Gord
05-03-07, 13:58
Inside the brains of all devoted divers, after a number of years seasoned by immersion in the briny depths, there is a section of memory which becomes dedicated to the sea. A wedge of synaptic connections furled deep inside waves of the cortex, awash in random sensations of salty water, fireside whisky in island pubs, friendship and banter, mist-swept decks of dayboats, bouncing around the Sound of Mull and Scapa Floe, visions of silver reef sharks and red coral in blue foreign seas, sunshine and wetsuits, old buddies and training: a glory hole of blue-green glimpses, dreams and forgotten thrills. This part of my memory revolves slowly around one dive site, a single image, partly sunken into the subconscious, built up piece by piece through many visits over the years, a colourful ship in a green bottle on a summer day. Its name is Hispania.
I’ve been thinking about the Hispania all morning for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is that time of year when spring expeditions are organised and my club is no exception. On Friday night there was talk about the forthcoming May Bank Holiday live-aboard to the Sound. Doubtless we’ll get onto the Hispania. And then, secondly, I woke up this morning thinking about Mull, and for some reason took my first log book off the shelf and started to leaf through it. I was startled to be reminded that my first dive on the Hispania was only my tenth dive! The entry reads:
“First dive of two days in Sound of Mull aboard Gemini Breeze. Skipper is George Mair. Other divers are Andrew from Kilsyth BSAC and a group from Cambridge. First wreck! Made it to deck only. A little too buoyant”. Sheeesus … the blood runs cold.
There’s no point in pretending that I was anything other than grotesquely inexperienced. The preceding nine dives had included two open water training dives with Kilsyth BSAC near Crinan (on the shallow shelves within view of Jura where scallops can be collected, out of the reach of the dredgers) and six open water training dives with Puffin to get my PADI OW ticket. I had met this chap Andrew on the fringes of the BSAC club where I was going through pool training. He found out that I was trying to expedite myself into open water by going down the PADI route (it wouldn’t be until the autumn of the year that I completed my training with Eastwood SSAC and gained the more appropriate Sport Diver qualification) and invited me on the weekend to Mull. The skipper had phoned him with an offer of two spare spaces on a jaunt which was already 80% filled by an English club. It was a combination of Andrew’s absent-minded lack of awareness of my total inexperience and my own reckless thirst to be in the water that led to me being there at all. Retrospectively: completely into harms way!
Here is what really happened.
I left Glasgow and travelled up the A82 past Loch Lomond on a sunny Friday morning in August. I remember that I drove with the sunroof open all the way: through Crianlarich, Tyndrum, Glencoe, and it was around nine thirty when I joined the back of the short queue for the Corran Ferry. The morning was one of those surprising confluences of warmth off the sunbathed green hills and a hint of chilled freshness from the Atlantic, with a big blue sky and the smell of heather and surf in the air. If you haven’t crossed in the little ferry from Corran to Ardgour in Ardnamurchan, then I recommend that you do. The body of water that you cross is part of the upper reach of Loch Linne, which stretches all the way down from Fortwilliam and Nevis to open out into the ocean just south of Mull, a stone’s throw from Oban. The crossing is very short, taking only 5 to 10 minutes, and I think the price is around a tenner. Most people sit in their cars, but on a nice day you can get out and walk around the little viewing deck, taking in the open vista down the loch past Ballachulish towards Port Appin.
On this particular Friday the destination was Lochaline, a tiny anchorage hanging off the southern side of the Ardnamurchan peninsula, halfway along the Sound of Mull. It has a long history as a fishing village, and in the thirties was the point to which the last generation of puffin-guzzling island dwellers were cleared from St Kilda. You reach it by driving off the Corran Ferry at Ardgour, through the larger village of Strontian, crossing the bridge above Loch Sunart, and pushing on for about an hour or so through the mountains to the south, eventually dropping down through a series of hairpins into the village which clusters around a small harbour and ferry slipway. Lochaline is relatively busy in the summer with fly-drive tourists from all over Europe who want to catch the ferries to Mull (it’s a much cheaper and shorter crossing from here than from Oban). Lochaline is also home to the legendary and eponymous dive centre: a bunkhouse which could, at that time, accommodate 12 divers in six double-bunked rooms. It has since been extended and I think the current owners have taken on another property nearby (the big house next to the logging terminal, just past the hotel), raising their hospitable capacity to twenty-odds.
