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
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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