Eliza Ramsden

Meet the site

The Eliza Ramsden is the best-preserved sailing-ship wreck inside Port Phillip and a textbook of what Corsair Rock did to shipping. She was a three-masted iron barque of 415 tons, 46 m long, built in Glasgow by Barclay Curle in 1874 for the Melbourne businessman Samuel Ramsden, who named her after his wife; she cost £10,000 and had made one voyage. On 24 July 1875 she left Hobsons Bay at one in the afternoon with a light fair wind, and that night ran onto Corsair Rock at the Heads. She was floated off but had taken in too much water, and on Sunday 25 July 1875 she sank where she now lies, upright on the edge of the South Channel.

The Scuba Doctor listing describes her as 'upright and quite badly broken up' but with much still readable: the hull plating and starboard decking are intact, the port-side decking has collapsed – probably from the explosives used in the 1960s to reduce her as a hazard – and the hold is full of the bluestone blocks she carried as ballast. The donkey boiler stands in the wreck. Deck stanchions and small fittings survive in the bow, where the clipper stem was virtually intact until it collapsed in the 2010s. From the stern a natural ledge, Ramsden Reef, runs north-east for about 75 m. Depth is 14 m on the highest iron and 22 m on the sand.

The iron is heavily grown with soft corals and the bright yellow zoanthids of the Heads, and the wreck concentrates fish in the way a reef on a sand plain does: southern blue devils under the plating, old wives, boarfish and wrasse over the hull, bullseyes inside, and giant cuttlefish in winter. Nudibranchs are abundant on the growth. She is a shipping-lane site dived at slack water with a shot and a shipping check, but at 14–22 m she is within Advanced limits and the structure is open, with no penetration, which makes her the standard wreck dive of the Queenscliff fleet and a wreck-specialty training site. She is a protected historic shipwreck under the Heritage Act; nothing may be removed.

What you might see

Soft corals, yellow zoanthids, sponges, southern blue devil, old wife, longsnout boarfish, bluethroat wrasse, bullseyes, giant cuttlefish, nudibranchs, leatherjackets

Location

Inside Port Phillip about 2.3 km east-south-east of Queenscliff on the southern edge of the South Channel, roughly midway between Queenscliff and Popes Eye; Ramsden Reef runs north-east from the stern.