Diary of a deckbitch…

June steams ahead

The surging adrenaline, turmoil and rush of the entry to the water and then the calm focussed silence of the swim to the shotline seem such a contradiction.  Somehow, deep down stepping from a perfectly good boat seems wrong, it bypasses the brain and gives a gland marked “survival” a good hard kick.              The “oh shit” second - the moment you are in midair then plunged into the water and feel the buoyancy of your wing drag you back amongst the swirling convulsing mass of bubbles, green light and unwelcome cold dribbles seems such a masochistic addictive rush.   

It is the moment of faith, in your skipper that they are able, in your equipment that it is capable of doing what you want it to, and above all in yourself.  Faith in your abilities to prepare your kit, your training and your nerve.   

Feeling alone and finning hard through the water which seems to be suddenly as thick as treacle slowly the pale blue line of the shot emerges from the particulate.  Descending to around 4m Hazel signals she is not ok.  We return to the surface where we are battered by the waves - a good force 6-7 is blowing and whipping the waves to their own private fury.   

Hazel suffered a double freeflow - where a regulator goes slightly potty and gushes your gas away in seconds as it sticks open - and a mask flood - enough to make almost any diver quit the dive there and then.  Losing over 100bar of your precious gas in seconds right in front of you is terrifying.  Ultimately it is this gas which is the difference between you living or dying and watching it all pour away in beautiful glassy bubbles can flick the switch from dealing with it to not dealing with it.  Gathering herself together with the strength I have come to envy and admire she signals she is ok.  I suspect she knows what this dive means to me and feels unable to seem at all anything but totally ok.   

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Two years ago I dived this wreck, surfaced, made a bad decision and carried on to dive the Coln in the afternoon.  Despite returning to the Coln many times since, something deep down makes it feel as if it was the dark brooding metal of the Markgraf which pushed the limits, it was that wreck which caused the fateful bubbles to cross into my arterial system and cause me to feel so damned crappy. 

If I remember correctly the weather was similar, a poor forecast with winds causing the choppy swell to leap up the sides of the boat high five-ing the underside of the tyre fenders on the Jean Elaine.   Surfacing from the Coln I was cold, the deep bone chilling cold that makes you seek out warmth like a cat on a cold day.  A shower seemed like a good option, however this proved to be the trigger I needed to start a new chapter of my life. 

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The Markgraf is simply a huge pile of metal, rusted plates slowly falling to the seabed.  Practically the same as any other wreck in the flow, in the world.  But for me I know what it means, not simply getting over some fears, but acknowledging my own mortality, my own fears - no matter how irrational - barriers I built when I needed protection from the world. 

Suddenly it becomes a hull in the distance rather than a jagged toothed monster lurking below to swallow us down into some obscene oxide covered gullet.  Lines, patches of light and dark emerge and we alight onto the hull, its almost barren surface a strangely safe place.  Hazel signals I am ok to go search out nudi’s and fleshy cylinders of anemones with their feathery tops the plates are my hunting ground.  I go off in some kind of personal quest, to find something squishy and pretty, to take my mind off where I am.   

Making our way aft along the wreck we finally see the huge uprights of the rudders, themselves tombstones marking the deathbed of a giant, a behemoth decaying beneath my fin strokes.    

Slowly we head back to the shotline, the occasional gash in the hull festooned with life making me linger to explore this microscopic community.   

Seven minutes of stops are completed on the shotline and we surface triumphant.  I have dived the Markgraf, Hazel has dealt with standing on the edge of the incident pit and walking away to carry on with the plan.   

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A dive with a scooter. 

The weather is excellent, calm winds, blue skies and the time is right for me to drop in with a scooter on my first proper scooter dive.  A dive previously had been spent in 7m at Burray Pier messing about with them and using most of my gas giggling like a girl.  We are lucky enough to have three x-scooters on the boat for hire, these machines are no toy you can buy from eBay for a couple of hundred quid, but the real deal, costing over 2K each and with a top speed the underwater equivalent of going down a really big hill on your bike with your legs out to the sides.  You have to wear a harness or have a scooter ring on your harness as they simply pull from your grasp without it.  They have sat on the deck for over a month now, their understated shiny blackness winking seductively at me every time I pass.  Now the time has come for me to get to flirt with one properly. 

