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For better or worse,everything on this site is original. My cartoons just randomly occur to me, and my writing comes from my life experience. I hope that you have a pleasurable visit, perhaps a smile or a feeling of pleasant nostalgia, if my experiences mirror your own in some way. I am open for business, my contact details are on the contact page and I welcome any offers of publication or purchase. Thank you for visiting. |
I thought I’d go down to Sandymount Strand, to visit my childhood, you understand.
I drove down and I parked by the tower, walked down the long gone horse ramp, and stood there on that vast expanse of sand. The home of many crabs and the odd tidally compromised flatfish, still stoically faces The Tower. The Victorian bathing place, now crumbling and covered in graffiti, was already fifty or sixty years into ruination, by the time we played there, catching crabs. A Martello tower, ‘The Tower,’ with its canon facing seaward, was one of the defensive forts ringing the coast of Ireland, bristling with over lapping firepower, waiting for the Napoleonic invasion fleet that never showed up. It was obsolete and probably Canon-less, when Victorian ladies bathed their ankles in its shadow. It was the tower café fifty-five years ago. The pleasant Promenade with the absurd ‘contemporary’ sculpture wasn’t there in my reverie. Once upon a time the tide had deposited lovely soft yellow sand, like at Brittas Bay in the same area as the prom occupies today. I wonder is the sombre ‘Encircling Tide Warning’ sign still there? Even without the promenade, there was always the chance of meeting the profoundly benign, and intellectual Father Kelly, a priest from the star, walking along the Strand Road path, dressed in his long black robe with a Biretta (not a gun) on his head. He walked around Sandymount for years, cogitating and talking to himself. If we met he would stop and look down at me, in a kindly way, saying something like “Ah James, me thinks it is one quarter moon since last we met and converseth on things intellectual. How ist thou, and how progressith thy pursuits in academia.?” Of course I had no idea what he was talking about, but I loved to hear those exotic words, sounding like a foreign language almost. The memory of that long dead priest is as intrinsic to my recollections of Sandymount as the tower. Ignoring the warnings on the sign, I’ll walk across the rippled sand to the nature walk to continue my ramble. The Strand can be deceptive as we were warned by our Ma’s “don’t let the tide come in behind you” We lived in fear of that evil tide encircling us while we splashed and played, even though the water was mostly never more than 2 feet deep. I use the nature trail rather than swim the Cockle Lake, the tidal phenomena of the strand. As the tide comes in, it chiselled out a channel of deeper water between Sandymount and the Great South Wall. Probably the evil tide our Ma’s and the sign warned us of. The channel which was the Cockle Lake, used to be in the middle of the Strand and was, perhaps 8 feet deep. Since the old dump was reclaimed, and it became possible to walk from Sandymount to the Shelly Banks via the nature walk. Whatever freak current causing the Cockle Lake was diverted, and now runs along the edge of the reclaimed land. As I walked across the sand, I see backwards in time the half sunken porter bottle of Ulysses. The sun was hot as I scrambled up the boulders, the rock armour that marks the edge of the old dump. Behind me the Strand and in front, reclaimed land on top of what had been ‘The Municipal Waste Disposal Facility and is now Sandymount nature reserve. Our parents never tired of warning us to stay away from the former, full of dangers full of disease full of rats and full of adventure. .There was a lake of rainwater in the dump, where we sailed the upturned roofs of cars, don’t ask me who cut the roofs off or where they came from? They were just there. It was like a magnet for us, but practically every time I went there, it caught me out. One time, we were playing football on the newly grassed ‘green’ in front of dumps fence when a man asked us to help him lift and engine out to his truck. There were four of us, but I was wearing a newly (I could still smell the camphor mothballs) arrived from America, Baseball jacket from my auntie in California. The jacket was red, and it had all of the major league baseball club crests sewn down the front, it had been sent to me for my birthday. First of all, I had hardly crossed the threshold when my feet got tangled up in wire from a burnt out tyre, and I fell into a pool. So I was wet before I did anything. Of course, even though the