Put a RIB on the long, low swell that rolls in to the West Coast of Scotland from the deep waters of the Atlantic and someone is going to be sick. Mick Moor, alone at the helm of the Dive Club six metre Rigid Hull never enjoyed it. Rummaging around in the bottom of the boat for kit was a pretty good way saying goodbye to breakfast. The twist and pitch of the boat eased as the tide rose to full flow around the headland. Calliach Point reared from the water, with the distinctive flat rock marking the wreck of the liner Aurania at its foot. The boilers lay a hundred yards off the rock and the rest, busted to scrap by eighty years of tides, was strewn southwards across three hundred yards of seabed. He had four divers in the water with a mix of experience between them. He checked the figures pencilled on the plastic slate against his watch and scanned the water around him. He couldn't see any bubbles and the plan was for a delayed marker to be sent up during the ascent, but he’d been told to watch for a lifting bag. Moor tweaked the ignition, kicking the starboard engine into life and eased the wheel around. Two engines may be better than one, but for tootling around on one would suffice, OK so the RIB pulled slightly to one side, but what the hell, it worked. Moor headed into the tide for about a hundred and fifty yards, swung the boat around and knocked the engine out of gear. A check of his watch showed it was ten fifteen. It would be half past before the last pair of divers was back on board, then a twenty five minute run into Tobermory, they should be back in good time for lunch, drop off the cylinders at the dive shop and pick them up later on. They had spare cylinders for the afternoon dive.
Jenny Brown, a petite brunette who looked barely strong enough to pick up her kit had seven years of regular diving under her weight belt. She had drawn the short straw and buddied with the least experienced, Jim Vernon had joined the club last winter and this was his first sea dive. The preparation and entry had gone smoothly, kitting up and rolling backwards over the side, no problem and they had descended into the gloomy green water, slipping down the shot line dropped alongside the boilers. The plan was simple enough, do the dive and return to the shot but British diving conditions weren’t always that co-operative, hence the delayed markers. Jenny paused at the top of the shot and waited for Jim to sort himself out and when he gave her the OK, she turned her thumb down. Confirmation from Jim and they rolled over and kicked for the bottom. Eighteen metres below they touched down and the surrounding area was tinged with a grey brown cast, the water above them a pale green. The visibility was good, it was shady rather than dark and torches brought along as a matter of course would be used for probing dark holes rather than the basic task of seeing their way around. Ten metres away the boilers loomed from the shadows and Jenny got an OK from Jim once he settled down beside her she chopped her hand in the direction of the boilers. He stayed close up alongside her left shoulder. Jenny blew air via the direct feed into her dry-suit and eased away from the sea bed, the folds in her membrane suit had begun to nip, checking herself a couple of metres up and kicked, the fins pushed her forward and the boilers solidified as they approached. The plan was simple, hit bottom, a couple of minutes around the boilers, then south across the debris field. A cloud of mackerel shimmied past the edge of her field of vision, Jim saw them too and let her know and they found themselves among the territorial fish at the boilers. Conger, a couple of species of Wrasse and an ancient Pollack lurked amongst the wreckage. She flashed her torch around and checked the holes in the metal. Jim got a little too close for comfort to the residence of the Conger and she hurriedly drew him back with a wag of her finger. He gave her an OK and grinned behind his mask. That was fine, he'd got the message and she led him on, completing a circuit of the boilers before she checked the compass on her gauge console and pointed south. It was all going very smoothly when they stumbled on a discarded aqualung. Jenny vented her suit and dropped down beside it for a closer look. A battered demand valve was clamped around the pillar valve and a length of rope was tied securely around the neck of the cylinder. Three feet or so of rope from one side of the knot ended at a frayed end. The ten feet from the other side ended in a spliced loop attached to a screw-gate karabiner. The ragged end had probably once supported a float, but the broken rope had allowed it to float away and left the breathing set on the seabed. She unclipped the lifting bag from the D-link on the left shoulder of her stab jacket and handed it to Jim. He took it and began to unroll the bag. Jenny worked on the piece of rope around the neck and tied it into a secure loop, pulling hard on the line to check it would hold and reached for the karabiner attached to the strop of the bag. Jim pushed the rest of the bag away, stretching it to its full extent as she clipped the line to the Krab and unhooked the valve of her pony cylinder; she tucked it into the mouth of the lifting bag and purged it. A blast of air shot from the mouthpiece and the bag lurched upright, straining against the weight of the cylinder, a touch more and it strained harder and then a third and the bag began to lift slowly. She withdrew the valve, hooked it up again and pushed Jim away. They both eased back and watched the burdened bag begin its ascent, slowly at first, but faster as the air inside expanded with the decreasing pressure and it closed on the surface. Satisfied it wasn't coming back, she aimed an OK at Jim, got one in return and headed south again.
