Читать книгу Into the Abyss - Rod MacDonald - Страница 12

“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 a bit of a stand off as we tried to leave the harbour.

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 I had my first incident where something went wrong under water. On a hot, lazy, blue summer Sunday we had driven to a car park at a local beauty spot, Cullykhan Bay. This small, picturesque bay, only a few hundred yards across, is surrounded on both sides by high cliffs and jutting headlands. At one time there had been a medieval fort on top of the westmost headland, from which a cannon had been recovered by archaeologists. There was rumour of another cannon lying underwater in the rocks and gullies at the foot of the headland and we had decided to have a dive at the foot of the headland, out at its end, to see if anything was indeed there.

Our small group of 6 divers drove to a car park high up on the top of the plateau surrounding the small bay - arriving as usual at about 10 am. We got dressed into our dive suits in pleasantly warm conditions. The rolling farmland and woodland of the Buchan countryside seemed stunningly green, the water a deep blue. Once fully kitted up, we then walked gingerly and in a rather ungainly manner, weighed down by our heavy gear, down a small path that meandered across the hillside down to the rocky beach.

Once at the bottom we strolled past a few startled holiday makers sending their groups of children into an excited chatter about the ‘deep sea divers’ that were walking through them en route to what they thought was a terribly exciting adventure.

Walking into the water to a depth that supported my body weight I bent down and pulled on my fins. One by one we flopped onto our fronts and started to snorkel out into deeper water, following the side of the cliffs on the west side of the bay.

Once we had got into about 10 metres and were approaching the end of the headland, we grouped up and then dumped all the air from our ABLJ’s. I sank slowly towards the bottom, a boulder field and kelp forest which, in the good visibility, I was able easily to see beneath me. Long kelp stalks were anchored to rocks, the fronds at their extremities waving in the gentle current.

As I sank I sensed the familiar increasing pressure on my sinuses but no matter how hard I tried to ‘pop’ my ears to equalise the pressure, I couldn’t. As I dropped down to 3 metres it became uncomfortable. By 5 metres down it was sore and I struggled to pop my ears to alleviate the pain.

The pain grew worse and worse as I sank deeper, becoming a numbing intense pain that filled my forehead inside my skull. I didn’t want to hold up the dive and with the ‘save face at all costs’ arrogance of youth, didn’t signal to tell any of the others that I was having difficulty.

Eventually we landed on the bottom. The pain was excruciating for me but I still managed to take a compass bearing to head out to the end of the headland where the cannon was rumoured to be.

We set off, heads down, finning out to sea. As we moved out to sea, so the seabed dropped away and it got slowly deeper. As the depth increased, so did the water pressure – and the pain in my forehead. The pain became the focus of my thoughts – but as I worked down the shelving bottom as the dive progressed, I found that the pain slowly eased. Perhaps, I thought, the effort of finning vigorously had helped clear my ears – or perhaps the increased pressure of air had forced its way through whatever sinus blockage I had.

‘Nature always tries to equalise’ was a rule taught to me at secondary school. The higher pressures now working on me, had strained to equalise with the lower atmospheric pressure in my sinal cavity. Eventually, somehow, the higher-pressure air had forced its way past the blockage and the pain left me.

We finned forward, winding our way through the large boulders. Here and there we encountered large kelp forests blocking our way. The large 10 feet long fronds at the uppermost ends of the kelp billowed in the gentle current and snagged at everything that protruded from your rig, wrapping themselves around your knife or your tank. We swam right down to the bottom of the kelp stalks and found that once you got below the 10 feet long waving fronds and got in amongst the stalks, there was plenty clear space between the stalks to swim through with your chest close down onto the rocks, underneath the carpet of fronds.

Although we searched in and around the large boulders and potholes at the end of the headland, we didn’t find the fabled cannon. Eventually we turned and made our way back into the bay and headed towards the shore. As I moved back up into slightly shallower water the pain in my sinuses returned. This time it seemed that the air in my sinuses was at a higher pressure than the water pressure around me. It wanted to get out to equalise but couldn’t because of the same blockage that had caused the trouble on the way out. It was exact the opposite situation from the descent.

