development effectively leaves the west coast of Scotland without an NHS registered facility to treat decompression illness, a critical service for divers.
Do we really need to go underwater at the other end of the world (and its challenges)? Lawson Wood poses this question while comparing the muck diving found in his home country of Scotland to that found in exotic locations in Asia and other regions of the world, renown for their muck diving sites.
A team of British divers have identified the wreck of the SS Express, a ship that sank off Orkney in 1918, resulting in the loss of 13 lives. The vessel, which had been a vital lifeline connecting Orkney to mainland Scotland, met its unfortunate end following a collision with another ship, the HMS Grenville.
Over a number of years, the actions of fishermen and sea anglers have attracted the attention of marine scientists at the Dunstaffnage Marine Laboratory who quickly became aware of these fishers catching spurdogs in the Loch Etive area near Oban on the west coast of Scotland.
Scapa Flow, located in the Orkney Islands of Scotland, is the site of the scuttling of the High Seas Fleet of the Imperial German Navy in June 1919 at the end of World War I. While many of the wrecks were salvaged following the war, the remaining wrecks have become popular dive sites. In recent times, efforts to learn more about these wrecks through multibeam sonar surveys and 3D photogrammetry have taken place. Rosemary E.
Scotland's highest civil court published their Opinion of the Court on 10 May 2022, and ruled that fault or neglect on the part of Scapa Charters "is not established".
The Opinion states "The Lord Ordinary wrongly concluded that walking in fins represented an unacceptable risk...The inference drawn by the Lord Ordinary was unreasonable. The divers' unchallenged evidence made it clear that putting on fins and then walking to the exit point was almost invariable practice.