The yellow bag burst from the water thirty yards ahead of the RIB and bobbed in the swell. Mick Moor restarted the second engine and motored down on to it, aiming his bow slightly to one side. The yellow rubberised canvas bumped against the orange Hypalon tube as he knocked the engines into neutral, stepped from astride the console and leaned over to grab the bag by the black webbing strap stitched to the top. He dragged the bag and its load over the tube and dumped them in the stern of the boat, surprised that it wasn't a goody bag full of non-ferrous, or at least something edible. A lost aqualung he didn't expect. He left it there and resumed his seat at the helm, taking the boat back up-tide and out into deeper water where there was less chance of coming to grief while he dealt with the bag. Jenny and Jim were first up, ten minutes after the bag and he nudged the boat between them, leaving Jenny to hang on while he took care of Jim, stripping his kit and hauling him unceremoniously over the side in a large splash of water. He left him wallowing while he pulled off his fins and chucked them in the stern of the boat, repeated the process with Jenny, who with equal lack of decorum found herself on her bum in the boat, with her feet sticking over the side. Fins off, into the stern and she tidied herself up. She lifted her backside on to the tube and wrenched off her hood. "Pete and Alan still down?"
Mick nodded. "Five minutes after you, so they'll be at least that, probably longer, both pretty good on air."
Jim leaned backwards off the tube, twisted his head around and snorted the snot from his sinuses. "You OK?" Mick pressed down on his knee, to counterbalance the outward shift of weight. Jim nodded. "No bother, that was a good one, but what we going to do with that?" He jerked a thumb at the forlorn looking aqualung. Jenny had grabbed a towel from her dry-bag and was towelling her hair. "I'm not sure, it just didn't seem that good an idea to leave it and there was nothing else worth sending up."
Mick glanced at Jim and his eyebrows went up. "Listen to her. You'd send up a bag of rocks for a chance to launch a lifting bag," Mick waved a thumb in Jenny's direction, "she loves it. Just can't resist firing something upwards. Slightest excuse and whoomph, off it goes."
"Bollocks, you'd have done it too." She protested and Mick beamed at her. Hook, line and sinker, every time. "I know." he said.
"But what are we going to do with it?" Jim asked.
For a start we'll take it back, uh oh, here we go," Mick leaned forward and restarted the engines. He then swung his arm up in an OK aimed at the two divers who had just appeared on the surface, "They're are up, take one each and we'll have them aboard in no time, then back for lunch." He tipped the throttle levers forward and the boat answered the helm, chalking a wide arc on the water. He gestured for them to go either side of the boat and slowed to a halt as he passed between them. They were still in a h
eap in the stern when he opened the throttles again and turned the boat towards Tobermory, skirting Calliach Point into the Sound of Mull as the hull settled on the plane. The obvious thing to do was hand it in at the dive shop with a note of their address. Mick swung the RIB into the bay and coasted in alongside the steps beside the Cal-Mac Pier. Unloading took ten minutes, he lifted the engines and shut down the electrics; he slipped the painter, clipped on an extra twenty-foot line and jumped ashore with the line in his hand. The free end of the rope had a karabiner through an eye splice and he wrapped the line around a railing stanchion and clipped on the Krab Pete Jones told him, “We dropped the cylinder off with the rest; they won't fill it the bloody thing is out of test.” Mick Moor stretched out his arms and turned around. "Hang on a minute, just pull the zip and lend us some change will you?"
