The story below is an extract from the book I am trying to get published. I was an eighteen year-old sonar rate at the time about to head off for the 79 field gun competition with Pompy...

 We had one Operation Awkward to complete before Pincher and I caught a flight to London. We also had an unexpected visitor, two actually: Bob Oulds and Mick Fellows. They were there to assess the fleets diving capability, and for the evenings exercise they were to see how London’s team performed.

For some time we had been experiencing problems with the Aquarius cylinder valves. Under the chunky rubber bulb that sat on the end of each cylinder was a small, ‘butterfly-valve’. This valve was gripped by the rubber bulb to make the actual valve stem operation easy – this made sense, and was lateral thinking at its practical best. But, navy bean-counters hidden away from logic in some Whitehall dungeon had found a brilliant way to save money. All you had to do was replace the expensive brass butterfly-valve with a far more economic plastic one. Made sense, saved vast sums of money - one problem: the plastic became brittle in extreme temperatures. If you were to say, dive in very cold water! Derr..? You might have needed brains to be a bean-counter, but apparently, you didn’t need much common sense.

Most of our butterfly valves had developed small cracks and we routinely checked them before and after a dive. None had failed so far, but the report of a diver nearly drowning after he couldn’t equalize (operate his reserve) was somewhat alarming.

As we prepared to dive that night, I pulled the rubber bulb from my set - there was a crack about a third of the way through the butterfly valve. Hmm, what to do? I could drop out of the necklace and have the boys work a bit harder, but it was a real exercise where people would be placing mines on the hull. That didn’t happen all too often and it wasn’t something I wanted to miss out on… Ahh bugger it! If the valve fails I’ll just disconnect and free-swim up…I was to discover that an over inflated ego is worse than a lack of ability, ego pushes you on, where as low ability would make you stop and ask questions – important questions.

We were fully dressed sitting on the deck near the accommodation ladder. It was darken-ship and we were waiting to be attacked by bad guys – there were actually blokes out there going to attack the ship and place dummy limpet mines on the hull. They were either Royal Marines from the SBS, or possibly a Clearance Diving team, we didn’t know.

Off to our left, up near the upper 4.5 gun turret, a scuffle developed. The next thing we knew a bloke, dressed in black, came charging down the deck with a couple of upper-deck sentries chasing him.

“Halt or I’ll fire!”

The bloke in black ignored the sentries command and leapt over the guard rail, a moment later we heard a splash. The sentries ran down the accommodation ladder blowing whistles and all mayhem broke loose. Lights came on all over the ship, extra sentries appeared on the deck, and yelling orders was the go. 

After about five minutes someone decided the bottom ought to be swept for mines and we were off. I was at number three - which worked well with my free swim plan, and we moved at a comfortable pace in the underwater lighting. The first side was completed with minimal fuss and, because of the slack tide; we simply swung around the stern and continued forward.

A quarter of the way up the ship I spotted a limpet mine, it was ten feet in front of us at my depth - we all carried tennis-ball-sized floats attached to light lines with a Mars-Bar-sized magnet on the other end to secure to the hull for such a sighting. I waited for the necklace to pass the mine and placed my magnet a foot above it. The float bobbed toward the surface uncoiling the line as it went. With the mines position now marked, we continued on forward just to make sure there weren’t any more.

Forty feet further on I felt a breathing restriction. My hand, quite routinely, came back to the rubber bulb of the reserve and I began to open the valve when, alarmingly, I felt it first crack, then fail! As adrenaline began to flood into my blood stream I kept turning the reserve, but the bulb just spun on the broken butterfly valve! Time to go... Wait... It’s gripping a bit. Every second turn a bit of valve was gripping the thread of the valve stem. At first there was a slight hiss, and then a rush of air as the valve opened sufficiently. Faced with a quick decision to surface or to continue, I left the reserve open - not that I could do much else, and finished the last part of the hull without further incident. We found no more mines, and the standby removed the one I had marked once we were back in the Gemini.

“How was the dip Mac?” Bob Oulds (my former instructor) had a big cheery grin.

“A piece of piss with the underwater lighting PO.”

From that day on I vowed to myself never to dive with even the slightest of cracks in a butterfly valve... I broke the vow several dives later

Mick Macfarlane

Monkey Business…

Not only did we have an assortment of skates, clowns, arse-lickers and square teapots on the ‘Opossum’…..we also had a monkey and a cat.  Which was fatal, for the monkey fancied the cat and the cat – a he – was petrified.  In fact he would have been more than that, if the monkey had not blotted his copybook just once too often.  The ‘ape’ would always go round at tot time and hold out his small ‘ucker’s’ plastic cup in his tiny human-like hands and silently plead with his more-than-human appealing eye for sippers. (If you need translations for some of these articles then the local British Legion on darts and Skittles night). 

So within minutes the damned thing, though tiddley and way-off balance or control, would soon be trying to leap and swing through the jungle branches of the overhead profusion of mess deck heating and fuel pipes as did his free forefathers. 

Being mid-day “Cooks to the Galley” would have been piped and the messes would have tables laid for the awaited start of meal initial dispensation and eventual consummation and this particular day our mess were to enjoy potmess for dinner and was much looked forward to.

Until that is, the loopy monkey happened to miss an overhead bar and literally dropped in straight into the steaming hot steaming stew pot.  It struggled to the side and with a bedraggled, surprised and drowned-rat look, and laboriously hauled itself out over the metal rim covered in best corned beef in gravy and five veg.  

But there was no way the chef of the mess could dare throw this lot out – for fear of the wrath of his waiting hungry mess mates, and as there would be no substitute, he grabbed the monkey and chucked it out as far as one can throw a wet, soggy and  pissed monkey.  I recalled whilst eating my share wondering if there was just a hint of a little spice in the potmess, and many who did not know the run up to the saga  all agreed that the meal did actually taste a little more piquant than was usual and ought we not to compliment the chef!