The Gemini Breeze was tied up near the ferry terminal. Andrew had already arrived and was chatting with the skipper on the little dive deck. The divers from Cambridge were late. We loaded my kit, I parked my car and we all three waited for the others. George and Andrew were talking about incidents they had witnessed. I recall some extended chat about a guy who had died because of one of those bottles you get on Buddy Commando BC’s – he had somehow cracked it open down near the bows of the Rondo and it shot him to the surface. I sat quietly and sipped my tea, listening and contemplating the folly of my ways.
Around 12 the English party arrived and loaded their kit. George admonished them and had a mild rant about something to do with tides and slack water. I didn’t quite get what it was about, but it didn’t do anything to quell my - let’s say - slight sense of unease / impending doom. Everyone else was really confident with their kit, the way that experienced divers are: clipping bits and bobs together, shoving hoses through gaps in stuff, tightening straps, loosening straps, reading gauges, checking torches and computers, and so on. My kit was rented from Aquatron and I hadn’t used any of it before. I slapped it together as best I could and returned to my contemplation of the scenery.
George cast off and we “set sail” out through the mouth of little Lochaline and into the open Sound. The scenery became increasingly dramatic but I wasn’t seeing it anymore. Frankly, between you and me, I was totally bricking it by this stage. But, as they say, the important thing is to be brave and not show your fear. (It’s not actually: bravado in situations like these is the basis of a tragically common incident profile amongst novice divers, also known by its generic name: being way out of your depth, sonny boy).
We were soon alongside the small orange buoy that marks the spot, bang in the centre of the waterway, where the Hispania lies. I felt awkward and clumsy in my kit – it felt so heavy, and the trilaminate drysuit seemed about three sizes too large. There was a slight breeze and the surface of the sea was chopped up in little white horses.
“Your suit looks too big,” said Andrew.
We were buddy checking as the first buddy pair from Cambridge hit the water with two almighty splashes. The English group, which seemed to consist of four couples, was very upbeat. They were really happy to be here and brimming with noisy enthusiasm for the planned dives. They entered the water in quick succession and suddenly just Andrew and I were left. George was standing by the side of the boat, holding onto the dive ladder which was still stowed in an upright position just behind the wheelhouse. He turned to us and surveyed my kit and general demeanour.
“Your suit looks too big,” he said with a wry laugh.
“Do you think so?” I replied.
“You’ll be ok so long as you have enough weight,” he said. “Do you have enough weight?”
“I think so,” I replied.
George paused and gave Andrew a look which said, “I hope you know what you’re doing,” and then walked back to his cabin to manoeuvre the little boat into position for us.
Buddy-checked and ready, we stood at the open side of the deck and waited.
“Ready!” called George in his highland accent.
“Ready!” responded Andrew behind me.
I could see the buoy now, hoving into view at the starboard bow. Slowly, as Gemini Breeze moved alongside, it drifted round in front of me.
“OK!” shouted George.
I took my giant stride and landed in the foam, disoriented and breathing rapidly. There was a slight current and I was moving away from the shot.
“Swim!” called Andrew, who had entered the water directly behind me.
I swam and made it to the buoy. I grabbed it and waited to catch my breath. I felt very exposed, floating in deep water in all that heavy, cumbersome kit, uncomfortably aware of the chasm beneath. We gave each other the OK signal and then the descending thumbs-down. Andrew pulled on his shoulder dump and disappeared beneath the surface. I lifted the direct feed for my BC above my left shoulder and pushed the dump button. The air left my BC but I stayed on the surface. I squeezed my suit and pulled my knees up to my chest in an effort to dump air. Then I straightened out and raised my left arm above my head. The suit vented the last of its buoyancy and I sank slightly into the water, although the top of my head was still at the surface.
