Once we had swum out for about 20 minutes, Colin paused and took a new bearing on his compass at right angles to our previous path. We then headed off in that direction for 5 minutes before he reset his compass to take us on a return bearing back to the shore.
I arrived back in shallow water after some 45 minutes inwater and having got to a depth of about 15 metres. I had thoroughly enjoyed my first shore dive and the world of sea diving had been opened up to me.
The following week it was time for another first, my first boat dive. As with my first sea dive I simply had no idea what to expect when I eventually would roll off the side of a dive boat.
We arrived at Portsoy harbour and launched a battered old grey Zodiac inflatable. I watched, as if a spectator, as the old hands readied the boat for sea. Everyone except me seemed to know what had to be done. It was like a ritualistic occult practice. No one seemed to be giving any orders – they all just seemed to know somehow what to do, as if following some secret code unknown to me.
There were 6 divers diving off the boat that day and all the divers’ tanks, weight belts, fins and other gear had to be loaded in the boat as it was tied up alongside the pier. The engine, an old Johnston 35 hp was on tilt, its propeller out of the water.
Once all the kit was in, all of us jumped aboard and the engine was taken off tilt and the propeller and shaft was lowered down into the water. A few pumps of the fuel bulb and several pulls on the ‘pull’ start and the engine roared into life in a cloud of blue smoke.
The painter, the bow mooring line, was untied and the Zodiac moved ahead. We motored towards the harbour entrance and as we did, a gnawing apprehension start to work on me subliminally. I had no idea whether I should be scared - I didn’t know what there was to be scared off - but apprehension there definitely was. I suppose it was really just a fear of the unknown that was getting to me. I was about to go offshore and dive into deep water - where there was no prospect of swimming back to shore if things went wrong.
The old hands chatted loudly above the roar of the outboard engine and there was a lot of manly banter. These guys didn’t seem apprehensive at all - but I couldn’t help thinking that this was a dangerous place to be going. It was one thing to do a dive from the shore – it was something totally different to head out into far deeper water offshore.
We surged out of the harbour and throttled up. The boat pushed at its bow wave, driving a mass of water before it - we were heavy in the water with all these divers and their kit and the cox got us to clamber forward over the gear bags towards the bow.
The Zodiac got up to about 9 knots, pushing at its bow wave. Then, it seemed to conquer it - and rode up and over its bow wave. We were on the plane, and immediately our speed leapt up by 10 knots, to between 15-20 knots. The cox then got us to return to our seats on the Zodiac’s side tubes (called sponsons) near the stern and throttled back as far as possible. He skillfully kept the Zodiac up on the plane, conserving fuel – maximum speed for minimum fuel.
We roared along, bouncing from wave to wave, battered by wind and spray. With each impact onto a wave I was bounced upwards by the sponson I was sitting on, holding on for grim life with both hands to the lifelines along the top of the sponson. At the same time I tried to wedge and secure my feet under heavy pieces of dive gear on the floor.
We headed out until we got into deeper water about ½ -1 mile offshore. The boat didn’t have an echo sounder - they had not become popular and cheap in those days, as they are now so we didn’t know what depth of water was beneath us.
After a short journey of 10-15 minutes out, the cox throttled back on the outboard tiller. We slowed and then the Zodiac dropped off the plane and wallowed to a halt before the pursuing wake caught up with us. The cox had the anchor ready and threw it over the side. We made an educated guess as to the depth we were in from the amount of anchor rope we had paid out.
Once the anchor had snagged on something on the seabed the wind blew us round so that we were head into the wind and waves. We now started getting kitted up and I soon noticed that the slow wallowing action of the stationary boat started to affect some of the divers – even the hard looking guys in beards. One was sick over the side and one or two others started going a bit greenish/grey. I felt quite fine and, as if in some coming of age ritual, it made me feel as though perhaps I had the bottle for this after all.
My ABLJ went on, then my weight belt, then my air tank and harness, fins, and mask. I was soon ready and sitting all kitted up on the side tube of the Zodiac.
I was to be diving with Colin Rivers again - who had taken me on my first ever sea dive the previous week. We sat opposite each other and went through the standard buddy checks on each other’s gear.
“Are you ready?” he enquired staring straight at me.
“Yes” I said hesitantly. I was on the brink of diving into deep water, and the gnawing apprehension I had felt at the harbour, which I had momentarily forgotten about as people got sea sick, came flooding back.
“OK – let’s get going” he said. Slapping his regulator in his mouth and holding it and his facemask in place with one hand, he deftly rolled backwards off one side of the boat. I copied him and did my first back roll off a dive boat – splashing backwards into the water.
As my weighted mass hit the water, it erupted in a confusion of bubbles and white froth. Almost immediately the white foam of bubbles from my entry disappeared and I thrashed my legs and arms around to get myself upright from my upside down entry position.
I looked downwards and was surprised that I could not see the seabed below. I could see nothing below but empty deep water for as far as the eye could see. Below that, was a seemingly bottomless dark, inky void that filled me with foreboding. Was I really going down that far into that?
Looking around at either side of me, other than the boat I was holding onto, there was nothing that I could see other than empty water. It struck me that this was something of a tenuous position to be in. I was far out from shore clinging to a small inconsequential speck of a rubber boat with a single outboard attached to it - and was preparing to let go of that meagre modicum of safety to plunge down into the depths.
I kicked my legs and finned to the front of the Zodiac where the anchor line dropped away down below. I looked down the line as far as I could and saw it disappearing into the inky void, seemingly into infinity. This was something totally new to me – I hadn’t been in water this deep before and had not expected it to look, well. …. so deep.
Colin looked at me, eyes seemingly bulging through his facemask and gave me the OK question signal. I gave the OK signal back, belying my apprehension and he then gave the thumbs down sign, the sign to start going down. He dipped his head down and raised his feet high and the weight pressing down helped him duck dive. He started going down the line effortlessly and casually. I duck-dived and followed him down the line, hand over hand.
I was not to get far down. I had been unnerved by the depth of the water we were in – there was still no sight of the bottom. I then realised that I had not seated my mask properly on my face. The seal, which should seal onto my skin, was sitting on top of a small section of my wet suit hood, not under it. I did not have a watertight seal and so, as I went down a steady trickle of water entered the mask and it started filling up.
I was making the descent in a head down position so the water dribbling into my mask ended up on my faceplate. Everything below, the line – including Colin - seemed to become slightly blurred and indistinct. Then everything swam completely out of focus so that I could not make out anything at all.
I knew that my mask was now almost completely filled with water. I had been trained in the pool how to ‘mask clear’ in a situation like this - but I