 “Down, Down on the Range”…

On any diving launch, nice hot food is a rarity and in  great demand, for the water at some depth, wherever you are, will inevitable be cold. The Admiralty in its benevolence would some times allocate an up-market, though elderly, 60ft MFV, and things could have looked good or dangerous!

This one had a galley with either an oil or coal burning range and someone would have to be initiated in the art of cooking on it for cooks didn’t come as standard issue. The diving team soon sorted out a routine, and daily one of the team would take turns to produce something hot and simple. Inevitably it would be potmess (literally a Jack-speak stew of  corn beef and veg) being easy to produce from tins, keep hot and keep topped up for ad lib 24hr a day consumption. To facilitate this, a brand new galvanised steel bucket would be welded to the range (thus stopping it sliding about in rough weather) and thus make it easy to top-up as necessary. Simple but!, now here was my problem, which I soon found when the sea became a little agitated and our craft would roll either at anchor or underway.  Naturally the duty ‘chef’ was still expected to do his duty and this meant going down into the bilges were the supply of tins of canned food was kept. 

Being an old boat and no ones particular baby those bilges were likely to have collected a certain amount of unhygienic fluid/liquid/water et al, in which the aforementioned food tins would have wallowed and though hygienically safe, would inevitably have lost many of their identifying paper labels.  With my delicate stomach I could never stay down long and therefore grabbed whichever dozen or so tins easily came to hand. As soon as I had surfaced, I was in the galley blindly operating the tin-can-automatic-lid -removing-device and then would have those tins emptied into the bucket in a flash.  Yours truly would then greenly dash to hang over the side and hope no one was surfacing from a dive at that moment with a face-mask off. 

The upshot of this was for the rest of that particular week - Monday, Tuesday, most of Wednesday and some of Thursday’s daily fare was a subtly tainted, delicately tinted concoction of stew enriched with two tins of finely sliced cling peaches, three of baked beans, one herrings-in (tomato sauce) and the last – a large tin of Blancmange powder – which gave it an overall rather sloppy light blue tarty look and tasted just as vile as it looked. So Dinah S was unanimously and publicly voted never to be allowed work in the galley again unsupervised.   Now things are beginning to look up.

Size is important! 

Cold water has always had not only a numbing effect on me, but increases my need to pee and also makes ‘John Thomas’ smaller than usual, and thus harder to find in one’s desperate hour of need. 

When you are diving in an all-embracing tight 2-way stretch rubber diving suit, and you do get cold, you want to pee – then you have one hell of a job finding a capable bystander to help one struggle to undress, all of which can take up valuable minutes.  So the Avon Rubber Co. (I think) Diving suit manufacturers came up with the clever idea of having a ‘piss port’ fitted with the appropriate position where you could undo a large screw knob revealing an access hole supposedly large enough for prying fingers to find your JT etc etc. 

All very well – but also with cold weather/water, my fingers get numb and sometimes swell and go a funny blue, thus with this added problem, you still had to try and find your shy tucked-away-somewhere piddler!  You cann’t exactly ask a mate or oppo to help now can you – certainly not with my nickname of Dinah, now can you? 

So after a few damp legs, and a lot of late-night thinking - I cracked it. When I was next due to dive I would carefully tape onto my todger a small length of string with masking tape making it much easier to find.  For this meant when I needed to ‘go’ all I had to do was to unscrew the piss port, then just ask a passing chap to pull my string (no! not wire) and all should hopefully be revealed.   And that is definitely true and I still have the stretch marks to prove it!

  A marked man.  Diving to any depth, with or without a suit has a number of hazards, but one that is not in the book is when you inadvertently get an appendage – like nipple, testicles or penis, even a fold of skin, it can end up in one of the many inevitable creases of the rubber suit! And after a few feet/fathom that gentle squeeze on the material becomes a vice-like grip – so that if you eventually go deep enough you are talking and experiencing a pressure of many pounds/tons per sq. inch.

   Unfortunately it is not possible to ‘re-adjust your clothing’ down there – you have to come back up and frustratingly start again.  Though not being well endowed, it rarely was a problem for me, but just think of the newly-wed husband trying to explain the various and embarrassingly placed bruises to his suspicious and possibly naive wife.

Deal me in! 

We were always taught  (and we always boasted) that a well trained diver can do anything underwater and though I cannot answer that for ‘anything’ I do know that it is surprising the amount of engineering, demolition, survey and photography is done to a superbly high standard. Welding and acetylene cutting certainly is impressive, as is firing underwater guns, drilling holes and pushing wheelbarrows (oh yes I did!).  I am sure there are now many more modern successes due to sophisticated improvement in this electronic age.

 But I have played cards…to while away the time either on a test dive, or just an     excuse to boost our income. For we were paid Diving Pay according how may   minutes we were submerged and at what particular depth – all very technical,  complicated -and so rewarding!  So any excuse to stay under, and in some cases a diversion to while away the time, playing I-Spy has its drawbacks and so does camp-fire singsongs.  So we heavily varnished a deck of playing cards, and then carefully attached a small fishing line type of split lead shot to each corner, then check for floatability and trim.  Now find a nice quiet sandy cove, not too deep so as the visibility would still be ok to see the cards, now sit on the bottom with three  others, make yourself comfy – and deal!  (Now where did I put that fifth Ace?)

Have you ever had a Grouper or a Manta Ray look over your shoulder, nudge you   and burble “that ten of Spades goes on that Jack of Hearts ......     bubblybubblububbullble????