I could now see Andrew in front of and below me. He was watching me and gave the OK signal. I gave it back and used the shot line to pull myself down towards him. I was now entirely beneath the surface and I could feel the pressure building in my ears. Andrew turned around and worked himself deeper down the line, head slightly down, his fins flicking out behind him. I waited and pinched my nose with the finger and thumb of my left hand, blowing against them to open the Eustachian tubes and enable air to enter the spaces in my ears from the back of my throat. The discomfort eased and then disappeared. Now that we were beneath the waves, everything was a little bit calmer, although you would never have known it to listen to my heart thudding in my chest. Andrew had switched his torch on and was now around ten metres beneath me. I had neither torch nor computer, and was using my analogue depth gauge to orient myself in the water column. I pulled myself down the rope behind my buddy. I was holding the line in my right hand and had somehow managed to hook my console into the crook of my left elbow so that I could keep track of depth, progressing slowly and clearing my ears as I went: 3m … 5m …. 8m …. 12m … And then I stopped dead: what the hell was that!
In the midst of all the pre-dive procedure and busyness, I had almost forgotten what this dive was about. I had been thinking about my skills, my buoyancy, getting my checks right, my gauges, my nerves, everything except the objective – the reason we were out there in the first place. It was the middle of a summer day and the sun was directly overhead, streaming down through the water on every side and illuminating what lay beyond, below, beneath me. I had been looking at my buddy’s fins, concentrating on my progress by keeping up with the yellow labels pasted to the back of the white cylinders of his twin-set. But then, suddenly my eyes were distracted by a looming swatch of orange and pink below him which stretched out in both directions and suddenly I knew I was looking at my first ever shipwreck.
It was not what I had expected at all.
What I had expected was a grey metal ship, or something along those lines, but this … this looked like nothing other than a garden … some sort of colourful rose garden blooming there in bright, clear, green water. It was vivid and it was absolutely beautiful. I hung there from the shot and simply stared. I could see the whole ship, from end to end, sitting there on a light sandy bottom, tilted slightly to its port side at an angle of maybe seventy-five degrees. I could see the other divers exploring the decks and gangways, and there were bubbles, silver escaping mercury, rushing up from cracks and breaks in the structure where divers had entered and were swimming inside.
I realised that Andrew was waiting for me at the base of the shot line. I worked my way down and put some air in my suit to equalise the pressure which was shrink-wrapping my body like a pack of bacon. I left the shot and followed him along the deck in the direction of the stern. I could see that there were divers inside the ship; I caught sight of them from time to time below me through openings in the deck and inside big square holds. I was amazed by how bright it was! I was still a little too buoyant, and as I consumed my air the situation worsened. We were at a depth of 19m on the deck and I had around 120bar of air left in my single 12 litre cylinder. I held onto the railing at the side of the deck, knowing that if I let go I would start to float up towards the surface, and that if that happened then I might accelerate and potentially end up like that poor chap with the Buddy Commando who had popped like a cork from the depths of the Rondo.
That first wreck dive was … ill-considered… and I spent the majority of the thirty-one minutes hanging onto either the shot line or the rusting deck rails of the ship. But it was a unique and unprecedented experience for me and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Do you remember the first time you dived a Scottish shipwreck in clear visibility on a summer day? The first time you saw a garden of anemones and dead men’s fingers growing across a superstructure of rusted iron, with shoals of small silver fish flickering overhead? We live in a country where this thrilling beauty awaits us on our doorstep, so to speak, but yet the majority of our fellow citizens think we must be mad to seek it out, preferring instead the Saturday pleasures of Princes Street, Braehead, Buchanan Street.
Breathing like a Gortex jacket, I was unbelievably buoyant by the time we started to ascend the shot. It was all I could do to hold on tight to the rope to stop myself rocketing for the surface. We did a stop at 3m with my feet at 1m, but eventually made it back to the boat. Though massively adrenalised and thrilled with the experience, I also realised that I had been lucky and was well outside anything resembling a comfort zone. I looked admiringly on at the proficiency of the other divers as they climbed back on board, sorted and stowed their kit. The talk was of winches and props, holds and swim-throughs, a smattering of one-liners about depth and penetration. This dive had been an initial rite of passage for me into a world to which I did not yet belong, and I knew that, regardless of qualifications and badges, I had a long way to go.
George was watching from the door of the wheelhouse and, as if reading my mind, smiled at me and said, “Get another seventy dives under your belt and then come back and do it again.”