I drop in on the Brummer, a wreck I am not that familiar with, but a dive is a dive.  Descending the shot I seem to become aware of the fact I am truly alone down here - there is no one at all on the wreck with me a rare occurrence.  Alighting onto the wreck with slightly more grace and elegance than last time I dived this one (a holey wing meant I hit the deck with all the grace and tact of a jelly being dropped from a second storey building, i swear there is a Helen shaped imprint in the silt), and sort out my buoyancy, I was never quite sure of what it would do for the buoyancy, but it hardly affects it at all.  I head towards the bow, and fuck me, I’m there within a couple of minutes.  Descending to the seabed, I decide to see how long it takes from one end of the wreck to the other.  Pulling on the trigger the propeller becomes a blur and me and my small atom bomb surge forwards.  Flying over the wreck I cant help but smile.  How I would love for some of the guys I learned to dive with to see me now.  Diving twin 12 cylinders from a boat I am a stakeholder in in Scapa Flow, zooming over the remains of a cruiser all alone, a sin in their books for certain.  All I need is nitrox and my ticket to hell is booked, I better get some asbestos knickers on.   

OOOO bugger, there is the mast, I fly over the top of it just in time, past a gun in the gloom and whoa, shit, I ran out of wreck.  Turning around I am ready for this - stern to stem in one totally out of control - mad as a box of frogs with the lid off - attempt.  Somehow I really want to hear the Benny Hill music. 

Here follows a stream of consciousness from what was going through my tiny mind…. 

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee oooo this is fun, there goes the gun……oh a broken bit, better keep out a little, oooo wow a fish, oh bugger missed it - too fast - right, keep eyes forward, I’m sure there is a mast around here somewhere, OH FUCK that’s the bridge, fuck fuck fuck fuck, I’m heading for the bridge and its only 5m away and looks solid as a brick wall, 4m away, a hole, need to find a hole, 3m away, found a hole above me, shit this is tight at 2knots, waiting for the bone juddering thunk as my manifold impacts rusty steel……..nothing - wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee I made it, bugger, better not let Bobby at the chamber see this profile Oh look here is the bow, anddddddddd oh bugger, out of wreck again heheheh lets do it again….. 

For the record, I was on the middle speed setting and it took me 4 minutes from one end to the other. 

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One group of divers departs, somehow I always have the awful feeling I should be up and awake and seeing them off, but the lure of the warm bed and the not having to get up means I fart and roll over in my warm pit, safe in the knowledge I don’t actually have to get up at all today, although Hazel would be mightily pissed off at having to clean down the boat by herself. 

Stripping off 12 beds and re-making them takes a surprisingly long time, but then I am fussy about how they are done, they have to be perfect, duvets tucked in just so, pillows done like this….it drives me mad, let alone anyone else.  I hoover around the cabins, clean down the shower with flash, get everything ready downstairs just as the ferry makes her gravity defying turn around Ness Point.  The saloon was done earlier so that is all ok, the galley will pass at a push, but to be honest I am never happy with it in there, always finding something that isn’t right, clean enough or could be moved to a better place.   

Our new group arrive in two lots, half on the afternoon ferry, the rest on the evening ferry.  Set and ready for another week, we hope for calm winds. 

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Visiting Lyness I am treated to hearing Emily sing in the oil tank.  Lyness was a huge bustling town during the war, nissen huts popping up like mushrooms, service men and women all doing their bit for the war effort.  The base was flattened after the end of the war, leaving nothing but uneven ground, concrete bases and the Golden Quay with its mysterious track lines and wooden piers.  A visit to the museum or some reading will make everything clear, the uses of the tracks, piers and quite simply how important Orkney was during the war.  The pump house is one of the few buildings left, testament to the past life of the island.  Huge valves, boilers and dials festoon the walls.   

If you visit it is easy to forget the oil tank display, a fantastic mix of maritime and war time history housed inside the one remaining oil tank at Lyness.  Painted black, with excellent low level lighting the interior has the most breathtaking acoustics.  A mindblowing echo amplifies any sound, and Emily, a trained opera singer but who now skippers the Radiant Queen, steps to the exact spot under the centre of the tank.  Divers clamour for the film to be played which details the history of Scapa Flow, but Emily draws breath, begins to sing and suddenly all else is quiet.  People stop moving simply to be silent and listen.  Notes reverberate and build and I wonder how such a small person can hide such a beautiful sound and not sing all the time.   

I share her point of view that she could spend all day in there singing, as long as I could spend all day listening.   

