The Cost of Diving

I've been diving my whole adult life and I have always been fascinated with wrecks. I can still remember my first wreck dive in a small lake in Ontario. It was 1992 and I had just completed my PADI Advanced Diver course. I had a total of 16 dives under my weight belt and I was considered an advanced diver. It sounds so ridiculous to me now. At the time, I had decided to venture out with some of the other more experienced divers from our local shop and try a wreck dive.

As we bounced along in the inflatable boat heading towards our dive site, wearing thin wet suits, the snow started to fall. We were told that the water temp was a balmy 36 degrees. After we geared up I patiently sat on the side of the boat, waiting for my turn to jump in. I watched my instructor take a long haul off his cigarette and then exhale through his reg as he rolled back into the water. Everyone thought this was very funny. The ironic part is I think I had read something about not smoking right before a dive? I shrugged and rolled in.

I love the history of wrecks and the challenges that come with diving them. This feeling of excitement has never changed even after 16 years of diving. The first time I learned of Scapa Flow was in the spring of 1996. I was sitting in a Trimix course and the guy seated next to me taking the course was heading over to Scapa Flow, Scotland the following year. I listened to him talk about the fact that it is one of the best wreck sites in the world and that this very course would help prepare him for the dive. I was sold.

In 7th century AD, the Vikings discovered a shallow body of water near the Orkney Islands that was perfect for anchorage. It became an effective raiding base and it was the Vikings who named it Scapa Flow. The word Scapa from the Norse word skalpr, meaning ship. Flow comes from floi, meaning plenty of water.

For the world of divers, Scapa Flow is now known for the rough, frigid northern waters and the graveyard of World War One German wrecks that populate the seabed. They are there from the end of World War One, when Germans guarding the ships scuttled them rather than turning them over to the allied forces.

It took me two years before I organized my first trip to Scapa. There were only 4 of us on the trip, which was not a surprise, given we made the trip in December! Regardless, the wrecks were bigger and better than I had hoped for. I knew I would be back.

My second trip was just a year later in 1999. In the spring of 2003, I organized my third and largest dive trip to Scotland. By this time my business had taken off and the retail side was taking a toll on my time. My personal life was changing too. While opening a dive shop, I got married and bought a house all in a matter of 6 months. During this time I also was organizing 3 international and 15 other local dive trips. Hey I was living the dream, as a friend of mine said.

The actual trip to Scapa is not for the faint of heart. The 9 hour flight from Vancouver to Heathrow seemed easy compared to the 12 hour drive to Edinburgh after the flight. Driving while sleep-deprived, on the other side of the road and the other side of the car, zipping along curvy roads often blocked by sheep was somehow crazy according to some people. I guess you have to love driving and the country you're driving through.

Three days after arriving in Heathrow, 10 excited divers were loading on to the Orkney Islands ferry. It's a two and a half hour trip with most of the ferry ride exposed to the open Northern Sea. I've learned from past trips that this can make for an interesting - and on occasion a very rough - voyage. The sun was starting to set as our ferry made its approach to Stromness Harbour. The sky was lit with an orangey red glow. The entire town hugs a small hill that runs right down to the docks. The small old stone houses are packed close together as if to protect each other from the unforgiving northern winds. I have read that the first dwellings were built here over 1000 years ago.

As we unloaded our vehicles from the ferry, I climbed out to have a look around. The docks had changed from the last time I was there. It had been four years since my last visit and I felt a little lost in the fading light of the day. Finally I saw our boat moored down at the dock. It was the first time I used the company Sunshine Charters. They came highly recommended and have a great reputation within the Orkney diving community.

Most of the dive vessels in Scapa have been converted from fishing boats built of solid wood with big high bows and sterns designed to handle the rough weather. This one was the same, a fishing boat with the addition of a long Wight top covering most of the deck, in order to give its divers some shelter from the cold winds.

Just as I located our boat I saw our host, Dougie, stroll down the dock towards us. He's about 5 foot 8 with a stocky build, wearing a typical thick wool sweater. He has an Orkney look about him. The people of Orkney don't refer to themselves as Scottish but rather as Orcadians. They are Scottish with a Viking heritage.