man gave each of us half crown, a fortune to us in those days, I got oil smeared on the front and the back of my jacket, and while it wasn’t a lot, it was noticeable and necessitated specialist cleaning by my ma. We went to Robinson’s newsagent shop with our half crowns, and I bought my ma ten Players No 6 cigarettes, a bag of Milky Mints, the RTV television guide and luxury of luxuries, for me, a large bar of Cadbury’s milk chocolate.Mrs Robinson regarded us quizzically, as we bought never before even imagined extravagances. Even after all that, I still had money left. I got a good hiding for nearly ruining my new jacket, and coming home soaked after being in the dump. But the chocolate was delicious. When they were reclaiming the land in front of the ‘tins’ it became a very dangerous place. Me and my pal from the later longline adventure, went over to see just how dangerous. Huge earth moving trucks and bulldozers had deposited thousands of tonnes I would guess, of topsoil, creating mountains and valleys of black wet muck, the perfect place to play. We were even warned about in school. In one of the valleys we encountered a lake of liquid mud, which would not have been out of place on the Somme or Ypres. Luckily we encountered it only up to our knees, we managed to back scramble up the slope to safety, but our shoes and socks were mud caked, and I knew I was in for another hiding, if my transgression was found out. To the front of our Georgian house on Tritonville Road, there was a sunken area, which was known as the ‘area’. In this ‘area’ the long water pipe from the roof ended in a 45° angle, delivering whatever water came from the roof to a large shore. I concocted a plan to sneak in to our house, knowing that my ma was busy in the kitchen at the back, preparing meals for our lodgers and the family. I would steal two pairs of school socks from the dresser drawer in my parent’s bed room, and on the way back down; I would pick up some of the old newspapers, collected for me to light the fires in the evening, to clean our shoes. Good plan, except what to do with the socks and the dirty newspaper? Collectively we decided to stuff them up the drainpipe, which we did. If it had never rained again, I would have gotten away with it, but it did and I had simply put off the hiding. Water poured from the gutter down into the area, it still drained down the shore, so we were not in imminent danger of flooding. But da was a pipe fitter, and it would never do for water to be cascading out of the gutter above like Niagara Falls. When he pulled the socks and newspaper out of the drainpipe, he half turned and shouted “Jimmy”. The dump itself was hidden from the public behind a long corrugated iron fence, which ran west from the pigeon House Road to the newly grassed, reclaimed ‘green,’ fronting the Strand Road from Ringsend Park to past the Star of the Sea infants school, ‘The Star’. The colloquial name for the corrugated iron fence was the ‘tins’. The smell however could not be fenced in, an unpleasantly pungent stink of fetidness particularly, powerful throughout the summer. Living near there in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s meant that habituation to bad smells was mandatory. The stench is gone now, buried deep under the nature reserve. This reclaimed green, not to be confused with the actual Green in Sandymount village, ran parallel with the Strand wall as far as the old Shelbourne stadium, beside ‘the drain’ Between Irishtown and the Pigeon House road, and had once been Sandymount Strand. When Mrs Byrne exhorted us to go to the green and play, I for one felt confused as to where we should go. Me and a pal set a nightline near the edge of the dump to catch all those huge fish that came in on the flooding tide. We painstakingly attached twenty hooks to a long piece of fishing line. We anchored each end with heavy iron bars, and then baited each hook with rag worm, dug from the Liffey bank on the Pigeon House road at low tide. The whole exploit was at least a week in the preparation, and our entire investment was lost in a night time twelve hours. We could hardly sleep with excitement, and we met on a sun filled and hushed summers morning at the ridiculous hour of 6:30 AM to retrieve our catch. And as we walked towards the Strand we discussed what we would do with all the huge fish, soon to be ours. Even my dog, Tara seemed caught up in the excitement as she danced along beside us, tongue lolling. At the junction of Cranfield Place with Strand Road, a police light blue Avenger car, passed us as we waited to cross. He stopped, reversed back, rolled down his window and enquired as to what we were doing at that hour of the morning. “We set a Nightline and