And that is pretty much what I [nearly] did. For the rest of that trip, under George’s welcome and wise advice, I avoided the longer drops to the seabed wrecks such as the Thesis and the Shuna, instead adding a few pounds to my belt and devouring the experience of shallower dives at Calf Island and the stern of the Rondo. The weather throughout the weekend remained fine, and the whole experience became my template for what a weekend in the Sound of Mull can be. My next dive on the Hispania was almost exactly a year later, dive number 45, a qualified SSAC sport diver with functional buoyancy control. My buddy was “Dundee” - then a member of Eastwood and latterly a stalwart of Yorkshire Divers. We explored the wreck inside and out, working up the courage for that long dark swim-through between the holds on either side of the superstructure. And since then there have been many return trips aboard the Silver Swift with Paul Gallagher, the Eastwood Club rhib, and the Loyal Mediator (again with George Mair).
And now we’re getting all set for another expedition to that exquisite corner of the liquid earth, and again we’ll be aboard a boat skippered by George, this time the Gemini Storm. It is spring time and the sun will be shining!
Why does the Hispania have this position at the heart of all my diving memories? Perhaps because it sits alongside other aqueous experiences from my earlier life which are themselves precursors of this passion for the neoprene-clad lunacy. I lived in Africa as a small child where our parents had neither the money for, nor access to, expensive toys and we tended to make our own. One of my favourites was an empty one-litre Johnny Walker bottle into which I’d poured the multicoloured beads from a broken necklace of my mother’s. I filled this up with water and enjoyed shaking it and watching the beads float around inside: infinite permutations of colour flashing in the hot sunshine. Later, when we lived in Ireland and holidayed in County Clare, I spent endless hours wading around and fishing in rock pools, staring at grape-purple anemones and little ochre gobbies trying to hide from my mussel-baited hook under fronds of kelp, scraping urchins clean on the rocks and gouging out their entrails with my little penknife with the mother-of-pearl handle. It’s all about the play of light and water. The chiaroscuro world of brightness and shade where you can glimpse a kind of flashing, dappled green magic which occurs in these northern seas.
To which I suppose I must add the emotional intensity of that first wreck diving experience: a searing cocktail of raw nerves, wonder and exhilaration which branded the grey matter. The world is full of beautiful oceans and stunning reefs, but for me the best water in the world in which to dive is this mysterious enticing water that I dream about, that I miss when I’m away from it, right here in the West of Scotland.
I’ve been thinking about the Hispania all morning for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is that time of year when spring expeditions are organised and my club is no exception. On Friday night there was talk about the forthcoming May Bank Holiday live-aboard to the Sound. Doubtless we’ll get onto the Hispania. And then, secondly, I woke up this morning thinking about Mull, and for some reason took my first log book off the shelf and started to leaf through it. I was startled to be reminded that my first dive on the Hispania was only my tenth dive! The entry reads:
“First dive of two days in Sound of Mull aboard Gemini Breeze. Skipper is George Mair. Other divers are Andrew from Kilsyth BSAC and a group from Cambridge. First wreck! Made it to deck only. A little too buoyant”. Sheeesus … the blood runs cold.
There’s no point in pretending that I was anything other than grotesquely inexperienced. The preceding nine dives had included two open water training dives with Kilsyth BSAC near Crinan (on the shallow shelves within view of Jura where scallops can be collected, out of the reach of the dredgers) and six open water training dives with Puffin to get my PADI OW ticket. I had met this chap Andrew on the fringes of the BSAC club where I was going through pool training. He found out that I was trying to expedite myself into open water by going down the PADI route (it wouldn’t be until the autumn of the year that I completed my training with Eastwood SSAC and gained the more appropriate Sport Diver qualification) and invited me on the weekend to Mull. The skipper had phoned him with an offer of two spare spaces on a jaunt which was already 80% filled by an English club. It was a combination of Andrew’s absent-minded lack of awareness of my total inexperience and my own reckless thirst to be in the water that led to me being there at all. Retrospectively: completely into harms way!
Here is what really happened.
