John Scott

Meet the site

The John Scott was a two-masted wooden snow – a brig-rigged vessel with a small trysail mast – of 157 tons, built at Hylton near Sunderland in 1848 and measuring 78.7 feet by 20.5 feet. Under Captain Corbett she left Adelaide for Melbourne on 27 January 1858 with a cargo of flour and wheat, a handful of passengers and a crew of eight. In heavy weather and fog before dawn on Sunday 14 February 1858 she ran ashore at Bold Projection below Flaxmans Hill, between what are now Childers Cove and the Bay of Islands. Everyone aboard got ashore safely and was sheltered at McCreddin's station nearby, and the cargo was partly salvaged before the ship broke up. The wreck is one of the earlier losses on this stretch, twenty years before the Loch Ard, and it appears on the Historic Shipwreck Trail as one of the chain of sites between Warrnambool and Peterborough.

As a dive it barely exists. A small softwood vessel lost in the wash zone in 1858 leaves almost nothing, and what survives at Bold Projection is a scatter of iron fastenings, ballast and concreted fragments in the gutters of the shore platform in 2–3 m, visible to a snorkeller at low tide on a flat day. The platform reef itself carries kelp, abalone and the small fish of the intertidal zone. The site is included because it is documented by the Scuba Doctor with a verified position and because it completes the sequence of Shipwreck Coast wrecks between the Antares and the Children; it should be thought of as a heritage walk with a mask rather than a dive, in a remote and beautiful spot at the end of a farm road where you are unlikely to see anyone else.

What you might see

Kelp, black-lip abalone, limpets and periwinkles, small wrasse and sweep in the gutters

Location

Scant remains of an 1858 wooden snow at Bold Projection below Flaxmans Hill, at the end of Mathiesons Road, Nirranda, in 2–3 m.

Facilities nearby

None – informal parking at the end of Mathiesons Road; nearest facilities Peterborough or Warrnambool.