That night we unloaded everything from our cars into the boat and headed to the local pub for dinner. Conversation weaved around what dives we will be doing, our gear, and what the weather holds for the next day. Despite our excitement, we started to run out of steam and eventually found our way back to the boat that would be home for the next six days.

On Day 1 we were up early. The bustle and noise around the boat would be best described as controlled chaos. When the boat pulled away from the dock we had finished setting up our gear and started making plans for our first dive. Our boat rolled through the waves towards the wreck of the Kronprinz Wilhelm.

The Kronprinz Wilhelm was a battleship, Konig Class. She was completed on November 8, 1914. The Konig class battleships were some of the biggest ships the world had ever seen. The ship was so big in fact that the Kiel Canal had to be widened to let her pass to open ocean. She had awesome specifications at 575 feet long, a beam of 97 feet and a draft of over 30 feet. She displaced 25,800 tons. Her main armour plating was 13.8 inches thick. She had a power plant that produced 48,000 horsepower, driving three huge propellers with a top speed of 22 knots. At the battle of Jutland, the only naval battle of World War One, she was the fourth in line of seven battleships with a crew of 1136 men. Although her sister-ships the Konig and Markgraf were badly damaged in the thick of the battle, the Kronprinz came through unscathed and kept up a steady hail of fire on the British battleships. It wasn't until 1919 that she would find her resting place here at Scapa Flow. She had survived the war, but rather than have her handed over to the British, her crew scuttled her, to lie forever along with the rest of the High Seas Fleet.

Some of the group had already picked their dive partners while others needed some help. We had a very mixed group on the boat that year. Pat and Ken were dive instructors and friends from the same dive shop back in Vancouver. Doug and Derek were also good friends who had been on a number of our trips together over the years. Miro and Rick held the same certification level and had made about the same number of dives, so they seemed to make a good match. Ron and Ron B were both new to technical diving but had a lot of past diving experience. I buddied up with Chris who was one of our best clients and had done over 20 trips with us. These buddy pairs matched divers according to their level of experience and what type of dives they would be doing. This way, divers with less experience wouldn't be asked to go beyond their ability and those with more experience would not be held back.

Due to the type of diving and the extensive travel, trips like these demand a high level of trust in fellow divers and the bonding and camaraderie tends to be great. This trip was no different. Most people on the boat knew each other and I had taught all but Derek at one time or another.

We went through the final checks on our gear and laid the plans for the first dive. Dives in Scapa are what we call "live boat sites" meaning that neither the boat nor the divers are ever anchored. Instead, they both travel with the current. The boat runs up-current from the wreck. A diver team jumps in there, and descends quickly, with the current pushing the divers towards the wreck. The dive boat then moves off allowing the next team of divers to get ready, then repeats the process. At the end of a dive, the divers deploy a lift bag with line attached. The lift bag, as it rises to the surface, shows the boat where the divers are. The line allows the divers to ascend safely, with some reference in the open ocean. The ascent and safety stops are done drifting with the current, and the boat picks up the divers wherever they surface.

Due to the live boat drop we needed to go in small groups of two or three at a time. The divers waiting their turn helped the others gear up. As the boat started making passes over the wreck, the first group got on deck and stood at the doorway in a line, ready to go. The captain slowed the boat and started turning to the left in a large arc about 100 yards up current. Our deck hand got the signal from the Captain and yelled, "First team Go!" Standing at the doorway, the divers slipped their regulators into their mouths and plunged into the water. One after another they dropped the 6 feet from boat deck to ocean surface, gave a quick salute to the boat to indicate that all entries went well, then immediately started their descent. Then the boat drifted away to get the next group of divers into position.

Dougie continued to make wide circles around the wreck below, dropping more of the divers on each pass. Chris and I were the last group to go in; we had held back in order to help everyone else get off the boat without incident. Standing at the edge of the doorway hanging to the rail I felt the gentle rocking of the boat as she crossed back and forth over her own wake. Finally we got the call to jump. There was a brief but intense feeling from the sudden change from standing on a pitching deck while wearing 180lbs of gear to hitting the water and suddenly the weight of your gear gone.

