St Andrew’s University Sub Aqua Club went through a phase of great activity in the early 90’s. We had some great members and some good friends from Southport SAC with excellent kit, like boats that actually worked in rough weather. And we had some great adventures. We like to think that at that time we were at the cutting edge of adventurous sport diving. I’ve certainly never met anyone since who could better what we were doing at the time, and before the age of internet forums, word of mouth was the only certain means of communication. Some of the adventures were foolish, some ambitious, some would seen reckless to others, but my memory is that we were quite simply young, fearless and at the top of our game. I do remember hearing a complete stranger telling one of my stories to a mate in the pub, as if it had happened to him, which I guess is some measure of approbation. He did have the grace to look slightly sheepish when I had to tell him I didn’t remember him being there!
We were doing fast drift dives, deep dives, fast deep drift dives, and deep dives on underwater pinnacles that most will never have heard of. And we were doing them on air. We were all students, the kit for nitrox and trimix was quite simply beyond us at that point. Not so now, the boys have a mixing panel in their garage but I bowed out when the kit got too complicated and the emphasis changed to serious wreck diving. The West Coast of Scotland offered a wealth of opportunity for the intrepid dive team with a good RHIB and a willingness to burn gallons of petrol. PeteT’s Glen Uig Inn was the starting point for many a weekend’s frivolity. Muck and Eigg both have deep vertical walls guarding the entrance to their harbours, with a perfect current that takes you along the wall at your chosen depth and speed with no effort required, although it does make scalloping a bit more challenging. The mighty Bo Fascadale, a dramatic volcanic plug, 16-65m, rearing up from the seabed like a tower block covered in sea life, with a cave at 65m in one face that I never managed to find. Elizabeth Rock, the elusive companion, deeper, harder to find with an echo sounder and first generation GPS, before the descrambling, when the closest you got was a 50m margin of error. Glen Uig itself is an amazing community of musicians and poets, a tremendous pub where a ceilidh springs up whenever the wind turns. We took Dave, previously a champion piper, and nearly lost him there for ever. I can still hear the pipes swirling around the bay as we tinkered with the RHIB and Dave took himself off up the hill. To truly understand the magic of the Highland great-pipes, that is how they should be heard, unstinted, unfettered, full volume, echoing between sea and sky and precipice, calling the ancients to life, calling the tribes to war, calling the mountains themselves to song.
DaveA used to pop valium before dropping us in to the Grey Dog Race, Cuan Sound or Dorus Mhor, all roaring tidal races that we did faster and faster, racing along the sea bed, mostly alone, as the current took you and your buddy off in different directions, tumbling in the turbulence, swirling up as well down, the computer screeching alarms as the depth changed too quickly to calculate stops, watching your bubbles spinning around, up, down, the torch beam spinning in the murky green gloom, the adrenaline pumping until the sudden feeling of release when the current joined the open sea again and the run ended, and you had to work out which way up the light was, put up a marker buoy, start doing stops, flag or torch ready to be found by the boat, often over a mile from the start of the dive and still travelling at a few knots.
Dorus Mhor was the most serious, it just got deeper and deeper and the spit out at the end was from 40m into bottomless green murk, completely disorientated, swirling, panting, watching the air gauge going down with each uncontrolled gasping breath, watching the marker buoy go down and down before heading for the surface, and then doing the loneliest stops in the world, floating in mid water, counting the minutes, doing frantic useless sums, still drifting quickly further away from the boat, 20 minutes of stops, how will they find me if that buoy didn’t hit the surface, have I got enough air to do these stops or am I going to be fizzing on the surface waiting for the search team tomorrow? We did lose people occasionally!
One memorable occasion was the weekend Ken invited me to join the BSAC Advanced Instructors and Area Coaches on a fast drift diving weekend on Dave’s boat. Bearing in mind that this was our specialist subject at the time and went against everything BSAC taught! I was the only girl, was not an AI or an area coach!
Ken picked me up from a ball in St A’s at 4am and we drove across the country, me still in my dress and heels, planning to change on the pier to start the wind up in good style. Except when we got there Dave was sweating already and I snuck off around the corner, the gag just as likely to backfire. We inevitably lost one of the Advanced Instructors- he didn’t follow instructions, didn’t get his marker buoy up at the allotted time and so surfaced out of sight after doing all his stops. By that time he had gone a good mile or two, and it took us a couple of hours to find him. Dave didn’t swear often!
The SAUSAC favourite drift dive was the Falls of Lora, under the bridge where Loch Etive tumbles into the sea. Jam and I went there once to dive it on slack as a shore dive, only slack never happened, the Falls just turned around without stopping and we sat there for two or three hours waiting for the thing to slow down. Although it was still going full speed we got bored so we decided to jump in anyway-not the best run through I ever had but certainly the fastest! I used to love boat handling there, scooping the terrified St A’s novices out of the raging torrent after their first go at a proper drift dive!
Port Appin Pier on New Year’s Eve at midnight. Black as hell, vertical, bottomless. JM did 100m there one year after a fight with RA who officiously thought he was too drunk to get in the water. I did 72m, one night, the depth of the year I was born, taking care to lose my buddy at about 40m, carrying on down into the dark, fighting the narcs, keeping it together, true rapture of the deep, just like the Big Blue. Then the moment you always forget about, when you turn around from free fall position to fin for the surface and all the blood redistributes from your core to your legs and you go light headed and dizzy just at the moment when you most need to keep it together, inflate suit, start finning, regulate breathing, work hard but not too hard, beat gravity, beat free fall, beat momentum, beat nitrogen, swim and live.