I’m not sure what the divers and tourists were expecting, but I’m pretty certain they got far more than they could ever have imagined. 

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I have just completed reading “Billy” by Pamela Stephenson, Billy Connolly’s biography and I see him in a totally new light.  Such a troubled childhood and past is the kind of thing to break so many people.  He shrugged his shoulders and carried on.  It amused me greatly his attitude on the standing stones of Orkney - “we haven’t a clue what they are for” which harkens me back to the attitudes of a tutor of mine at university who mercilessly took the piss out of time team and the like for always assuming everything, no matter how simple and everyday, had some sort of ritualistic significance.  It makes me immensely proud that his habit of dancing bare arsed nekkid was born in Orkney as it seemed the most appropriate thing to do at Brodgar.   

Reading this book about life made me wonder about my own, how events have shaped who I am, my attitudes to life and others.  I guess one of the reasons I don’t really feel any need to have children is that I am afraid to get it wrong.  So many of us do.  _____________________________________________________________ 

Jumping in on the F2 and the barge with a scooter I am silently wondering how long it will take me to get bored of this wreck, what with it being one of the smallest in selection of regularly dived wrecks.  I make it from the bow, around the stern around the barge and back to the bow in 7 minutes.  Oh bugger.  A capsule has been added to the bows in memory of a diver who has died, it hangs from a short galvanised chain secured with cable ties.  A sad reminder that the sport we do comes with a price sometimes.Zooming back around the wreck I cant help but go through a cloud of tiny silver fish that swept in front of me from behind a plate.  Guilt makes me regret the scooters almost invisible propeller, wondering how many of them became minute sushi as I passed.     

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I enter the water at Burray pier to play with my camera, the shallows here being silty and seemingly devoid of life in comparison to anywhere else in the flow, but this is what I want.  All I need is a few starfish to practice on and I am happy as a pig in poo. 

A small starfish is photographed to within an inch of its life, however none of them seem to come out in focus which is a real bugger.  However, a small stroppy fish does seem to hold still for long enough for me to snap him a couple of times which come out far, far better than I ever thought they would.  Stroppy fish is left alone and I carry on along the flat silty bottom to find what looks like the end of some underwater meal, an empty wine bottle, a crab shell, a spoot shell and a clam shell.  I also find an axe sitting there rusting away. 

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Surging towards us a silvery fin breaks the surface sending the clear water spraying into the air.  As the dolphins make their way forwards with all the gusto of children charging towards a new plaything, the excitement on the boat builds to a crescendo as they come into view under the water.  Silently they pass beneath us, surfacing a few yards away their curiosity slain by their visit.  Moments before Hazel had shouted to me to grab my camera, but somehow I suspect having the camera would have spoiled the moment.  It remains pristine in my memory, no stress of getting a good shot, wondering if they come out or not.  For a brief moment it seemed like it was just me and them, both of us as interested in the other.   

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Glancing at the water around the shotline somehow I knew something was wrong.  Bubbles reaching the surface looked wrong - don’t ask me how, but somewhere deep down I knew what was coming.  The diver broke the surface gasping like a goldfish on the carpet, mouth agape arms flailing.  Seeing the SMB lying in the water next to him we assume the worst - that he has just become tangled in it and had a rapid ascent to the surface from somewhere below - maybe from the very bottom at 30m.I grab the yellow throw line from behind me and launch it over-arm towards the diver where rather satisfyingly it lands within his grasp who grabs the bag and is towed towards the boat and waiting lift. 

Ten minutes later and we are heading home, a diver on O2 to be checked over by the doctor. 

______________________________________________________________  Selkies sit on their castle, left alone for the most part by dive boats and locals, the Barrel of Butter is their space and we are about to invite ourselves in.Dropping the divers in, they head for the shore, some 200m away, I struggle into the monofin and eventually splash into the cold water.  Surface swimming with the mono on is hellish, but soon I can make out the bottom some 15m below me.  Soaring over the underwater wall, I am in around 6m and duck down to be surrounded by long fronds of kelp and the occasional thin string of bootlace weed, snaking up from between the rocks.  Urchins sit and wave their tiny tube feet at me, wrasse scoot off wondering if I am a seal come to harass them.

In the distance a silver shape teases me, a flash of bubbles and it is gone.  A deep breath and I am in hot pursuit.  Once again

June 20th, 2007 Posted by helen | Uncategorized | one comment