I left Glasgow and travelled up the A82 past Loch Lomond on a sunny Friday morning in August. I remember that I drove with the sunroof open all the way: through Crianlarich, Tyndrum, Glencoe, and it was around nine thirty when I joined the back of the short queue for the Corran Ferry. The morning was one of those surprising confluences of warmth off the sunbathed green hills and a hint of chilled freshness from the Atlantic, with a big blue sky and the smell of heather and surf in the air. If you haven’t crossed in the little ferry from Corran to Ardgour in Ardnamurchan, then I recommend that you do. The body of water that you cross is part of the upper reach of Loch Linne, which stretches all the way down from Fortwilliam and Nevis to open out into the ocean just south of Mull, a stone’s throw from Oban. The crossing is very short, taking only 5 to 10 minutes, and I think the price is around a tenner. Most people sit in their cars, but on a nice day you can get out and walk around the little viewing deck, taking in the open vista down the loch past Ballachulish towards Port Appin.
On this particular Friday the destination was Lochaline, a tiny anchorage hanging off the southern side of the Ardnamurchan peninsula, halfway along the Sound of Mull. It has a long history as a fishing village, and in the thirties was the point to which the last generation of puffin-guzzling island dwellers were cleared from St Kilda. You reach it by driving off the Corran Ferry at Ardgour, through the larger village of Strontian, crossing the bridge above Loch Sunart, and pushing on for about an hour or so through the mountains to the south, eventually dropping down through a series of hairpins into the village which clusters around a small harbour and ferry slipway. Lochaline is relatively busy in the summer with fly-drive tourists from all over Europe who want to catch the ferries to Mull (it’s a much cheaper and shorter crossing from here than from Oban). Lochaline is also home to the legendary and eponymous dive centre: a bunkhouse which could, at that time, accommodate 12 divers in six double-bunked rooms. It has since been extended and I think the current owners have taken on another property nearby (the big house next to the logging terminal, just past the hotel), raising their hospitable capacity to twenty-odds.
The Gemini Breeze was tied up near the ferry terminal. Andrew had already arrived and was chatting with the skipper on the little dive deck. The divers from Cambridge were late. We loaded my kit, I parked my car and we all three waited for the others. George and Andrew were talking about incidents they had witnessed. I recall some extended chat about a guy who had died because of one of those bottles you get on Buddy Commando BC’s – he had somehow cracked it open down near the bows of the Rondo and it shot him to the surface. I sat quietly and sipped my tea, listening and contemplating the folly of my ways.
Around 12 the English party arrived and loaded their kit. George admonished them and had a mild rant about something to do with tides and slack water. I didn’t quite get what it was about, but it didn’t do anything to quell my - let’s say - slight sense of unease / impending doom. Everyone else was really confident with their kit, the way that experienced divers are: clipping bits and bobs together, shoving hoses through gaps in stuff, tightening straps, loosening straps, reading gauges, checking torches and computers, and so on. My kit was rented from Aquatron and I hadn’t used any of it before. I slapped it together as best I could and returned to my contemplation of the scenery.
George cast off and we “set sail” out through the mouth of little Lochaline and into the open Sound. The scenery became increasingly dramatic but I wasn’t seeing it anymore. Frankly, between you and me, I was totally bricking it by this stage. But, as they say, the important thing is to be brave and not show your fear. (It’s not actually: bravado in situations like these is the basis of a tragically common incident profile amongst novice divers, also known by its generic name: being way out of your depth, sonny boy).
We were soon alongside the small orange buoy that marks the spot, bang in the centre of the waterway, where the Hispania lies. I felt awkward and clumsy in my kit – it felt so heavy, and the trilaminate drysuit seemed about three sizes too large. There was a slight breeze and the surface of the sea was chopped up in little white horses.
“Your suit looks too big,” said Andrew.
We were buddy checking as the first buddy pair from Cambridge hit the water with two almighty splashes. The English group, which seemed to consist of four couples, was very upbeat. They were really happy to be here and brimming with noisy enthusiasm for the planned dives. They entered the water in quick succession and suddenly just Andrew and I were left. George was standing by the side of the boat, holding onto the dive ladder which was still stowed in an upright position just behind the wheelhouse. He turned to us and surveyed my kit and general demeanour.
