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
