Picking up my single air tank I hefted its black rubber encased bottom onto the large grey Zodiac side tube. Holding it steady I squatted down almost onto my knees, got my arms under the shoulder harnesses and stood up and tied the waist fastener around me - letting the tank sit securely and snugly.
Sitting down on the tube again, I rested the tank on the grey tube, letting it take the weight whilst I pulled on my black rubber jet fins. Finally I was ready to dive.
My two dive buddies for the morning were also just about ready. With a few minutes grace I turned round and studied the buoy and followed the line as it plunged beneath the water down towards the foremast of the wreck. The visibility looked quite good - I could see a long way down the line from here above the surface. But there was no sign of the foremast itself.
The water was still, like a glistening millpond despite the cold above-water temperature. The ominous clouds over Skye to the west seemed to be getting larger and slowly moving our way. There was a threatening, massing darkness, which promised rain – or even snow later in the day.
My two companions signalled that they were ready and we did a quick buddy check on each other’s rigs to make sure that there had not been a stupid omission, like forgetting to switch open the pillar valve on an air tank. Everything was in order – and we all rolled simultaneously off the two sides tubes of the Zodiac into the dark water.
As the first explosion of white water and bubbles from my entry disappeared there was, immediately, the familiar feeling of cold seawater trickling down my back in between my skin and wet suit. I knew it would soon warm up but it was one of the aspects to wet suit diving in Scotland that I hated most.
Very soon my wetsuit was fully flooded. A thin layer of water became trapped and warmed up by my own body heat – this warm layer then shielded me from the cold water outside my suit.
I looked downwards and saw my legs and black fins suspended above an inky void. There was no sign of any wreck at all. I got myself into a prone position and kicked my legs, the jet fins propelling me easily up to the bow where the painter was tied off to the white buoy. Once I got there I could see the buoy line leading below and at the limit of my vision I could make out a blurred shape, which must be the foremast down at a depth of about 10 metres.
The three of us clustered around the downline and after a round of OK signals the dive started. I dumped some air out of my ABLJ and duck-dived, getting my head well down and my feet high above me out of the water. The weight high up sent me moving downwards and as my fins slipped beneath the water, I kicked my legs and moved further down.
Almost immediately came the familiar pressure on my ears - which I got rid of by popping them. I moved down the line keeping a wary hand on it. Very soon the foremast materialised out of the gloom - covered with marine growth with swathes of long kelp fronds attached to it. Some of the original cross rigging hung about in places providing footholds for sea life to colonise.
I moved onto the foremast and looked horizontally along it towards the wreck itself. The wreck was only barely discernible at this distance. All I could see of it was just a sinister, black silhouette, a dark shape that rose right up to the surface.
I followed the foremast horizontally towards the now vertical main deck of the wreck. As I moved along it, the blurred image of the wreck seemed to come into focus in the gloom. Suddenly I came within the horizon of underwater visibility and everything swam sharply into focus.
A large section of the shipwreck was laid out before me and I could see that the foremast rose out of a small deckhouse which had three rooms side by side in it – and an aft facing door into each room. Now this was interesting – what was inside?
I moved over to the door of the first room and, switching on the powerful beam of my dive torch, swept the interior of the room. The uppermost and rearmost walls were covered in all sorts of old fashioned electrical switches, junctions and white Bakelite fitments. I learned later that this was the switch room. The bottom of the room was filled with silt, shale and all sorts of shell life. There was so much to see in just this one small room that I almost forgot that there was the rest of the 550-foot wreck to explore.
Richard was the dive-leader for our group and beckoned for us to follow him. We kicked our fins and moved slowly forward past the foremast to the open expanse of the foredeck holds - which had been covered over when she was converted to a minelayer. Wooden deck planking was still visible, something I had not expected.
As we moved forward the lower of two side by side 4-inch deck guns came into view, its huge barrel still pointing defiantly dead ahead. I had never seen a wartime big gun like this underwater before and I was able to drift around it and get a feel for its dimensions.
Looking upwards, I could see the silhouette of the upper most 4-inch gun - but it lies in much shallower water nearer the surface where the kelp is thick and strong and so it was partially obscured by a carpet of kelp fronds.
Just forward of the 4-inch guns, anchor chains rose out of spurling pipes from a chain locker below decks and ran to an anchor windlass before snaking off in great suspended loops to the anchor hawse pipes. Beyond the hawse pipes, the hull started to sweep together and narrow as we headed to the very tip of the bow itself.
At the bow I kicked out and moved away from the wreck itself before turning round to look at the whole bow section of this massive vessel lying on its starboard side. The sharp stem looked as though it was still ready to slice through the waves. Even to my untrained eye she looked a fast vessel, well designed for the open sea and minelaying.
The stem gave way to the lower starboard side of her hull, which swept down towards the bottom. This was the first time I realised that the visibility here was so good that I could see the sea bottom, 10 metres below me. I hung there, suspended and motionless for a minute or so just taking in this spectacle and enjoying the sensation of weightlessness – of being so small and insignificant beside the imposing majesty and scale of this huge shipwreck. I could see the starboard anchor chain running out from its hawse pipe and away down to the seabed below. The seabed was covered with a carpet of scallop and razor shells, no longer inhabited.
On the seabed all around, was the debris field, which is always found beside a shipwreck – the casualties of a ship slowly rotting and falling to pieces in the depths. Sections of ship’s plating, spars and pipes lay scattered about along with cables, pieces of deck gear and the remnants of corroded handrails.
The wreck itself was well covered in a ghostly carpet of sponges, anemones and the soft coral called “dead man’s fingers” by divers because of the white bulbous, skin like look of its clumps. They look exactly what a dead man’s fingers would look like after long immersion.
Richard motioned to me to come back towards him and he led us downwards, following the sweep of the starboard side of the deck until we were just a metre or two off the seabed.
We moved back along the ship retracing the way we had passed earlier, higher up the wreck. I saw the silhouette of the lower 4-inch gun pass overhead and then we were back at the small deckhouse where the dive had started a seeming eternity ago.
I looked at my dive watch and found that we were only 10 minutes into the dive. We were planning a run time of about 45 minutes so we had a lot of time left to explore. I was exhilarated by the dive so far. What else would this fantastic wreck reveal to me.
We finned around the deckhouse and moved over the covered over remains of another hold until we arrived at a flat wall of a far larger deckhouse – this was clearly the main superstructure which held the bridge at its highest levels. Richard moved on downwards towards a small now horizontal rectangular opening just above the seabed that looked as though a diver could pass into it - albeit that it would be a tight squeeze. It looked as though he was going to lead us in – I had never dived a wreck before, let alone done any wreck penetration so the prospect of going inside the wreck was quite exhilarating.
Without hesitating Richard moved through the opening and was gone into the blackness. I knew he was pretty familiar with the wreck and guessed he had been through here before