Once we got back into a depth of about 10 metres, the dive leader decided that the group would surface, check where we were and snorkel back the last part to the shore. Rising straight up slowly from the seabed, the pain suddenly got so intense that I almost bit my mouthpiece off. In silent agony I screamed into my mouthpiece.

As I slowly approached the surface, the pain suddenly disappeared in a palpable rush of air inside my sinuses. I felt as though my forehead was emptying of all its contents, including my brain. I felt light-headed at first and then I felt a wet, clammy sensation on my face inside my mask.

There were lots of strange effects competing for my attention inside my head but the main problem, the intense pain, had gone. By the time I hit the surface however I was feeling distinctly dizzy and a little queasy.

The head of my buddy diver appeared beside me, water cascading from his wet suit hood. He looked at me and immediately I registered concern in his face. Pulling his regulator out of his mouth he said casually,

“Your mask’s full of blood, Rod. Are you OK?”

“I’m not sure….” I replied, my words hanging in the air as I tried to work out what was happening to me. The pain had gone - and as the time passed on the surface the faintness and dizziness were abating. At least I knew what the strange wet sensation inside my mask. I had never had my face in a pool of blood before – the wetness of blood had a different more clinging, oily feeling compared to water.

I lifted both my hands up and taking hold off both sides of my mask I gingerly lifted it off my face breaking the watertight seal. Instantly a pool of blood spilled from it into the water around me spreading outwards in a dark, red/black cloud like the ink of a startled octopus.

A shock of alarm ran through me as I watched the cloud spreading. This was beyond my limited experience and I didn’t know if I was in trouble or not. I didn’t feel in any great difficulty now – but the sight of so much of my own blood was disconcerting. I had perhaps a few hundred feet to snorkel back to shore - so even if it was serious, I wasn’t in any immediate danger given that there were five other divers around me to assist.

My buddy, who was equally as inexperienced as me, didn’t know what was up and called over the Dive Leader, a veteran diver. He took one look at me and asked me,

“You had pain going down in your sinuses, right?”

“Yes – as I got deeper it got worse – and then went away. It’s only as I came back up to the surface just now that something went high up inside my nose.”

“Don’t worry about it, Rod – you’re OK. You’ve just had some sort of blockage up there – gas has gone in and got stuck. When you came up at the end of the dive, the air had to get out somehow and ….. Boom….. all those psi’s had to go somewhere.” He thrust his hands upwards as he opened them simulating an explosion with great eagerness.

“It’s burst its way through some sort of membrane. It’s not the end of the world and you ain’t gonna die – so get your mask back on and let’s get you ashore.” I must have looked unconvinced – or worried,

“It’s OK, Rod, you’re not in trouble.” he reassured me more sympathetically – and right enough, the rest of the snorkel back was easy enough.

Other than looking a bit white and drained (literally), back on the beach I didn’t appear to suffer any other repercussions from the incident. But I had had felt another of those surges of panic, the sort that shoots through you when something goes wrong and you don’t know how to handle it - a gnawing fear that turns your stomach and makes you feel almost physically sick. It is a sensation that most divers will feel at some stage of their career.

In October that year I had my first dive on a shipwreck – not the Hollywood style intact wreck, but more a mangled, flattened field of debris with two huge boilers standing proud in it.

Slains Castle, just north of Cruden Bay is known as being the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s legendary tale of Dracula. It’s now ruined but still imposing remains sit right on the edge of sheer cliffs that plunge down for about a hundred feet to the rock foot and the sea. Several people have lost their lives on these cliffs – they are extremely dangerous.

Some of the more experienced club divers knew that there was a wreck smashed up hard in at the rocks right below the castle’s remains. I was told that there was a rather perilous way down the cliffs to the rocks below, from the grassy area beside the castle where visitors park.

