On another occasion our club had three boats out to sea from Gardenstown for a Sunday dive. As we arrived back at the harbour after the dive, just as I was jumping out of my Aberglen as we nudged up to the slip, a large splinter exploded off the side of a wooden creel boat tied up alongside. This was followed almost simultaneously by the crack of a rifle report. Our group had been shot at from the steep brae and houses above the harbour.
I reported the matter to the local police in the nearest large town some miles away but found that they were not interested in investigating the incident. No police officer bothered to come to see me about my formal complaint about being shot at. Perhaps they agreed we shouldn’t be diving there on the Sabbath as well.
Gardenstown itself is an idyllic, old fishing village. It is steeped in the sea and originally sprang up as a cluster of fisherman’s cottages gathered around a favourable harbour site at the bottom of a steep, long hill, which shielded the houses from southerly and westerly winds. As is common with many of the fisher houses along the north-east coast, many of the houses were built gable end on to the sea. This presented the smallest possible profile to the harsh northerly sea winds, which tried to strip the precious heat from the very stones with which they were built.
For us, as divers, to get down to Gardenstown towing a dive boat, was something of an art form. We had to manoeuvre down a hugely steep road off the main Elgin to Fraserburgh trunk road. This road way meanders down through a confusion of old fishermen’s houses with a couple of surprisingly tight hair pin turns which, towing a boat, we could only make by the barest of margins by taking a wide swing at it as slowly as possible.
Once down at the harbour we were able to launch our boats and then motor down the coast to the east along plunging cliffs dotted with a white confusion of seabirds until we found a convenient sheltered cove to anchor in, within a stone’s throw of the cliffs.
Once kitted up, we would roll over the side of the boat into perfect visibility. It was often possible to see the seabed 20 metres below as soon as you entered the water. I never got over the sensation of weightlessness as I floated suspended in the sea, looking down some distance to the seabed below.
I was always amazed to be able to see other divers exploring far down below in the distance. Their columns of brilliant white and silver exhaust bubbles belched and broke into smaller bubbles as they expanded and strained upwards towards the surface.
As the bubbles reached the surface the large bubbles erupted in slow languid belches and ‘bloops’ reminiscent of mud pools - before breaking into a shimmering mass of smaller bubbles and dissipating. Thousands of smaller bubbles accompanied the larger ones, shimmering and fizzing like a bottle of lemonade being opened. On oily calm days you could hear the same noise if you listened carefully.
This area was rich in sea life and I became acquainted with all sorts of local underwater wildlife. I had my first encounter with a dogfish here. It looks like a small shark about 3- 4 feet long. Unlike most of the other sea life around it didn’t seem to see my 6’2” frame and that of my dive buddy Richard Cook as an immediate threat warranting flight. This dogfish just lay there on a large flat-topped boulder. Its cold, lifeless eyes looked at me but didn’t flicker or show any emotion.
Richard swam up to it – and it still didn’t move so he put his hand on it high up at the back of its head and picked it up to show me how to handle it. It just remained impassive and unresponsive, waiting for us to tire of it and put it down. After he put it down again it moved off the boulder top and with a flick of it’s long thin tail was gone. He told me later that if it was picked up in the wrong place it could quickly whip its long tail around a diver’s arm.
Diving around these parts I also came across my first monkfish, a thoroughly evil looking flat fish which looks like a large nan bread from your local curry house. It has a huge semi-circular mouth ringed with nasty teeth that runs like a zip around the wide top of its head at the front. Its two small eyes sit behind giving it good vision.
As I was growing up as a child in Fraserburgh I had heard from fishermen how the jaws of this fish, once it has bitten something, lock fast and hold on - it just doesn’t let go. Monkfish amongst a catch of fish were a continual hazard for local fishermen at sea. They would often put their hand randomly into the catch of fish to pull out the next fish for gutting. If there was a monkfish in the pile of caught fish and it was still alive it could snap at them and cause serious damage to their fingers. I gave this monkfish a wide berth - resisting the temptation to prod it with a stalk of kelp lest it come after me.
On another dive we came across an evil-looking wolf fish. This fish, enticingly called rock turbot in specialty seafood restaurants, has a very soft white flesh and is exquisite battered or fried. But in the wild these eels are blue/black, about five feet long and have the meanest looking head and set of teeth and jaws you can imagine – designed to crush crabs and sea urchins.
On this same dive we next came across a rather less offensive looking angler fish lying motionless on the bottom in a sandy clearing between several large boulders, which were covered in the waving fronds of a kelp forest. This is a flat fish, somewhat similar to a Monkfish but smaller proportioned and not quite so evil looking.
My dive buddy on this dive decided to see what this fish could do - as it wasn’t for moving for us either. He pulled out his nine-inch long pencil torch, used for looking into nooks and crannies, and approached the fish menacingly…. but obviously not menacingly enough to frighten this poor creature - it just stared at him. Emboldened he got right up close to it and gave it a prod on its snout with his torch. It didn’t move - probably hoping we would give up and go away.
Undeterred, my buddy gave the inoffensive and somewhat tolerant angler fish a harder prod on its nose. He had obviously overstepped some unwritten law and gone one prod too far. With blinding speed, the anglerfish’s inoffensive semi-circular mouth suddenly transformed into a large oval hole and like lighting, it flicked off the bottom and attacked the offending torch.
The fish tried to take the whole torch in one go into its mouth getting the whole 1-2 inch diameter width of it a few inches down its throat – when it bit down however it encountered, probably for the first time, man-made hard plastics. I expected to see its teeth all fracture and fall out like a Tom & Jerry cartoon scene - but even though the attempt to crack the torch in two wasn’t a good idea for its dental care regime, it held on and simply wouldn’t let go.
My buddy waved his torch about trying to dislodge the fish from the end of it but it wouldn’t – it just hung on for grim life and he did not dare to try using his other hand to prise it off. If it could do this to his torch it could make a nasty job of a finger. Eventually after a degree of thrashing around the anglerfish obviously decided that it had done enough to further our diver training on “things not to touch underwater.” It let go and swam back down to the bottom where it turned round to face us and settled back down on the bottom. “You wanna try that again, laddie?” it seemed to be saying. If it was nursing a bad toothache it didn’t show. We beat a retreat, Angler Fish 1, Divers 0.
On another occasion we were swimming in a group of about 4 divers along the very bottom of some plunging cliffs looking into sub-sea caves when I saw my first bird flying underwater. This bird flapped its way down my bubble stream from the surface and swam right up to my mask homing in on the source of the bubbles, which it no doubt took for a shimmering feast of small fish. It got a shock when unexpectedly, it came face to face with a 6’ 2” Scotsman. It did an emergency brake in its flight through the water right in front of my face and stared at me for a second or two, no doubt trying to work out what this big, noisy, unusual visitor to its realm was doing. After working out that there was no food here, and that it may become food itself if it hung around, it beat its wings again and shot off towards the surface.
This bird was something of a vanguard, for as soon as it had disappeared, in quick succession, countless other birds came screaming into the water, plunging downwards and speeding through our group leaving a small trail of bubbles to mark their passing - as if someone had been spraying machine gun bullets down through the water towards us.
On a shore dive towards the end of the summer of 1984