Diary of a Deckhand - October 2007

Well, here I am. Sat in Orkney which seems to have gained some strange hold over me.

The History

I first came here in 2002 to dive off the MV Jean-Elaine with Andy Cuthbertson. Venturing up into the northern isles, the cool clear waters fascinated me. As a diver, the underwater world seems to call me in, and the outstanding waters around these islands make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Returning less than three months later I was hooked. I constantly scanned the newspapers for a way to escape back to Orkney, but it took far longer than I ever thought.

In 2006 I got the chance to do what I always dreamed of - to work on a dive boat in Scapa Flow. The Stormdirft was a small dive boat, taking groups of up to 12 divers out to the wrecks of the German Fleet, owned and skippered by Hazel. After a season we got on so well we started to look at larger boats - a liveaboard which allows the divers to sleep on board as well as dive from the boat. So over the winter of 2006/7 we bought the Bounteous Sea, a boat which had already been converted for diving to a very high standard. Changing her name was done on a winters day:

Standing in the flurry of snow up on the shelter-deck roof, the words of George Mackay Brown are whipped away in the wind as soon as they leave the ministers lips. Myself, Carolyn and Hazel stand alone the significance of the moment isnt lost on any of us. 6 months ago, this day was a pipe dream subject of idle surface interval chats, many sketches of dive decks and cunning plans hatched and nurtured. So in the snow and wind of Stromness Harbour, the newest dive boat of the fleet is made known to any gods who may be watching.

I’m not religious, neither are Carolyn or Hazel, but the boat might be, so we thought it best to make sure. Many people dont know, but almost every fishing boat carries a bible on board. I would rather not consider when it is referred to by fishermen, as many people seem to either lose their religion or find it in times of extreme trouble. Ours is kept in the wheelhouse, and it never crossed our minds to get rid of it. I just dont think it would feel right to.

George was a poet based in Stromness, his works world famous and it seemed appropriate to read something of his on the Valkyrie.

Finally a blessing from Celtic tradition was said into the bitingly cold air, completing the ceremony. A bottle of Champagne is carried onto the whaleback by Hazel and the cork sent flying, some of the contents poured over the bows, drunk from and then the bottle passed to Carolyn and myself, pouring a generous splash over the name above the wheelhouse we then retreat inside to the welcome warmth. There was something unusual about this, an all female owned and crewed boat being blessed by a female minister. Make what you want of it, but it felt right.

A long night is had, much food, drink and merriment. The babies head is thoroughly wet, roll on the dive season.

2007
The season was long, much longer than anything on the Stormdrift. Groups came and went, each with their own individual personalities, traits and requirements. Many trials and tribulations were overcome. A nasty incident with a diver nearly drowning due to running out of gas scared us both and left its scars etched over our souls. A visit to Shetland was also a great challenge for us both. A new boat, a new adventure. Crossing the vast expanse of water between the islands of Orkney and Fair Isle we suddenly seemed to be a very small boat in a very big sea.

Turning the key in the wheelhouse silenced the engine, a noise that has been a pivotal part of my life for the past few months. As everything comes to a halt, I cannot help but feel sad that somehow one chapter of my life has just come to an end. But by no means is this the end of the story. It simply means another chapter needs to be written.

I never realised the affinity you seem to gain for your boat. The Valkyrie seemed such a huge and ungainly thing when we first took her out of Fraserburgh, but soon enough i learned to love her size, her lines and her sea keeping. Soon she had personality all of her own, no longer a collection of wood and steel, she seemed to blossom into her own character.

The beauty of the Orkney islands is never lost on me, some days the islands seem to shine with a light of their own. As the sun sets over the hills of Hoy, the light reflecting on the calm waters of Scapa Flow, i somehow know i can never be happy anywhere else.

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Now i have finally worked out how to shrink images, here are a few....

Me in my freediving suit


One of the most frequently stolen road signs in the UK


Bruce the derranged goose - was thought to be male, but is actually female, and also thinks she is a dog/human.....oh dear.


Rowan our Stag


Stromness in black and white


Diving the wrecks around barrier No. 2


The Valkyrie up on the slipway at Fraserburgh


Dolphins close to Fair Isle


Sunrise last week

Things seldom go right in the world of boats. Throw divers into the mix and its a wonder we ever get out of the harbour without having to shout on the coastguard for some reason or another. This is an account of the incident we had in the summer. It was first put on my old blog which i suspect is about to be turned off....hence the new one here!



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The wind seemed to whip the waves up from the very bottom of the flow, making us pitch and roll around the site. Plates slide and slip in the galley, my spidey senses were going haywire, somewhere deep down I knew the day was going to go pearshaped.

An earlier mishap with an octopus (a divers spare regulator to breathe from) seemed to settle them down, but on seeing a diver surface next to an Surface Marker Buoy - a sausage that can be sent up on a reel from the bottom - that had only been on the surface a few minutes, I knew there was something amiss. Seeing the yellow fins kick down away from the SMB I curse the diver for being so silly.

