Diving the MV Dara, the forgotten shipwreck off Umm Al Quwain

[Rain and storm sounds] [Typewriter sound] [Explosion sound in the distance] The fire was raging ahead of us. You could hear it We had to push our way through the passengers. A lot of them were obviously panicking A bomb had blown a hole through two decks, up through the boat deck and created in effect the fireball that shot up through the boat deck and made one side of the ship untenable after about 20 minutes The Dara was the biggest peacetime disaster to a British ship since the Titanic and say there were 234 lies were lost, and that is a huge number to lose in one shipping incident Today we're diving deep into a piece of history [Arabic theme music] We've all watched the Hollywood blockbuster "Titanic" but not many of us know the story of our

very own Titanic of The UAE, The M.V. Dara. She was built in 1948 by Barclay Curle & Co in Glasgow, Scotland. The 120 meter, four deck vessel carried passengers between the Indian sub-continent and the Arabian peninsula. Then one day on a trip from Bombay to Basra she stopped over at a little port town known as Dubai, little did she know that was going to be her fate Exactly 60 years ago today on the 7th of April 1961, The MV Dara docked just close to where we are now in what we refer to now as old Dubai near the creek. While she was unloading cargo and exchanging passengers the weather had worsened, so as a precautionary move she was taken offshore in order to weather the storm still carrying 800 passengers. She was kept offshore overnight

when at 4:30 am a powerful explosion blew a giant hole in the MV Dara later sending her to her depths and killing 238 people in the process I was 17. I think this was my fourth voyage, because I had been on board for four months when this tragedy occurred My name is Ian Tew and I was the junior cadet on the Dara when she was blown up on April the 8th 1961 by Omani rebels It was suspected that it was a deliberate attack by rebel forces from the Dhofar region of Southern Oman but a British naval investigation wasn't able to prove this The Dara was one of four D-class British India Steam Navigation Company vessels running the mail service from Bombay to Basra and it was the only way you could get around the Gulf

Today the shipwreck is located just off the coast of the Emirate of Umm Al Quwain, and unlike the Titanic which is kilometers deep in cold water and can only be accessible by submarine, the MV Dara is in just 30 meters of water meaning it's accessible by scuba divers. So today I'm going on a special adventure to go and visit it. So i'm meeting up with Divers Down in Umm Al Quwain in and we're going to take a little trip out [Adventurous Music] We know the ship sank off the coast of the Umm Al Quwain but finding it is another matter, and the currents there are known to be extremely strong. So we had to have a very robust dive plan to ensure that we didn't waste a lot of oxygen trying to find the ship,

or lose each other Wow it looks amazing like that Yeah that's on the other side This side is where all the rooms everything interesting is but we got to really watch out for current and because there are a lot of passages and structures, yeah sometimes you'll have current that's actually pulling you the other way, so you don't just look out for the current that's blowing you off of it, but there might be some suction. That's why it's really, got to be really careful penetrating a wreck like this and currents because certain port holes will actually suck you instead of My name is Moe, I am a diving addict. I dive with Divers Down most of the time. Lots of dives here in UAE but all over the world. I read an article where Sheikh Mohammed

was mentioning his book that how he remembers that evening of the wreck. How bad the storm was I found my bed in the middle of a full-blown storm the windows were slamming with gale force winds that were blowing through our family home He thought it was going to be the end of the world, it was a pretty rough storm all his family members were having trouble with their houses, roofs falling There was heavy destruction with palm trees flying through the air like toys many houses damaged or utterly destroyed and fishing boats tossed into the streets Many families suffered death or injury that night. And then he remembers his dad freezing when he heard the news of the MV Dara Then arrived the news that froze my father in his footsteps British soldiers rushed past the

door scarcely catching their breath they shouted "Your highness. There's a fire on the MV Dara" And then they ended up asking all the family members to go out with boats to help save any survivors Right, which there were a lot of survivors They did save about what five-six hundred people, or something. So still lost a few hundred lives Most of it they say from the explosion itself. A few even jumping over the raft two rafts capsized More than 800 passengers are on board the sinking ship. The soldiers said that many were killed immediately but more passengers were dying every minute as they crowded to escape. Some crashed to death others drowning in the raging waters. Overloaded lifeboats were capsizing in the middle of the sea, as strong winds were scattering the boats in all directions

