Island Life Magazine Ltd February/March 2015 | Page 12

INTERVIEW said: “It was a bit like a space station, but with a complex of chambers built into the bottom of the ship. You went into the compression chambers and pressured up to whatever depth you are working at, and then you lived at that depth for a month, normally working eight-hour shifts. You worked outside the bell in hot water suits which were fine when they worked, but often they didn’t! I think the longest shift I had down there was over 17 hours. Then at the end of the month you did five days of decompression before you returned to normal life. But it was like any other job to me.” He continued: “I had a few scary moments in bad conditions. One day the diving bell got caught up in a wire in rough conditions, and when the ship we were diving off blew off station it left us at an horrendous angle. Fortunately the wire which had gone round the tube that supplied our gas, broke out, and we were ok. Yes it was dangerous sometimes, but I would rather do that than drive a taxi!” Martin admits that in the early days of deep sea diving there was no such thing as health and safety regulations - it was just a case of getting the jobs done. One of those jobs was actually diving down the inside of huge legs of oil rigs. He said: “We went down inside the legs of the rig, maybe 200ft, to recover drill bits or do other work. Some divers didn’t like doing it, but I did it because I would be getting ‘back-handers’ all the time. The basic rig leg was 3ft across which was luxury; I used to do a lot of 30-inch ones, which you could just about get down. “I was down below the mud line sometimes, but you weren’t going to come to much harm. It was good fun, but some of the work we did would never be allowed now. These days you have to have four people on site to go two feet under water - ridiculous! Health and Safety killed the small diving business.” He recalls: “When I was working in 12 www.visitilife.com the Gulf we had a rig blow out, and it all disintegrated. It left a bubble of gas burning, and we were surveying down to 200ft, just diving with air tanks. It was dangerous, but fun. I wouldn’t have missed a moment of it.” Although his days working on and below oil rigs have long gone, Martin still enjoys the thrill of wreck diving. As well as the 2,000 or so wrecks recorded around the Isle of Wight there are an incredible 250,000 under the water around the British Isles He has dived on some 600 around the Island, but reckons: “There are still plenty out there to be found. The biggest one I looked for was the HMS Victory - the one before the Victory you can see in