After a while you learn to read bubbles, Hazel the skipper had pointed out that the deeper the diver, the smaller the bubbles. I press the talk button on my radio and tell Hazel that I think those bubbles look deep – they seem to come to the surface in a bit of a fizz, the bubbles themselves are small and diffuse, not like the upturned soup plates you get from divers at 6m or 3m doing stops.

As we turn past the SMB three divers on our port side (away from the diver lift) surface and we manoeuvre to recover them and give them shelter in the lee of the boat and I climb into my warm floatation jacket to protect me from the biting wind. As we recover them a shout comes through the turbulent air, and the diver is back on the SMB and signals distress. Hazel turns the boat towards the diver painfully slowly, the wind making it hard to bring the bows around. Too much power at this point would be fruitless as it wouldn’t actually help the turn – you just have to be patient. If it had been me at the helm I would have got this so wrong, but with her experience H knows her stuff.

Coming alongside the diver she is sitting low in the water and I can see something is very wrong. I tear the throwline from behind me and the yellow bag lands inches from her hand. She makes no effort to grab it. Hazel appears on deck next to me and we both grab hold of the nearest diver to us, we explain to him in emphatic urgent phrases (the whole group is French, only a few speak English well) that he seems to only just understand that he needs to get in and help her – he is still in his drysuit. Just as she starts to slip below the surface he splashes in next to her and hauls her back to the top.

By this time they have drifted to the rear of the boat making moving impossible for risk of putting a diver through the propeller. I can see that he is making no effort to open her airway, white froth is coming from her mouth and her lips are blue.

Making the decision to do what I do next took milliseconds. In reality there was no question of me doing anything else. I climb over the railing and onto a fender. I then drop the bombshell. Hazel is running back into the wheelhouse to try to move the boat and I ask her possibly one of the hardest questions I have ever asked anyone - “do I go in?”. Ultimatley she is responsible for me as well as the divers, something that must have felt so heavy on her shoulders that day. I cannot even begin to think how she feels after saying yes. Hanging a foot above the water, I count. One. Two. Three.

The cold water takes my breath away, my clothes feel so heavy and I gasp for air but in the knowledge that it will pass quickly and I can get on with what I have to do. Swimming for the casualty I mange to get hold of her pillar valve and turn her face up again as the force of the waves had rolled her face down. Grasping her jacket shoulder strap I form a seal on her mouth as best I can in the waves and give five rescue breaths, painfully aware that these are nowhere near perfect. I press the button on her Buoyancy Contro Device but there is no inflation. I also try her drysuit inflator, but that is the same. She has no gas in her cylinder.

I feel around on her left shoulder for the inflate tube and find it, gasping for air I blow into it and feel her start to rise. Once her head is clear I release her weight belt and begin AV again, pinching her nose and struggling to get a seal around her mouth. The boat comes in as close as it can - there are SMB’s in the water very close to us an we are within the turning circle meaning we are around 5m away from the lift, I can see Hazel screaming out of the wheelhouse at the divers left on board “THROW A LINE”. A red and white lifebuoy lands in the water next to me, but the French divers on the boat have not kept hold of the line attached to it. I pass it to the diver in the water and continue to breathe into what seems to be a lifeless body. I will never forget the way her eyes looked. Blank, staring and unresponsive.

Hazel shouts “Line!” and I glance around to see the monkey’s fist throwing line splash down only 1m away from me, for some strange reason I thought it would float, even in the knowledge it contains a lump of lead and sinks like a stone. By the time I have completed the cycle of AV and turned back to face the boat the critical line is gone, another accurate throw from Hazel shows the distance to be too great as the line lands short. Painfully quickly, the boat is blown away from us in the gusting wind.

Hazel is unable to come in for another chance for the pickup as there are now other divers in the water between us and her, and since time is of the essence, she asks another boat to come in and help. The feeling of being utterly powerless in this situation must have been soul destroying for her, but with another boat lined up for the pickup, she powers out of the way.

The bow of the Sharon Rose surges towards me and I scream for a line to be thrown. A rope has never felt so damned good. Wrapping it around my arm and gripping her tight we are pulled towards the pitching hull. I can feel the muscles in my arm ripping, my elbow feels as if it is about to pop apart and I scream as my thumb is yanked by the force of the weight.

Alongside the boat we grab the ladder, but the rolling motion makes this a painful experience for me, I am slammed into the hull and into the rungs of the ladder with every wave. The rescue davit is lowered down and I find my hands are so cold I struggle with the clip, but manage to find a D ring and she is hauled clear of the water. At about level with the deck the D ring parts company with the BCD and she crashes back into the water. I yell and swear with fury that we got so damned close.

With the feeling this is still going totally pear shaped I feel my feet on the rungs and with some strange superhuman strength I haul her up high enough that a diver on the deck can grab a hose from her pillar valve. This gives me the seconds I need to clip the line to another D ring and try again. Finally she is gone from above me and I suddenly seem to struggle a little – the ladder is only a few feet away and yet I cant seem to make any headway. Jimmy the crew spots this and hauls me in close on one of the many ropes in the water. After what seems like an eternity I clamber from the freezing water.

