I’m from Rathmullan in Co Donegal, just on the shores of Lough Swilly. My childhood home was straight across the road from the shore, so I transitioned from walking to swimming before I did anything else really.
I would have seen divers at the pier when I was a boy, I was always fascinated by the whole thing. I joined the local dive club, Sheephaven Subacqua, when I was 16. One of my first jobs after leaving school was at a local fish farm and the manager asked me if I would be interested in doing a commercial diving course, so I trained and qualified as a commercial diver.
You need to be calm and you need to plan what you are going to do when you get into the water. With salvage work, you might see a drawing of what something looked like before it sank and then when you find it on the bottom, you’ll think, that’s not what I saw in the picture. You have to think on your feet, or your fins as they say, because a lot of the time you are on a timescale with the tides.
If you are salvaging a boat, it could be sunken alongside a wharf or in open water. There is always an interesting factor there, how to rig it and how to get it up safely so that it will float again. There is always a good bit of thinking in it and I enjoy those kinds of jobs.
We do maintenance on propellers underwater, we’ve changed sonars, we’ve done small patching jobs to get a ship ready enough to get it to a shipyard to do a proper repair.
You never forget you are under water – you are breathing air underwater so you will always have that noise, the bubbles, the cold. Everything is a bit slower. When you are doing things with tools, your dexterity is slightly different, especially when it’s cold and you are wearing thick gloves. Gravity is another one – you are not completely weightless, but you move in 3D.
Most of the work in Ireland, especially coming into the winter now is in zero visibility. Today, I was out marking an anchor for a navigation buoy and I could probably see at the very most, with the two torches on, maybe six inches. And that was in 20m of water. You are always a bit more cautious in those environments.
There was one time when a mooring line twisted and caught me. I got tangled and I had to take out a knife and cut the line just to make sure I was free. There have been a few incidents where gauges have failed.
You do definitely get spooked by things, especially in zero visibility. Something might touch you, or you might touch something and you’re, “What the hell is this here?” It does make your heart jump, don’t get me wrong. It could be a fish, an eel or it could be something you didn’t expect to find down there.
I found an iPhone back last July for an Australian guy. He dropped it in and 48 hours later I found it on the bottom and it was still working, flashing at me.
Ten years ago, I found a big massive anchor that would have belonged to the British Grand Fleet that was based in Lough Swilly from the late 1890s. This would have been one of their main ports because it was so deep and accessible to the North Atlantic in the war years. I’m actually in the process of getting it lifted now for display in the town.
This year, the sea temperature went up to about 18 degrees and it will drop to 3 degrees or 4 degrees in winter. My dry suit is about 5mm thick and under that you wear merino wool to keep warm. Sitting, waiting, decompressing, that’s when you can get cold. You could be sitting for 10 minutes when the water is 3 or 4 degrees. It does take its toll on you.
Seals come around you a lot, there are always fish of some description. You hear the clicks of the dolphins, it’s just their sonar figuring out who you are and what you are doing. You are on their home turf so they are curious to see what you are.
One time, at Port Salon, a big whale came in with a calf. I didn’t realise it was a whale until the last minute, but the surface crew could see it and they panicked because the whale actually went over the top of me.
There are days in the winter when it’s just freezing cold, the hailstones are bouncing off you, you know it’s going to be zero visibility, you are going to be there for an hour and you think, my God, is there something else I could do today.
When it’s warm and it’s sunny and it’s crystal clear and you can see what you are doing, you think, I could stay in here for hours. Thank God those days do come in the summer, that’s what keeps you going in the winter.
You can get a call out to do anything, that’s what I like about it. Every day is different underwater.
- In conversation with Joanne Hunt
