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My first book, Dive Scapa Flow, was published by Mainstream, Edinburgh, in 1990. It set the scene for diving at Scapa Flow by covering the scuttling of the 74 interned German High Seas Fleet warships there on 21 June 1919 and the subsequent momentous salvage work over the coming decades that saw the majority of those ships lifted to the surface. Three complete German World War I High Seas Fleet battleships and four cruisers were left on the bottom of the Flow. The book also covered the many other Scapa Flow wrecks, such as the blockships, World War II wrecks and more recent sinkings.

The book came out at a time when there was an absolute dearth of information about what the ships left on the bottom were like and how to dive them. It was an immediate success.

Mainstream had taken a leap in the dark with me as an unpublished author and my idea for a book, and had published it in paperback initially. As the first paperback print run quickly sold out, it was reprinted in 1992 – and sold out again. In 1993, happy with the figures, Mainstream put out a hardback version that underwent a number of revisions and editions before in 2017, my current publishers, Whittles Publishing, put out a fully rewritten centenary edition to coincide with the series of 100th anniversary events taking place in and around Orkney, such as the Battle of Jutland, the losses of HMS Hampshire and HMS Vanguard, the arrival of the German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow for internment, and of course the subsequent scuttle of the fleet on 21 June 1919. The book was given a full 21st-century makeover with new photography, new wreck illustrations and stunning cutting-edge scans that showed the wrecks in incredible detail, as they have never been seen before.

After the success of the first edition of Dive Scapa Flow, I researched and wrote about 14 of the most popular wrecks around Scotland in Dive Scotland’s Greatest Wrecks, published in 1993. It sold well enough, and a second edition was published in 2000. After a break from writing, following the birth of my two daughters, I put out a companion guide, Dive England’s Greatest Wrecks, in 2003.

Having now written about the greatest shipwrecks around the UK, as I brainstormed for a way of writing professionally about a subject other than shipwrecks, I came up with the idea of writing a book that charted the highs and lows of my diving career, which had begun back in the early 1980s as a novice diver and progressed through the development of our sport up until the advent of technical diving. The resultant book, Into the Abyss – Diving to Adventure in the Liquid World, was published in 2003 and was a collection of true life stories of my diving adventures, such as diving into the heart of the Corryvreckan Whirlpool off Jura, in western Scotland – a dive that seemed to resonate and attract a lot of attention. Diving like this was just what my group of divers did. We didn’t think it was anything special – but some of the stories seemed to have had readers breaking out in cold sweats if the reviews, which were unanimously positive, were to be believed. The review I liked best featured in Diver magazine in 2004 and ran:

As much as people try to portray diving as adventurous, very often these days it isn’t. You board a charter boat with 20 other people and get taken to a dive site that’s been visited a million times before, and picked clean by everyone before you. And that’s while you’re being led by a divemaster who still uses acne cream.

In short, diving these days is a little tame. We need a lesson or two from those who started when George Michael was still in Wham and Frankie Goes to Hollywood were telling everyone to relax.

Enter wreck guru Rod Macdonald, and his book Into the Abyss. For divers who started diving when BSAC clubs were full of men with more facial hair than Dave Lee Travis, when RIBs were actually Zodiacs and, if you hired a hardboat, it came with a lovely smell of fish from the morning’s catch; this book is a trip down memory lane.

For those of you who didn’t know a time before mandatory life-rafts, back-lifts, wing systems and nitrox, this will be a revelation. Six months’ pre-training before getting in the water, panic stricken first boat dives, awe-inspiring virgin wreck dives – this book has the lot. Macdonald really was on a voyage of discovery, and he shares it in intricate detail, as if he was sitting beside you, telling the story in person.

All the essence of diving at the cusp of the technical revolution is here. Forget biographies by 20-something pop stars or TV actors with mediocre lives; this is the life of a man who was out there pioneering and discovering. … This book is utterly marvellous and deeply interesting.

Diver Magazine, December 2004.

My life as a Scots lawyer seemed to consume me after those two last books were published in 2003, and I wrote no more until I retired from law aged 50 in 2010. Suddenly I now had a lot of free time and it just felt natural to return to writing. My first post-retirement book was called The Darkness Below and was published in 2011. This book picked up the story from the end of Into the Abyss, charting more of our adventures as diving moved forward from open- circuit trimix diving to closed-circuit mixed-gas rebreather diving. It again got great reviews – my favourite being from Divers Inc in 2012:

Even the name of Rod Macdonald’s latest book has the air of a thriller novel; and if you’re a dive junkie like me, then that’s exactly what it is.