were going to collect the fish” “drop a big one into the barracks later” said the Garda. Tara did her usual run and jump over the wall on Strand Road onto the green, as soon as I released her, it was a game. She waited patiently for us to run across and jump onto the top of the wall, and then down after her. Once on the grass it seemed perfectly normal for us to run, with Tara running happily along between us. It was when we got to the rock armour and the angle of the corrugated iron ‘Dump’ fence that we suddenly realised that the Strand was very big, and we hadn’t really taken any notice of where we put our Nightline. The tide was sort of out, there was two or three inches of water covering the sun dappled, rippled sand. Nowhere could we see twenty big fat hooked fish flapping in the shallows. We didn’t actually know if the tide was coming in or going out, so we paddled around for a while, and then got bored and called off the search. We were worried that we would have no fish for the policeman. No one was up yet and we were feeling tired, so we went home and went back to bed. Tara seemed confused. I walk now through the nature reserve and towards the base of those huge chimneys. They just stand there, looming benignly over everything, like red and white striped Pillars of Hercules, or perhaps more appropriately, the ‘Pillars of Ulysses’. I think that Mr Joyce would approve. On the countless flights home from work into Dublin, they can be seen from way over the North side on approach to the airport, sticking up through the murk of low cloud if necessary. I remember when they didn’t “just stand there”. During my childhood I watched them climb resolutely towards the sky. The steeplejacks who built them came from Bristol in England, and they stayed in our houses. Terry Hayward stayed in Mrs Byrnes, our next door neighbour. We were full of lodgers at the time, so the steeplejacks stayed in Mrs Byrnes and Mrs Crowley’s. Mrs Crowley had a double house so most of them stayed there. Terry was a giant of a man. Sometimes he came back from a weekend at home on his BSA Bantam and others in his Morgan Roadster. We called the Morgan a sports car, because it didn’t have a roof, and it was magnificent to our childish eyes. Terry was kind and brought us all on joy rides on his Bantam and in his Morgan, ‘hare arsing’ around the quiet leafy streets of Sandymount. . Poolbeg lighthouse, we called it just ‘the Red Lighthouse’, sits at the end of the Great South Wall, which in my childhood we called the Pigeon House and the Shelly Banks. The light house is redder now than it ever was when we were kids. That wall, a breakwater, was designed by Capt Bligh of ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ fame; he did a good job as it does too. The channel doesn’t silt up any more and the wall is still standing, one side of the rivers mouth. We hunted mackerel & cod on the deep side, all through our long ago summers, it was like a game, and we once caught a conger eel, which we carried back on a brush handle, like porters carrying the trophies of African big game hunters. We would swim in the Shelly Banks or the Costello’s, then fish near the lighthouse until dusk, when the nocturnal rats scurried from their nests among the gaps in the great granite slabs. There is no smell anymore. Long ago, anywhere near the Pigeonhouse Road or the Shelly Banks, there was a distinctive Odour which tussled with the evil fumes of the dump, eventually overpowering them as one came closer to its source. Again it was an odious stench requiring habituation. It was the smell of sewage! The old settlement tanks, there really is no way of telling you about this sewerage system without putting a very fine point upon it. Just before the Pigeonhouse Fort and Hotel, on the left is where the local raw sewage was collected and treated, by what means I have no idea. Those tanks were clearly visible from upstairs on the number 1 bus from Ringsend to the Shelly Banks. Before I was old enough to make the journey across the strand, swimming the Cockle Lake, I must have been brought to the beach by one of my older sisters, which meant a walk to Ringsend, to catch the elusive number 1. which might come sometimes, or not. I have a vivid flash bulb and olfactory linked memory from one of those trips, where a young fella, hardly able to contain his excitement at going to the seaside, exclaimed loudly in his best Ringsend accent, as we passed (almost passed out from the effluvium) the settlement tanks, shimmering enticingly in the sunshine. “Are dey deh swimmin pules?” There was a Dublin corporation boat known locally as the ‘Lord Mayor’s yacht’ which, waited patiently, moored in the river alongside the treatment plant. After