I tried a mask clearing drill by holding the lower part of the mask off my face and blowing through my nose. You can only do that when you are in a ‘head up’ position - and I soon discovered the hard way that you can’t do that exercise when you are head down. As a consequence, the air I breathed out trying to clear the water from my mask disappeared, and more water flooded into my mask.
My mask was soon completely filled with water. As I breathed, it was going up my nose and making me gag. My eyes were bulging wide open - and were completely immersed in water. Why I didn’t simply bring my legs and feet beneath me to repeat the drill I don’t know.
On the verge of panic, I looked down with my blurred vision. I could barely make out my surroundings – I couldn’t read my depth gauge and didn’t know what depth I was in. I couldn’t tell if I was going up or down.
With my blurred vision I couldn’t make out any sign of Colin below me. In the few seconds that it had taken for me to arrest my descent - and shoot from a semi-controlled state into abject terror, he had disappeared from view beneath me into the darkness. I grimly held onto the anchor rope and fought to deal with my mask flood.
In reality I was completely safe, but my novice’s inexperience was running riot with my common sense. I was in an alien environment, things were going pear shaped – I now perceived I was in trouble and was teetering on the edge of panic.
My first thought was to try and continue the descent and reach Colin who would now be well below me - out of sight but still holding onto the anchor line. I tried to tough it out and continue down blind but I got some more water up my nose and gagged - I couldn’t go on.
I stopped this attempt at a blind descent and started to go back up the anchor line. I moved into a head up position and kicked my legs to start moving upwards. Why I didn’t just clear my mask now and then recommence the descent I don’t know. I had just lost it - and was bailing out - whatever. Looking back, the main trigger for all of this was the simple fact that I was thrown by not being able to see the seabed below and not knowing what depth I was going into. That sealed how I behaved.
I reached the surface and my head broke through into daylight. I pulled my mask up and the water flooded out of it. I was back beside the Zodiac and safety. As I talked to the divers in the boat reassuring them that I was fine, Colin appeared unexpectedly beside me. He swam over to me and asked if I was all right. It turned out that he had got right down to the bottom at 25 metres. When I hadn’t appeared down beside him he had followed the rules and made his way back up the line slowly.
I had given up on the idea of the dive completely and felt a fool. But, Colin was very understanding and persuaded me to have another go. I agreed and we started the descent once again, this time Colin was right beside me, holding onto the strap of my ABLJ.
We pressed down and again I was disturbed at not being able to see the bottom. But then, when we got down to a depth of about 15 metres it was as though a curtain was pulled back and we moved through a visibility horizon. One moment I couldn’t see the seabed. Next, there was an amazing underwater seascape about 10-20 metres beneath me. The white anchor line led down to the chain and anchor – which were just lying on the seabed.
We dropped down the last 10 metres and landed on the seabed. I took time to look all around me at my new surroundings and get my buoyancy sorted out. Then, after an exchange of OK signals we moved off in one direction, swimming along just a few feet above the seabed.
All around me were flat slabs of rock housing lobsters, edible crabs and lots of conger eels. I had never seen conger eels in the wild before and they hid in their dark bolt holes with their blue/black head and eyes peering out at us, alien visitors in their underwater world. I had heard divers’ stories of congers biting off fingers and so gave them a wide berth. At one point I saw a conger in the open, a rare sight during the day as it moved over and under a large overhanging rock.
After a bottom time of about 20 minutes down at a depth of 25 metres it was time to start our ascent. My novice diver’s inability had almost ruined the dive but Colin’s stoic perseverance had saved the day and introduced me to the world of boat diving.
Learning Curve
“A little learning is a dang’rous thing”
Pope, An Essay on Criticism
For the next couple of years after my introduction to the amazing undersea world of Scottish coastal diving I turned up every Sunday for club dives around the north-east coast. My diving skills developed as I explored an underwater fairy-tale land of plunging cliffs, massive subsea canyons, gorges and subsea caves amidst all the rich and varied sea life of Scotland’s shores.
I moved down to Stonehaven, some ten miles south of Aberdeen, in 1984 but still kept my links with my dive buddies in the Ellon branch of the BSAC, now some 40 miles north of where I lived. I jointly took a small loan and invested in my own 5-metre orange inflatable dive boat, an Aberglen Gordon with a Johnson 35hp outboard engine.
Sundays consisted of an early wake up to an alarm clock followed by a scrambled breakfast, before hitching my orange Aberglen onto my orange Renault 14, now rusting fast and covered in brown filler spots. In an orange blaze of polka dot car and boat, I would drive up to Ellon, arriving an hour later at Richard Cook’s house. Richard was a strong, fair-haired and bearded old hand at the club. Somewhat older than me, he was an active and very capable diver with a great technical knowledge gleaned from working in the diving side of the oil industry for a long time. He knew his stuff and often helped me with my kit when things went wrong.
We would have tea and toast before a 40 minute drive up to one of our regular dive sites such as Sandhaven, Rosehearty or Gardenstown. It was this year that I had my first encounter with the somewhat strained relationships between fishermen and divers at that time. I’m pleased to say that things are a lot better nowadays.
Some fishermen at that time had a mindset that divers were diving with the sole purpose of taking their lobsters and crabs from the sea - and were robbing from their creels. I was new to the sport and had never taken on the fast claws of a lobster or edible crab. But that didn’t matter - I was a diver and that was enough. Some of them barely concealed their animosity.
I soon learned that there was a bit of a history in the north-east between my predecessor divers and fishermen. So much so, that in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, before I had started diving, there had been an attempt by locals in one of our now favourite dive spots, to prevent divers using the harbour for launching and retrieving their dive boats. The BSAC had successfully taken the harbour trustees to court and got an order allowing divers access to the sea there.
My club soon discovered that the fishing town of Gardenstown, just a few miles to the east of Macduff, was situated in an area where there was little run off from the land to bring silt down into the sea. Underwater, the sand was clean and white and as a consequence, the whole area of sea around Gardenstown was truly blessed with fantastic underwater visibility, of an average of in excess of 20 metres. As a result our dive club found ourselves drawn there regularly for club dives.
I had not fully realised the strained relationship between divers and fishermen at that time. But the history soon became clear when we returned to Gardenstown harbour in our dive boats after one Sunday morning dive. Gardenstown was very religious and the Sabbath was still largely observed. As we got changed out of the way at the end of the pier we saw a number of local youths in five or six cars driving their way along the harbour area towards the breakwater we were on. They then strung a barrier of their cars across the harbour pier blocking in our cars and causing