So, for our next club dive we agreed to meet at the car park as ever at 10am on a Sunday. I arrived at the dive site and parked my car alongside the others, who had arrived before me. I asked how we were to get down to the sea and someone beckoned me towards the sheer cliffs. I strolled over and had a look down. Far below the sea surged and washed over a number of rocky spurs and ledges before draining away to reveal, wet, seaweed covered rocks plunging down into the sea.

The main cliffs, down which we were apparently going to climb, looked seriously steep and I could see no obvious way down. Nevertheless I got kitted up into wet suit, ABLJ, weights and slung my air tank onto my back.

Once we were all ready, clutching fins and torch in one hand we all walked over towards the cliffs. This was going to be interesting.

I followed along behind the group as we meandered over to an almost imperceptible small gully that ran steeply down from the cliff edge. Here, cut in the rock, rather precariously, were roughly hewn steps over the difficult areas.

One by one we started slowly down the solid but undulating rock of the track. I scrambled down the steep path, sometimes leaning so far back to keep my balance that I was holding myself off the rocks with my trailing hand. At other times I was almost sitting on the rock as I went down.

We made our way down the 100-foot cliffs in this ungainly fashion but as we neared the rock foot the track became less steep and I could walk more easily. At the very bottom, the track opened out onto a large tabletop slab of solid rock. Just here, there was a large rectangular hole, some 15 feet across and about 5 feet deep cut into the rocky shelf.

“That’s the old castle pool for keeping lobsters and crabs in – nothing like fresh lobster” piped up one of the old hands.

So that was it – a hundred years or more ago some poor souls had been delegated to cut these solid steps down the precarious cliffs and hack out a pool from the solid rock, just to keep shell fish fresh for the guests at the Castle. Ingenious - and very functional. I tried to imagine the scene – my thoughts in black and white like an old picture. Castle servants in white grandad shirts with black waistcoats and caps bashing away at the solid rock to enlarge and shape what was probably partly an original feature.

We moved past the lobster pool and soon were standing at the side of the rocky shelf. From here there was a straight drop down some four or five feet to the deep water of a gully. The visibility looked quite good - I could see some large rocks under the surface sticking outwards.

Fully kitted, a diver is very heavy. I was going to have to make sure that I picked an entry point where I could leap far enough outwards to clear these rocks. Looking around, I spotted a large rock further along to seaward, which just protruded from the water, right at the bottom of the shelf. This would be my exit point and would allow me to clamber from there out of the water – and from there, back up onto the shelf where I was standing.

My dive buddy and myself were ready. He moved up to the edge of the shelf and had a good look down. Clutching his mask to his face with one hand, his torch in the other, he strode and half-leapt well out from the edge, clearing the submerged rocks and splashing down heavily into the water. The sea seemed to part to swallow him up before closing over him with a large white splash. A second or two later his head popped up again and rolling onto his back he kicked his fins and moved away from my entry point - keeping an eye on me.

Heart beating, I moved up to the edge and put one hand up and held my mask to my face. I looked down once to check where in the water I was aiming to land - and then raised my head to look at the horizon. I had heard of faceplates cracking on stride entries if a diver was staring straight downwards. The glass took the force of the impact with the water and sometimes yielded to it.

Striding outwards strongly and pushing off with my trailing leg I was suddenly air borne. The combined weight of my dive kit and myself took me downwards like a Disney ride and I splashed into an explosion of white water and bubbles.

As the foam of my entry dissipated, I looked downwards and saw the seabed at the bottom of the gully running off out to seaward. I looked back at my buddy and he signalled for us to dive - so down we went to the bottom. I then followed him as we meandered out along the bottom of the gully before we cleared a large rocky shelf and the seabed dropped away deeper.

We followed the seabed down and as we moved on, I started to see some mangled bits of ship debris. Some rotted plates were lying in the sand alongside a pile of anchor chain. As we moved further out, the debris field got thicker and more crowded. Very soon the whole seabed was covered in the remains of a ship’s demise.