settlement, the boat was loaded with the solid waste and it then steamed out to the Kish bank, almost totally obscured by its squadrons of screaming seagulls, where the bottom opened to to discharge their cargo. The liquid, left behind in the tanks was dispersed through diffusers in the tail race, of the cooling water from the ESB’s generators. You may wonder how I am familiar with such details, so as a sidebar to this story, I can tell you that a mere thirty-five years ago, I worked as a professional diver in those very tail races, however that is a story for another time. Mullet simply adored the combination of warm water and sewage permanently emptying into the rivers mouth.. Back in the real old days before the new ESB generating station, at the base of those chimneys was built, the ‘hot waters’ as they were known, was on the Pigeon House Road across the road from the old ESB generating station. The mullet actually leapt out of the water to announce their presence or maybe to cool off momentarily because the water actually steamed. If we wanted to simply catch fish, not for consumption, for conger bait or for no reason, the hot waters was the place to go. Our However, when we were being serious anglers seeking mackerel, cod, sea trout and the occasional conger eel, which tastes exactly like cod by the way. We had to walk the length the great South Wall to the Red Lighthouse. Although in late summer, the mackerel sometimes chased the fry all the way in to the grand Canal Basin. Mackerel follow herring fry, so whenever we saw the surface dimpled by the little jumping fish, we knew that the mackerel were below them in vast shoals and we deployed our feathers, catching two or three beautifully silvery and black fish with every cast. There were not enough Dunnes Stores bags to hold all that we caught. I often brought them home strung through their gill covers on a piece of fishing line, like Tom Sawyer I’d imagine. I liked cod or conger, but I brought home bushels of mackerel for consumption in our house, and my uncles and aunties up the road. Actually it was difficult, despite the seas bounty, to keep our four lodgers, my Ma my Da and my uncles and aunties fed. Walking slowly from the strand to the great South Wall unleashed a flood of childhood memories, so clear, so bright, so happy. I could almost smell that smell. How everything has changed, the incinerator seems to work well, and is not quite the eyesore that my father feared it would be. The sewage treatment plant does its job, most of the time and it is so efficient indeed, that it takes ‘production’ from Baldoyle, and there is no smell anymore. The Lord Mayor’s yacht has no doubt been long since scrapped, The absence of odour of a municipal dump, and a Victorian era raw sewage treatment plant means that Sandymount and the Pigeon House Road is now prime D4 real estate. The eighteenth century hotel, built in response to the success of ‘Mr Pidgeons House’ an impromptu rest and feeding station, opened by the eponymous and commercially cute Mr Pidgeon, a way station almost, where the famished and fatigued Napoleonic and early Victorian era mail packet travellers, were rested fed and watered, when they disembarked from, or embarked to, one of the ‘packet’ ships plying the route between Dublin and Holyhead. A week’s journey in the eighteenth century. and not without its risks. My ma’s granduncle, Capt John McGowan, unrepentant Fenian, master mariner and all of his crew, was lost when his ship the ‘Reaper’ went down off Anglesey on 4 October 1878. He is remembered on the Mansfield ‘Sea Pole’ monument in the Catholic cemetery in Skerries. Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa wrote of him in the Brooklyn daily Eagle. “in connection with the rescue of James Stevens, a cooler or a braver Irishman is not on Irish ground” The fort was built in Napoleonic times, contemporaneously with the Martello towers, in response to the threat of invasion from France at the end of the eighteenth century. It was designed to protect the mouth of the river. The huge castellated granite slabs are there still. They fed our overactive childish imaginations half a century ago. The hotel and the fort are currently being renovated. Further down the pigeon house Road towards the city is the Poolbeg yacht club, anchorage now for some sleek and beautiful boats. Noely and Leo’s idea has grown into a world-class Marina. I even had a hand in the early days, sign writing the original Poolbeg yacht club sign, and then diving, to position the first few moorings on the rivers bed. These places were not just my childhood playground, there importance continued into my teens and adulthood. One could not tire of the view from a seat on the promenade at the tower, or out through a wind and rain lashed, wiper cleared, car windscreen down at the ‘Shelly Banks’. Growing up there was a privilege. Our fathers worked, our mothers kept house and looked after, their invariably large families. They took in lodgers or/and sewing to make ends meet, and us children came and went in our carefree world, a world centred on Sandymount Strand and its environs.