Now we're above here above where the MV Dara is, you can just kind of imagine how the events would have been 60 years ago. I mean looking towards the shore now you can just about see the shore, but that's only because there's buildings there, which wouldn't have been there 60 years ago. So if you were here on the boat you'd really feel like you're stranded and that there's really no option but to stay on it How deep are we going to go and roughly how long are we going to have in this dive? Okay so we'll probably go between 15 and 17-ish meters, obviously from the top to the bottom there's the height of the ship herself Hi my name is Aoife Baxter and I am the latest dive instructor to join Divers Down. It's

really important that we stay together, we stay really close, we keep on to the anchor line as we descend. Because if one of us let's go we could get swept away and separated from from everybody So we're all kitted up and ready. This is where the MV Dara is. There's a boy the far side there about 150 meters away So that's the other side of the boat. Now we're anchored so we can see the current's very strong so we've got to watch that we're not drifting from it but at least we've got a reference point which is the boat as long as we find it I think the visibility is good and I'm praying it is because it really makes a big difference to what we can see, so if the visibility is good but

we have a bit of current and we should be all right [Splashing sound] [Erie oriental music] We were anchored off Dubai and in the afternoon a storm blew up and a ship called the Zeus dragged her anchor and hit the Dara on the port side damaging one of the lifeboats The captain, captain Elson put to sea to ride out the storm, and the storm had moderated but was still blowing, when at 4:43 in the morning a bomb went off [Erie Oriental music] I was awoken by the alarm bells and was told by the third officer to go to our fire stations I woke up the other cadet and we dressed and made our way down to B deck. The fire was raging ahead of us you could hear it. A lot of noise of the

passengers shouting and screaming and you could see the red glow. The then abandoned ship signal occurred. We had to push our way through the passengers. A lot of them were obviously panicking to our boat station. Together we wound the boat out, but it was nearly full of passengers who managed to climb into her and Grimwood then told me to get into the lifeboat, which i did and he then lowered the lifeboat and it hit the water and the boat then capsized because another empty lifeboat had floated by, and I was then thrown into the water, and the ship drifted away And I hadn't got a life jacket on either. I was wearing dungarees and shoes which I kicked off because without a life jacket it was quite difficult to swim and I basically trod water

and watched the ship drift away and there was nothing I could do then Until I then saw what I thought was a fin of a shark. It turned out to be the head of somebody on an oar, so i swam to the oar and the body slipped off and he then sank And then later I saw a life a lifeboat which was full of people and daylight by then or an early daylight. I climbed on board helped by the passengers and crew and the assistant purser said "Thank heavens you're here Tew. You can take charge" and then a kind passenger gave me a bathing costume, because obviously I kicked off my dungarees. So I then took charge of the lifeboat, and it was still quite rough, so I persuaded the passengers and and the crew

to row, and the fact that they were rowing, it was activity then cheered everybody up it was like this would say for about six hours, until eventually we were picked up by the Yo Yo Maru Japanese tanker, and I had decided to let the men go first it just seemed easier and then we helped the women, and then at the very last I saw, what I thought was somebody sleeping on the floorboards. I shook him and turned him over and he was dead. So I shouted up to get a stretcher and the Japanese sailors came down and took him on board and we put him in the freezer because I thought that his his relatives would want him I think later I found out that 234 people had been killed [Sea splashing sounds] That was

sensational Enormous wreck. Enormous. I just guess I wasn't expecting the scale of the whole thing. You look up it's just this big sheet of iron and you can see where the explosion was, there's this big hole where you can see a bomb gone off. You know it's corroded a bit over 60 years so you can still make out where the front is and you know some of the features. You can see where the there was obviously some kind of like wheels on the top and it's amazing and now it's you know flooded with different colored fish, beautiful purple fish, we saw some big barracudas, we saw a stingray. So now it's become a zoo. But definitely the most epic shipwreck dive I've ever done. Great dive. We got lucky, we had relatively good visibility. Maybe

eight to ten meters, very mild current so we got to explore the whole wreck It's just fascinating to see the size of that explosion. I mean it ripped apart half of that ship is pretty much gone Well that was a truly spectacular dive and I was expecting it to be great, but I think I was really overwhelmed by the real scale of the wreck when we were under the water, it was enormous. But you know the history and the beauty of the boat, along with the tragic story of the MV Dara is something that will stay in my memories for a long time We used to anchor off Dubai and I went to shore there once with the agents launch. On one side was nothing it was just a desert, and on the other side

was the gold souk. Then there were a few dhows there. But apart from that, Dubai was built up from literally the desert nothing, to the fantastic metropolis that it now is [Theme Music]