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