“Your suit looks too big,” he said with a wry laugh.
“Do you think so?” I replied.
“You’ll be ok so long as you have enough weight,” he said. “Do you have enough weight?”
“I think so,” I replied.
George paused and gave Andrew a look which said, “I hope you know what you’re doing,” and then walked back to his cabin to manoeuvre the little boat into position for us.
Buddy-checked and ready, we stood at the open side of the deck and waited.
“Ready!” called George in his highland accent.
“Ready!” responded Andrew behind me.
I could see the buoy now, hoving into view at the starboard bow. Slowly, as Gemini Breeze moved alongside, it drifted round in front of me.
“OK!” shouted George.
I took my giant stride and landed in the foam, disoriented and breathing rapidly. There was a slight current and I was moving away from the shot.
“Swim!” called Andrew, who had entered the water directly behind me.
I swam and made it to the buoy. I grabbed it and waited to catch my breath. I felt very exposed, floating in deep water in all that heavy, cumbersome kit, uncomfortably aware of the chasm beneath. We gave each other the OK signal and then the descending thumbs-down. Andrew pulled on his shoulder dump and disappeared beneath the surface. I lifted the direct feed for my BC above my left shoulder and pushed the dump button. The air left my BC but I stayed on the surface. I squeezed my suit and pulled my knees up to my chest in an effort to dump air. Then I straightened out and raised my left arm above my head. The suit vented the last of its buoyancy and I sank slightly into the water, although the top of my head was still at the surface.
I could now see Andrew in front of and below me. He was watching me and gave the OK signal. I gave it back and used the shot line to pull myself down towards him. I was now entirely beneath the surface and I could feel the pressure building in my ears. Andrew turned around and worked himself deeper down the line, head slightly down, his fins flicking out behind him. I waited and pinched my nose with the finger and thumb of my left hand, blowing against them to open the Eustachian tubes and enable air to enter the spaces in my ears from the back of my throat. The discomfort eased and then disappeared. Now that we were beneath the waves, everything was a little bit calmer, although you would never have known it to listen to my heart thudding in my chest. Andrew had switched his torch on and was now around ten metres beneath me. I had neither torch nor computer, and was using my analogue depth gauge to orient myself in the water column. I pulled myself down the rope behind my buddy. I was holding the line in my right hand and had somehow managed to hook my console into the crook of my left elbow so that I could keep track of depth, progressing slowly and clearing my ears as I went: 3m … 5m …. 8m …. 12m … And then I stopped dead: what the hell was that!
In the midst of all the pre-dive procedure and busyness, I had almost forgotten what this dive was about. I had been thinking about my skills, my buoyancy, getting my checks right, my gauges, my nerves, everything except the objective – the reason we were out there in the first place. It was the middle of a summer day and the sun was directly overhead, streaming down through the water on every side and illuminating what lay beyond, below, beneath me. I had been looking at my buddy’s fins, concentrating on my progress by keeping up with the yellow labels pasted to the back of the white cylinders of his twin-set. But then, suddenly my eyes were distracted by a looming swatch of orange and pink below him which stretched out in both directions and suddenly I knew I was looking at my first ever shipwreck.
It was not what I had expected at all.
What I had expected was a grey metal ship, or something along those lines, but this … this looked like nothing other than a garden … some sort of colourful rose garden blooming there in bright, clear, green water. It was vivid and it was absolutely beautiful. I hung there from the shot and simply stared. I could see the whole ship, from end to end, sitting there on a light sandy bottom, tilted slightly to its port side at an angle of maybe seventy-five degrees. I could see the other divers exploring the decks and gangways, and there were bubbles, silver escaping mercury, rushing up from cracks and breaks in the structure where divers had entered and were swimming inside.
I realised that Andrew was waiting for me at the base of the shot line. I worked my way down and put some air in my suit to equalise the pressure which was shrink-wrapping my body like a pack of bacon. I left the shot and followed him along the deck in the direction of the stern. I could see that there were divers inside the ship; I caught sight of them from time to time below me through openings in the deck and inside big square holds. I was amazed by how bright it was! I was still a little too buoyant, and as I consumed my air the situation worsened. We were at a depth of 19m on the deck and I had around 120bar of air left in my single 12 litre cylinder. I held onto the railing at the side of the deck, knowing that if I let go I would start to float up towards the surface, and that if that happened then I might accelerate and potentially end up like that poor chap with the Buddy Commando who had popped like a cork from the depths of the Rondo.