As we hit the water, we quickly dumped the air from our buoyancy compensators (BCs) in order to descend as fast as we could. Once at about 50 feet, we had to keep our eyes forward and focused on looking for the wreck in this green murky swirling world. The visibility was really bad but as we dropped it improved slowly to about 40 feet of clear sight. Suddenly, the ocean bottom appeared to rush toward us and I inflated my BC to prevent myself from slamming into the seabed. I checked my gauge and realized that our descent was a little too quick and we were only at 75 feet and were hovering just above on the hull of the wreck, not the sea floor. It's hard to imagine what a 25,800 ton Battleship will look like until you really see it. With her sheer size, the trick really becomes trying to figure out where you are on the wreck.

Try to imagine floating up to an apartment building that is 600 feet long, 100 feet across and 8 stories high. The Kronprinz was so big that everywhere we looked all we could see was the hull of the ship. That first impression never leaves you!

I remembered from past trips that the best dive was to be found over the high side of the hull. I took a good look and noticed one side of the hull was a little higher than the other. I signalled to Chris. I could tell he was thinking the same, so we moved off to the high side. As we passed over the hull and down along what is now the upturned starboard side of the wreck, we passed several large guns and the wreckage of the main funnel and superstructure. We were moving through the wreckage at 120 feet and saw what looked to be the tower mixed in with other parts of the superstructure. Everything was covered in a thick layer of marine growth that had flourished for about 80 years. Some of the large steel plates nearer to the ground could be mistaken for rocks if you didn't look closely.

We decided to pass under what was once the deck of the ship. The light of the sun was completely gone now, we were at 130 feet. Looking below me with the help of my high intensity dive light, I could see coal covering the ground. This coal was once stored in the bunkers of the ship to feed its huge engines. I checked my gauge; we were running out of time. In our dive plan, we had agreed to keep the dive short to avoid too much in-water decompression obligation. This was our first dive of the trip, so we wanted to take it easy in the event that we needed to work out any bugs.

Chris and I moved up the side of this massive ship and the light came back as soon as we moved from under the upside down deck. We reached the top of the hull again and stopped to deploy our lift bags and start the ascent to the surface. Chris and I had only a couple of decompression stops to complete, so our ascent wouldn't take us too long. As we deployed our lift bags, Chris' reel and lift bag slipped from his hands. Chris and I watched the reel and line as they slowly disappeared. With a sheepish grin, he pulled out and deployed his back-up lift bag and reel.

The visibility was bad. Back at 20 feet we could only see about 5 feet in any direction and anything further away was lost in a shower of snow-like plankton. It felt like we were swimming through a blizzard. We stayed close to each other but towards the end of the dive with about 5 minutes remaining we lost sight of each other. There was nothing we could do but wait and hope we ran into each other again. The general rule goes that if you try and swim around without knowing which way your buddy has drifted then you take the chance of swimming off in the wrong direction altogether. A few minutes later I was back on the surface, could see Chris' lift bag behind me, and the boat was swinging around to pick us up.

I watch the bow slice through the waves as the dive boat rushes towards me. I grab for the ladder and start the 8 foot climb. I'm wearing fins and 180 pounds of gear so this is no easy task.

As I reach the top of the ladder, I am met by two of our divers.

"What's up?" I say. I look around at the faces watching me.

"Is Ron B with you?"

"No, why?"

"Isn't that his lift bag in the water?" Pat asks.

Without looking I shake my head, "no that's Chris' lift bag, he was right behind me."

"No, not that one. The other one", Pat says while pointing to the second bag bobbing in the water farther off to our right. I recognize this as Chris' first lift bag he lost during our ascent.

"What are you telling me? Ron B's not surfaced yet?" I say, a little agitated. "Where's his buddy?"

Ron steps forward.

"What's going on? Where's Ron B?" I ask him.

"We were separated at about 30 feet," Ron says.

"How long have you been out of the water?" I ask.

Ron looks me in the eye and tells me he's been out of the water for 56 minutes! I think to myself that can't be right. I reached out to grab the railing of the boat as a passing wave causes me to lose balance.