Unclipping her gear and pulling it clear we can finally get things working properly. She is blue, her eyes unmoving and look so dead its unreal. A small voice in my brain says the words of an instructor deep in my past “you never stop until someone more qualified than you tells you, or rigor mortis sets in”. Getting a pocket mask from the O2 kit I press it to her mouth and nose and blow into it, making more froth and foam bubble from her mouth as the air rushes back out again. After several breaths it is clear I am getting nowhere and we begin CPR.

A fifteen to two ratio is started and we go through four cycles before I hear what I want – a breath being taken. Pressing the O2 mask onto her face she takes more breaths, her colour slowly returns but not her consciousness.

Twenty long minutes later we come in alongside the pier in Houton and the blue bow of the Stromness lifeboat comes into view, filled with friendly faces. Bags of medical kit are passed over and a big yellow jacket for me as I am all of a sudden aware that I have been in the sea for a while and have then been on deck in just a pair of trousers and a very soggy jumper for over 25 minutes.

The local diving doctor arrives on site and starts his treatment. I get into the shower on the Sharon Rose and start to defrost. Kevin asks me how many sugars I want in my tea, and I really don’t know. Six seemed like a good number.



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Heading back to Stromness the boat is so quiet. We get the harbours guys to help us moor up as I am now starting to feel all the bumps and bruises so Hazel runs me up to the doctors to be checked over. I’m pretty lucky - some spectacular bruises on my legs and stomach from the ladder, a small split in my lip and an inflamed tendon in my arm where I was bashed around.

We had to make some hard decisions that day - do I risk becoming a casualty myself was a calculated one. In truth the only reason I went in was that I trusted Hazel to not let anything happen to me. Even if she could not help by picking me up, she would damned well make sure someone did.

Seeing the diver in hospital awake and talking was a very strange feeling, she has since returned to France to make a full recovery.

I can remember feeling while in the water that I was giving AV to a dead body. Sometimes it is great to be wrong

A few days later a huge bunch of flowers arrived from a group of my friends. Thank you boys....

Freediving is something I have always felt drawn to. As a child my mum used to take me swimming every friday afternoon in the local pool and somehow i learned to swim under the water before i could make headway above it. Years later this led to me learning to scuba dive in that very same pool. The irony was never lost on me as i spent those happy hours practicing in the clear warm water.



A few years ago i got the bends, a combination of factors meant that the nitrogen in my blood was not down to a safe level and when i surfaced i developed DCI - Decompression Illness. After this i needed tests on my heart as if you have a hole in the septum of the heart (one in four people have, which is scary) this can allow bubbles to pass and result in the bends. The long wait, over six months for this test meant i was unable to dive, something which really destroyed me. Diving for some of us is far more than a sport we do at weekends, it becomes a part of our identity and suddenly i had lost this.

A friend of mine, Mark, could see how sad i was becoming, that i was losing sight of what i was waiting for. So one wet and windy day in January we headed to St Abbs to see if i was any good. Entering the water in my semi-dry i did wonder if i was slightly mad, the freezing water gradually finding its way inside like fingers of ice. My first dives were shallow, 5m or so (15ft) but according to Mark I was a natural. Suddenly i was hooked, i had a new focus, something new to allow me back into the underwater world.

Successive weekends were spent honing my skills, getting it wrong and blacking out and generally getting very used to the huge long fins.



After moving to Orkney I was lucky enough to be given a monofin, as well as getting a custom made freediving semi-dry suit. I'm no Tanya Streeter, more a cross of Dawn French and Tanya, so i am very self conscious when i am dressed in the suit, but other than that, the only thing limiting my diving was me. A freediving training programme which runs through the PC helped me extend my breath hold times to over four minutes.



Eventually i became the first person (as far as we know) to freedive on the wrecks of the German Fleet.

After a few days of rain which was more like solid water with air holes cut into it, the farm is pretty soggy. The area outside of the poultry is swimming in a fine sloppy mud, so i don my wellies and venture out into the wind.

Pushing the heavy yard brush soon a great tsunamis of what looks like chocolate sauce is shoved out into the drain. Following it up with the hose soon everything is clean and tidy, a quick splash of disinfectant and i can carry on with the other jobs.

The tribe of cats, Tuffy the Rodent Slayer and her pride of kittens, who are not really kittens anymore, they just got to half grown and gave up as far as i can see. Like mini moggie asassins they keep the rats and mice well away from the farm. Food is poured into their dish and i somehow expect to see one of them abseil from the dusty rafters, but they just seem to appear like magic.
The dogs hoover up any escapee biscuits, Pete looking very much like a living teddy bear with a handlebar moustache and Buttons the chocolate labrador who is quite honestly the stupidest dog i have ever ever met. Totally the lights are on but there is no one at home. I wonder if there has ever been anyone at home, or if there is a huge pile of unopened mail behind the front door for the previous occupant.

Buttons as a pup


Hazel with a deer calf


Sam flat out (its hard work being a cat you know?)


A pile of kittens....


Sam being cute


Bruce the goose


The farm


Pete in the snow


Rowans nose....i aint getting any closer to you!


Bruce again....