Within the month, Nautical Research Group will be doing some research diving on the Lost Liner - the Canadian Pacific Railways (CPR) ocean liner Empress of Ireland. This beautiful ship sank on May 29th, 1914 following its collision with the coal collier Storstad in only 14 minutes with the loss of more passenger lives than both Titanic and Lusitania. The ship lies in the St. Lawrence River north of the town of Rimouski. Our corporation will be broadcasting 'live from the dive' with daily webcasts that will give you the feeling of being on our dive team. We invite you to syndicate our blog as we have already reported live from Bismarck; and will be globally syndicated LIVE for our dives out to the Empress of Ireland and the White Star Liner, RMS Titanic in mid-July.
To provide you a feel for the diving down to the Empress of Ireland, we are providing you a video stroll across the port-side promenade of the Empress. The teak decking is in great shape although has been uprooted in many spots (due to salvage operations in the 1990's). Please observe all the wonderful marine life that call the Empress their home. On the day of this filming, the waters were very clear and the visibility was fantastic.
The slightly brackish waters in this area of the St. Lawrence River are very cold with strong currents and normally quite dark. A good book to read that describes the diving history on the Empress of Ireland is Kevin McMurray's book, Dark Descent, which we have provided a link for on the left panel of this blog. In order to view this video (as well as all our videos) you need to load the FREE Macromedia Flash 7 plug-in.
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