The seabed was an almost uniform litter of flattened bits of ship. Sections of ship’s side plating, beams and struts lay all around, sometimes part covered by rippled sandbanks - driven there by winter storms. Then in the distance two large black circles appeared, some five metres high. As we approached them I saw that they were boilers, about seven metres in length. I swam around them trying to work out how they had functioned in life.

All around the two boilers were the remains of an engine room. Large steam pipes competed for space with mangled bits of catwalks and other unidentifiable pieces of machinery. And all around in all the nooks and crannies provided by this mass of bent and buckled steel, the seabed teemed with all manner of crabs, lobsters and the occasional conger eel.

I was also surprised to find several golf balls in varying states of decay amongst the debris. Cruden Bay, a small coastal village a few miles down the coast, has a very fine and well-respected championship golf course, which I had played, right down at the seaside. These golf balls had been lost aeons ago and had been driven here along the sandy seabed by the current before becoming trapped in the wreckage.

Once our time on the bottom was almost up, we retraced our steps back through the mangled mess of steel. I was very impressed at my dive buddy’s precision in difficult surroundings in being able to navigate straight back to the same gully where we had entered.

Once back ashore we had to struggle up the steep path cut in the cliffs to the cars high above us before cracking open flasks of tea and chatting about the wreck. This had been my first taste of wreck diving and although there was no recognisable ship shape left to the vessel, the submerged devastation had been fascinating. I tried to envisage the awesome power of winter easterly storms that could pulverise and reduce a large ship to pieces no larger than a dining room table. No one knew the name of the vessel.

Once back home, in the coming week’s I read up on a few publications about shipwrecks in the north of Scotland. In an old dive magazine I came across an article on shipwrecks around these shores. Interestingly, there was brief mention of the SS Chicago, which had run aground right beneath Slains Castle in 1894. She was a large vessel and the more I read the more I realised that this was surely the identity for this wreck. This was my first taste of amateur wreck detective work and soon I was regaling the club with the identity of the wreck and the story of its sinking.

Just identifying the wreck and learning its story had brought the wreck to life for me. No longer was it a mangled pile of junk on the seabed. I could tell where the vessel had been built and by whom. But the most intriguing aspect of all was the tale of how this vessel came to lie at the foot of Slains Castle.

The SS Chicago had been a Sunderland registered schooner-rigged steamship owned by the Neptune Steam Navigation Company. She had sailed on 9 October 1894 from her homeport of Sunderland bound for Baltimore with a small general cargo of 130 tons.

She had safely run up the east coast of England and then moved past the Firth of Forth and on to Dundee and the River Tay. Moving onwards up north, Aberdeen had passed by on her port beam. Shortly after midnight she passed Cruden Bay and the feared Cruden Skerries, a very dangerous collection of rocks and reefs, already a graveyard for many a ship. A stiff southerly wind was blowing, helping her northerly progress.

The Second Officer, who was on watch, saw an unidentified light ahead and called for the Captain to come to the bridge. Suddenly it was realised that they were heading for rocks and the shore. The engines were put full astern – but it was too late. Her momentum and the southerly winds contrived to drive her onto the rocks right beneath the Castle.

Her three forward holds were holed and she stuck fast on a submerged rock ledge. Her engines were run astern for two hours to see if she could be pulled off the rocks and saved – but all the time, the once friendly southerly wind contrived to become her enemy, working against her engines on her hull and masts to pin her on the shelf.

Eventually the crew was taken off by the local Rocket Brigade, watched by a large audience of those who had been attending a servant’s ball in the castle but who found this compelling drama far more entertaining. The Chicago became a complete write-off.

I had found something new in diving. This combination of wreck dive, research and acquisition of knowledge I found irresistible - and I soon found myself being drawn towards further wreck dives. Little did I know at this stage, how this passion would develop.