"Why, what's up?
“I’ve only got a fiver and I want to give the Coastguard a ring, if it’s been down that long, they might want to know about, might even be looking for it,” Moor remarked, “or the poor sod who was supposed to be wearing it.”
"Fuck off, nobody was wearing that, there's no stab with it."
"Yeah, OK, I don't know, there's summat funny and I just feel like... Let's get the details and pass it on to the Coastguard, then we've done it by the book."
Alan Smith wandered up. "You two going to the office, or back to the digs?"
The office was the bar of the Mishnish, "Digs, see you in a bit, just need to sort this cylinder thing out, Mick wants to phone the Coastguard," Jones was sarcastic, "Wrong time of month I suppose."
"Ah well, humour him, I'll see you later, by the way I'm taking the Landie up, you're walking, enjoy the climb." The digs were a log cabin in the trees behind the Western Isles Hotel overlooking the bay, at the top of a hundred or so steep steps alongside the hotel gardens, climbing from the harbour behind the Cal-Mac pier. No gentle meander through the gardens here, the steps went pretty much straight up. Before they left he scrounged a quid in shrapnel. Alan Smith went off jangling the keys to his Land Rover with Jones in tow and Moor popped across the road to the compressor shed and gave the recovered cylinder a thorough inspection. Mick scribbled the details on a scrap of paper with a stub of a pencil scrounged off the compressor operator and then went back to the phone box. He found a non-emergency number for the Coastguard and dialled.
Robbie Maclean picked up the phone in the Coastguard office at Oban.
"Oban Coastguard, Rob Maclean, how can I help you?"
"Yeah, erm, my name's Mick Moor and we've found an aqualung..."
Robbie's ears pricked up, life was throwing a wobbly again, all of sudden everybody wanted to talk diving cylinders. "Well Sir, if you could give me some details I'll pass on the information and we'll see what we can do with it."
Mick Moor took a couple of minutes to give him as many details as he could about the particulars culled from the various stamps on the cylinder itself and the location where it had been recovered. Rob knew the site well, having sailed past the headland on a number of voyages around Mull and out to the Outer Isles of Coll and Tiree. If he tried hard enough he could probably remember the flat rock at the foot of the cliff, at least one of his occasional companions must have pointed it out. He scribbled the notes down on a pad and drew a big question mark alongside it. He wasn't quite sure about the direction in which this particular nugget of information would be going but had a feeling he knew where he might, "And where did you say the cylinder was at the moment?"
"At the dive shop in Tobermory, up by the compressor shed, it's stood away from the rest, 'cos there's no test on it." Moor told the Coastguard. Robbie nodded and added the note to his jottings. "Right, that's good, is there anything else you think might be useful?"
"No, can't think of owt, no, nowt else."
"That's fine Mister Moor, now if you could just give some details about yourself, in case we need to get in touch, should anyone come forward." and Mick Moor handed over his name address and a mobile phone number. Rob would go through the reports filed over the last six months for reports of Diving equipment. The dive shop proprietor might be worth talking to about the query from Jack. Robbie proffered his thanks for the information and put down the phone.
Moor replaced the handset and came out of the box and was on his way past the compressor shed to the foot of the steps when the lad watching the cylinders came down the path. "Excuse me, you the guy who found the bottle this morning?"
“Why is there a problem?" Mick Moor frowned.
"No, no, no," He shook his head, "Well, I don't know, just wondered what you were going to do with it."
"Don’t know, hadn’t thought about it." He spread his hands, raising them defensively, "Fine, it's a bit early, but I thought bugger it if no one claims it and you decide to flog it I might as well get in first."
Moor shrugged. "Tell you what, if nobody claims it, test it and have it for thirty five quid"
The lad nodded, "Sounds decent enough, OK, you're on." He turned and went back to the clatter of the compressor, dragging the ear defenders over his ears and bent to check the cylinders being blown. Moor left him to it, reaching the foot of the steps for the climb to the cabin.
*****
Chapter Eleven