"I don't care how long your dive was, I want to know how long you have been out of the water!" I said.

"Hamish, I've been out of the water and back on the boat for 56 minutes!"

This sentence changes everything.

It felt like the wind was being knocked out of me. Suddenly there was movement everywhere but I couldn't move, like time had slowed down for me somehow. Dougie yelled down that he is calling the coast guard. At the same time Chris returned to the surface and the boat started to swing around to pick him up. It was 12:30pm.

I turned to Ron and asked him where they were and why they didn't come up together.

"He was right with me as we came up. We got to 30ft and switched to our deco tanks. I started to deploy my lift bag when we somehow become buoyant we would have gone right to the surface," he replied, "but we dumped air from the BC's. We had ascended to 10 feet in seconds we then turned and got back down to 30ft. Everything seemed OK. Ron B was pulling out his lift bag right beside me, about 5 feet away.

"The viz was really shit."

"I know," I said.

"I turned away to check my gauges and when I looked back he was gone from sight," Ron said.

"Were you in deco?" I asked him.

"No, we had a 2 minute stop on our computers so we wanted to ascend slowly and stop just to be sure," Ron said.

The reality of it hit me. We were missing a diver. Ron B was missing!

I managed to find an empty spot on the bench to get my gear off. My mind was screaming, "What the hell is going on!" There were hands all around me pulling my gear off.

"We need to find Ron B," Dougie barked down for everyone to get topside and help them search.

The mayday went out across the airwaves to the Coast guard. Other fishing boats and dive charter boats in the area returned the call and ask if they could assist. Within 10 minutes we had 8 dive vessels, two Coast Guard boats and over 100 sets of eyes helping in our search. We could hear a helicopter en route. We'll find him, I thought.

Looking through powerful binoculars I had got from the bridge, I searched desperately. How had Ron B managed to drift so far away from the boat or why hadn't he used his lift bag? My mind was focused on finding him, and no other scenario.

Dougie worked our boat towards the edge of Cava Island to the west of us. We knew that once Ron B surfaced he would be swept toward this island by the current at this time of the day. Above us the chopper passed over us about 300 feet off the deck. They had the same idea as Dougie. I looked back into the wheelhouse and saw Dougie working the radio coordinating the search with the other dive boats.

Too much time had passed and there was no sign of Ron B. Divers from another dive charter went back in the water to search the wreck. It would have taken too long for our divers to refill tanks and head back down, that and everyone in our group had just finished a dive and it wouldn't have been safe to send us right back in. We were still holding onto hope that we were going to find Ron B at the surface. The chopper headed back to base to refuel before continuing its search.

The day dragged on and we all started come to grips with what seems to be a grim reality. We were not going to find Ron B on the surface. Everyone was up on deck looking for him but there was a solemn feeling in the air. Doug's fianc?e who had joined us for the trip was quietly crying. She and Doug had planned to be married there in Orkney right after we had finished diving.

At 6:30pm the search was called off until the next day. The reality hit me. The chances of finding him alive were slim to none. Dougie told me the police were waiting to talk to me on the dock and wanted me to bring his personal belongings. I spent the boat ride back to Stromness in Ron's room looking at his suitcases and gathering his things to hand over to the police.

We returned to the dock and I headed up to the police office to answer their questions about Ron B and deliver his belongings. The questioning took place over a three hour period and the nature of the questions was disconcerting. I realized quickly that this was an investigation of me as well, not just of the accident. How long have you know Ron for? What his wife like? Is he a good diver? How long has he been diving for? I looked across to the next room to see that they were interviewing some of the other divers on the boat including our Captain Dougie. Later the guys told me that the police were asking a lot of questions about my relationship with Ron B.

Near the end of the interview, the most difficult thing I have ever done took place. I took a call from Ron's wife and eldest son in the Sergeant's office. As I tried to answer their questions, I felt my strength leaving me. I was on one knee with my head in my arms. It seemed unbelievable that I was trying to help my friend's wife of 40 years understand why I don't know what has happened to her husband and why we don't have his body. After the call the sergeant asked if I wanted to take a break and have a breath of fresh air. I walked out the front door, turned left and found a place to sit on an old stonewall overlooking the town. Looking out across the water at the small town below me, it hit me that life hadn't stopped. The day moved on without us. Ron was dead! Then the tears come.