Although I’m not a techy, I love wreck diving within my limits and like many other devotees, I’ve made pilgrimages to dive wrecks in Scapa Flow, the Sound of Mull, the North Atlantic and a few more exotic locations around the globe. And that’s the real thriller of ‘The Darkness Below’. Rod not only reveals the facts of lesser known and enduringly fascinating wrecks in locations I’m familiar with, he goes even further; exposing the history of other maritime classics I would never have known about. That’s why this book is so different.

Like many other commentators, Rod could have chosen the easy path and concentrated on the more commonly known wrecks. But he’d just have been delivering re-hashed information presented from his perspective. Because Rod refuses to do that, it’s what makes ‘The Darkness Below’ a refreshingly great read.

The book itself is excellently arranged. The many illustrations combined with Rod’s in-depth descriptions and the wealth of both historical and anecdotal information doesn’t leave the reader wanting.

Often I’ll read a book on wrecks only to find myself disappointingly asking very obvious questions due to the lack of basic information. You won’t find that in ‘The Darkness Below’. It challenges and pulverises the senses with information. It truly is an excellent and informative read and a book you’ll find yourself returning to repeatedly for another fix.

If I could sum it all up, I’d say for me ‘The Darkness Below’ is like a fusion of the most exciting presentations I’ve watched on National Geographic or Discovery; and reminiscent of the pioneering explorations of Cousteau. And as the opening chapter acknowledges: the late great Monsieur Cousteau may have been your idol, Rod, but you’re equally trail-blazing an awe-inspiring path yourself.

After this book was published, I returned to type (!) and in quick succession put out Great British Shipwrecks – A Personal Adventure in 2012, followed by Force Z Shipwrecks of the South China Sea – HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse in 2013. In 2015 Dive Truk Lagoon – the Japanese World War II Pacific Shipwrecks was published, followed by Dive Palau – the Shipwrecks in 2016, and then in 2017, Shipwrecks of Truk Lagoon, which my daughter Nicola designed and produced.

In the intervening years since The Darkness Below was published in 2011, I had spent a lot of time exploring the Pacific War shipwrecks of Truk Lagoon and Palau for my two manuals about diving the wrecks there. Of necessity, my descriptions of the wrecks there had to be regimented, clinical and almost dispassionate. But, as ever with my diving, there had been many adventures along the way as I explored and researched the wrecks – and I had seen so many things that simply couldn’t go in the wreck manuals. In The Darkness Below I wrote a chapter about the SS Creemuir and the subsequent friendship I had developed with Noel Blacklock, the former Royal Navy radio officer on the ship when it was torpedoed off north-east Scotland in 1940. A couple of years after the book was published there was another exciting development to that story which I felt really needed to go into print. Read Chapter 14 to learn what it was – I won’t spoil it here for you!

So gradually, as my head was bursting with all these stories, I decided to write a follow-on to Into the Abyss and The Darkness Below – a third volume in the story of my diving career, which by complete chance, mirrors and charts the development of our sport of technical diving from its origins in the dangerous deep air days of the late 1980s, through concepts such as extended range diving, the use of decompression gases such as nitrox, the use of deep diving trimix gases using helium, through open-circuit trimix diving and on to the present day, when we use amazingly complicated closed-circuit rebreathers that greatly extend the time you can spend on the bottom and the depth you can go to with ease, whilst minimising as far as possible the length of time it takes to ascend safely and decompress.

Of necessity, reading about diving, and particularly technical diving, means grappling with a number of specialist concepts and pieces of kit that can seem confusing and daunting to the non-diver to begin with. Rather than providing a dull glossary, each time something specialist comes up for the first time I’ve tried to explain it in simple terms so that as you progress through the book, these concepts and pieces of kit will become more familiar. Don’t worry if you don’t understand something at a first reading; you will by the end of the book!

So here is my humble effort – an originally unintended trilogy is now formed. I hope you enjoy it.

Fair winds and following seas

Rod Macdonald

2018

Author’s note: For the last 10 years or so I have been using an underwater video camera to record the ship wrecks I dive. I now have my own YouTube channel on which I post short videos of the wrecks. Throughout this book, where there is a video of the particular wreck being described available on my channel I have inserted a QR Code to allow you to go straight to the channel and dive with me on the wreck.

If you don’t use a QR reader then simply go to YouTube and type in my name and the wreck you wish to dive with me – e.g. “Rod Macdonald Aikoku Maru” (using double quote marks helps google find the correct site). You will then be whisked magically to the bottom of Truk Lagoon. If you wish to be notified of future videos as they are posted please subscribe to the channel.