An Chailleach, the pinnacle beneath the whirlpool in the Gulf of Corryvreckan, the most beautiful and notorious tidal race of them all. In Gaelic, Chailleach means the hag or witch, and this infamous patch of water certainly inspires immense terror. The “un-navigable” race runs between Scarba and Jura, the standing waves reach 10m high, the whirlpool can be seen from a perch on the hillside of either island and underwater there is a sharp pinnacle at 30m. At the time, the only known dive on the pinnacle had been a navy diver who got swept off the top and down into the depths before being spat back up again and living to tell the tale. His depth gauge apocryphally read 200m, possibly the deepest bounce dive recorded on sub aqua kit. We thought this must be pressure effects, you surely couldn’t survive that depth, but the seabed does drop off one side to that depth, so who knows?
So started months of meticulous planning. Neap tides, unusually for this group that normally chased the fastest tides, the best neap tides of the year, a team of 12, all capable, all self sufficient, all self reliant, not so easy when the BSAC buddy is drummed into any budding diver like a mantra, all with computers, pony rigs, buoy, flag, torch, well versed in doing open water stops, all used to deep diving, going down an endless shot-line into the gloom without losing the plot. I wish I had made a list of the team on that first day, it was the most perfect day, and it is only in retrospect that I have come to realise how truly special it was and how perfect. Me, Jam, JM, DA, KA, KS, GK, MK,PH,AC—2 missing or were we only 10 divers? Dave chewing pills like gum as he drove us into the sound, listening to the roar of the standing waves at the other end, feeling the whirlpool catching and snagging the hull, feeling the inboard that had taken us everywhere strain against the force of the spiral, hearing it splutter occasionally, as we sounded for the pinnacle. The first cast with the shot line missed, the current too fast, having to haul the 40m of line back into the boat, all tense, the timings crucial. Let it go again, watch it catch, over again with the echo, 34m but right on the edge of the drop off, meaning we can’t pull it on the way down or it will come off. Kitting up, waiting for the buoys to surface at slack, still with the roar in your ears, still the boat pitching and tossing, it seems inconceivable that the tide will turn and the whirlpool stop. Some days it doesn’t, it simply reverses, the surface water and the deep water turning in opposite directions until the inexorable tide wins again. I remember sitting on the edge of the boat, heavy with kit, light with fear, staring death in the face. Not a certain death, not even a likely death, just one of the possible permutations of one of the ways the day might end. I may have faced more objective dangers since, but I have never since chosen to actively embrace them in the same way. But hey, 30 looked old in those days!
The timing was perfect, the whirlpool did stop, 40minutes of slack predicted, buoys on the surface at 30minutes please, chap and chapesses, and please no more than 10 minutes of stops, all to be back on the boat at 40minutes. Running down the shot line, letting it slide between finger and thumb, chasing Jam, always the quickest to the bottom, like a rat down a hole, the familiar blue to green to murk, then to glow as you switch the torch on, all so familiar yet so alien that day, everything heightened by pure adrenaline. The top of the pinnacle was amazing, swept absolutely clean by the force of the maelstrom, nothing grows on it, yet in the crack teems the most abundant, colourful, varied life I have seen anywhere in Scottish waters, in over 1000 dives. Jam and I floated over the edge, resisting the pull of the depths, not going for free fall today, just poking around, counting colours, marvelling at fish and squidgies and at the tranquillity that can be hidden beneath the turmoil above.
As we did a time check and started finning lazily back towards the surface of the pinnacle, we found an amazing rock cavern. Like an open air theatre, the size of a small room, roughly round, with a flat bottom, and walls about 15feet high. We lay on our backs on the floor of the cavern, torches playing over the walls, which were plastered with jewel anemones and nudibranchs, in colour coded patches like a paint card. I remember Jam’s eyes smiling through his mask, the little bubbles that come with giggles of pure glee. I think we both looked down at the same time and realised the floor of the cavern was made up of perfectly round smooth flat boulders. We looked up at the light above and both computed that there was only one force that could have polished those boulders to that shine, and got out of there quick!
Finning over the summit of the pinnacle, the current was just starting to tug impatiently at our fins. Buoy up, push up, take your leave, reluctantly, slowly, barely ascending, torch panning over the rock until the visibility ran out and the gloom won again. Hitting the surface, the boat on top of us, huge kerfuffle, up the ladder, in the corner in a heap, bottle off and all in, the boat powering away just as the roaring started again. Looking back at the standing waves, rearing up to full height almost instantly, just where we had been moment before.
The perfect day, for many reasons. A close-knit team had a wild dream, and achieved something that hadn’t been done before by civilian recreational divers. So as far as we know we were the first team to do a planned dive on the pinnacle of the Gulf of Corryvreckan. It’s certainly not common place now! The flawless execution of the plan- the timings were spot on, the tide calculations worked, the dive itself was amazing. We did go back, the others have been back since looking at a wreck off on one of the sides of the pinnacle, but nothing ever matched up to the pure perfection of that first dive. There is of course, finally, the whole thing about places of power.
There are only seven major whirlpools in the world. Were we really lying on the floor of the hole that had been formed by the vortex itself? I don’t know for sure, but it certainly could have been. Modern science has demystified so many things, as has the internet. On UK diving there is a perfect topo diagram of the underwater pinnacle and the boulder holes, but in my head the vivid fragmented impressions are more real and magical and still have a hold over me many years on. So now, I remember and cherish a little privileged minute in time when I rested in the centre of the maelstrom of An Chailleach and counted the colours.