The next day we headed back to the Kronprinz. Our plan was to search the wreck in three groups. I had spent most of the evening and the morning going over the dive with Ron. We searched for some clue as to what might have happened and where we should start looking. According to Ron and the computer he was wearing, they only had a scheduled stop at 15 feet for 2 minutes and had spent most of their time on the wreck between 80 feet to 100 feet along the starboard side. We tried to guess where they started their ascent and where the current could have taken them from there. Ron also mentioned that Ron B had some trouble with his buoyancy at depth. Maybe he was wearing too much weight on his belt? Several of the dive charter boats helped by putting divers in the water and using their depth sounders to search the ocean floor.

It was silently accepted that the next four or five days of our vacation would be spent looking for Ron's body. If nothing else, I was going to bring him back to his family. That day we had an ROV and tender from Stromness out searching the wreck. After three hours we were sure that Ron B must have drifted with the current and was somewhere in the valley between the wrecks on the bottom that made up this part of the bay. This clue made me rethink that Ron B was negatively buoyant when the accident happened. If he had been negatively buoyant then it was unlikely that he would have drifted away from the wreck as he must have done.

After the first day the authorities stopped looking and according to them he was lost at sea. Two of the other dive boats helped on the second day out of compassion but on the third day they had to get on with their trips. The third and fourth days were spent down-current and drifting towards the wreck in the opposite direction that Ron B would have been traveling. We were hoping to find him somewhere in the flats, but again he was nowhere to be found.

As the week wore on the fear that we were not going to find him at all took hold of me. At the end of day 4 of the search, I contacted the Minster in town to see if we could arrange for a ceremony on the boat. A number of us felt that this was the right thing to do. The ceremony was held that day, our last dive day, and was a fitting memorial for a man who loved the ocean and loved to dive.

We returned that night from our last search and everyone started breaking down their gear and getting ready for the drive back to London the next day. I had received Ron B's bags back from the police the day before, but I didn't have the heart to open them. I put them aside with my own gear and tried to come up with a plan for how to get them back to Vancouver. That night we went out for a group dinner and tried to celebrate the fact that I turned 32 that day. After such a hard and emotional week everyone needed to let loose. Most of us got so drunk that we had to help each other back to the boat to collect our gear before the sun came up and the 6am ferry arrived.

Getting on the ferry that morning without Ron's body was heartbreaking. I felt like I was walking away. What had caused this? Ron B was an older guy but in good physical condition and he passed all of his courses without exception. Again, I replayed what had happened that morning in the boat. I was one of the people who helped Ron get geared up and made sure he had everything he needed with him. Did I forget something? Could I have done anything different? Was there something wrong with the gas in his tanks? What about a gas bubble he may have acquired during that bounce to 10 feet at the end of their dive? Not knowing is in some ways still the hardest part.

People frequently ask me if I get a rush by Tek diving. I use technical diving methods to enable me to go to places many people never get to see. Is it a rush? Yes, but the goal is not to take big risks. The obvious truth is that diving is dangerous and there will be risk. My goal has always been to keep the risks at an acceptable level.

I'm not jumping over busses on a motorcycle. The diving I do is not about just making it back alive, but rather taking something that is inherently dangerous and trying to make it as safe as I can. If there is such a thing as "having a rush" in doing technical dives, then that's where I find it. My goal is to keep the cost of diving as low as I can every time.

What is the cost of diving? It seems to be different for everyone. The cost for me has been the scars I carry from losing friends like Ron. I think about him often. He is not the first person that I have known who has lost their life or sustained a serious injury while diving. I have known close to a dozen people who have been involved in major accidents in the last 15 years.

I read recently that an average of 10 people a year lose their lives at Scapa Flow. Does it make me think twice about diving? The honest answer is no. As long as I am able, I will dive with an acceptable level of risk to experience some of the most amazing places on earth.

I would like to express my gratitude to the many people of Stromness that helped us. They gave their time and compassion willingly and without their help that week would have been unbearable.