That first wreck dive was … ill-considered… and I spent the majority of the thirty-one minutes hanging onto either the shot line or the rusting deck rails of the ship. But it was a unique and unprecedented experience for me and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Do you remember the first time you dived a Scottish shipwreck in clear visibility on a summer day? The first time you saw a garden of anemones and dead men’s fingers growing across a superstructure of rusted iron, with shoals of small silver fish flickering overhead? We live in a country where this thrilling beauty awaits us on our doorstep, so to speak, but yet the majority of our fellow citizens think we must be mad to seek it out, preferring instead the Saturday pleasures of Princes Street, Braehead, Buchanan Street.
Breathing like a Gortex jacket, I was unbelievably buoyant by the time we started to ascend the shot. It was all I could do to hold on tight to the rope to stop myself rocketing for the surface. We did a stop at 3m with my feet at 1m, but eventually made it back to the boat. Though massively adrenalised and thrilled with the experience, I also realised that I had been lucky and was well outside anything resembling a comfort zone. I looked admiringly on at the proficiency of the other divers as they climbed back on board, sorted and stowed their kit. The talk was of winches and props, holds and swim-throughs, a smattering of one-liners about depth and penetration. This dive had been an initial rite of passage for me into a world to which I did not yet belong, and I knew that, regardless of qualifications and badges, I had a long way to go.
George was watching from the door of the wheelhouse and, as if reading my mind, smiled at me and said, “Get another seventy dives under your belt and then come back and do it again.”
And that is pretty much what I [nearly] did. For the rest of that trip, under George’s welcome and wise advice, I avoided the longer drops to the seabed wrecks such as the Thesis and the Shuna, instead adding a few pounds to my belt and devouring the experience of shallower dives at Calf Island and the stern of the Rondo. The weather throughout the weekend remained fine, and the whole experience became my template for what a weekend in the Sound of Mull can be. My next dive on the Hispania was almost exactly a year later, dive number 45, a qualified SSAC sport diver with functional buoyancy control. My buddy was “Dundee” - then a member of Eastwood and latterly a stalwart of Yorkshire Divers. We explored the wreck inside and out, working up the courage for that long dark swim-through between the holds on either side of the superstructure. And since then there have been many return trips aboard the Silver Swift with Paul Gallagher, the Eastwood Club rhib, and the Loyal Mediator (again with George Mair).
And now we’re getting all set for another expedition to that exquisite corner of the liquid earth, and again we’ll be aboard a boat skippered by George, this time the Gemini Storm. It is spring time and the sun will be shining!
Why does the Hispania have this position at the heart of all my diving memories? Perhaps because it sits alongside other aqueous experiences from my earlier life which are themselves precursors of this passion for the neoprene-clad lunacy. I lived in Africa as a small child where our parents had neither the money for, nor access to, expensive toys and we tended to make our own. One of my favourites was an empty one-litre Johnny Walker bottle into which I’d poured the multicoloured beads from a broken necklace of my mother’s. I filled this up with water and enjoyed shaking it and watching the beads float around inside: infinite permutations of colour flashing in the hot sunshine. Later, when we lived in Ireland and holidayed in County Clare, I spent endless hours wading around and fishing in rock pools, staring at grape-purple anemones and little ochre gobbies trying to hide from my mussel-baited hook under fronds of kelp, scraping urchins clean on the rocks and gouging out their entrails with my little penknife with the mother-of-pearl handle. It’s all about the play of light and water. The chiaroscuro world of brightness and shade where you can glimpse a kind of flashing, dappled green magic which occurs in these northern seas.
To which I suppose I must add the emotional intensity of that first wreck diving experience: a searing cocktail of raw nerves, wonder and exhilaration which branded the grey matter. The world is full of beautiful oceans and stunning reefs, but for me the best water in the world in which to dive is this mysterious enticing water that I dream about, that I miss when I’m away from it, right here in the West of Scotland.