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Running Dublin’s Docks. The closer we get to a no-deal Brexit, with its implicit threat of a border, either hard, around the six counties of Northern Ireland, or wet down the Irish Sea, the more my dock running PTSD affects me. Hard or wet, the imposition of a border between Ireland and Britain, means the re-imposition of customs formalities, hence my Post Traumatic Stress Disorderdness.. Despite the title, I was never actually responsible for the running of Dublin’s docks. I just ran around them. In 1975, I was eighteen years old when my father organised a job for me with a now long defunct shipping company, on Sir John Rogerson’s quay, in the heart of Dublin’s South Dock lands. . Their offices were in Transit House, a building from which both my father and grandfather had worked as stevedores for most of their working lives. The machinations of shipping, haulage, or freight forwarding were alien concepts to me at the time, and I was oblivious to the fact, that I was about to become a very small cog, in the huge machine that facilitated the mostly speedy movement of freight through Dublin Port. The role that I was poised to undertake was explained briefly to me at a perfunctory interview/ explanation of the job, by the owner and managing director of the company, in his office on a cold late October Friday afternoon. During the job briefing I was asked if I could ride a bike, to which I answered honestly yes. And if I could ride a Honda 50 motorcycle, to which I also answered, but somewhat less honestly, yes. The prospect of having a motorbike, even though I didn’t know how to ride one yet, was very exciting. I had youth’s confidence in my own ability. It was explained that I would have to learn how to make out customs entries, and deliver them to the relevant customs offices (landing stations) around the port of Dublin. Initially, I would have to travel by bicycle, there was one available but I could use my own if that suited. The motorbike would arrive after a month or so. I started work on the following Monday, Like all first day on the job introductions, they are a blur, but from the owner down, my new work colleagues were all nice people. There were three permanent entry clerks, one girl and two men, a girl on reception and the switch, an accounts clerk girl, an accountant and office manager, a salesman, an elderly man who walked with a stick and who told jokes all the time, and I mean literally all the time!. He was the father of the owner, and also the grandfather of the receptionist, the younger of the male entry clerks and the female one; he was currently the dock runner also. And then finally the owner himself, whose office was behind a two-sided timber and glass partition in one corner, the partition walls did not quite reach the ceiling, and it rattled ‘glassily’ when his door was opened or closed. I wasn’t to have an exclusive, ‘dedicated to me’ desk just yet, I would sit in with the clerks until I was reasonably proficient at entry preparation, and then I would be driven by everyone’s granddad, around the port to the Customs House and the many ‘landing stations’ for my first week. For the moment I could use a spare desk and tariff book. In the world of customs clearance, paperwork was king, and there was a customs and excise form for just about every ‘freighting’ eventuality imaginable, copies of which were available by the dusty pile load, from the stockroom in the Customs House. Immediately applicable to me were ‘Free Import Entries’ on white A 3 forms, ‘Duty and VAT Entries’ on green A 3 forms and export entries on EX CU 29 (white A4 forms). Every shipment coming through the port had some of the following documents ; shipping manifests, commercial invoices, EU Transit forms, bills of lading, packing lists, ATA carnet’s, certificates of origin, import licenses. Then there was end-use certificates, inward processing declarations, drawback authorization, temporary importation verifications, goods in transit, tariff quotas practically ad nauseam. And every shipment was liable for either Nil Duty, Ordinary Duty at the rate determined by Customs and Excise, VAT at varying rates, Anti-Dumping Duty determined by customs and excise, and then there was Excise Duty, payable on alcohol and cigarettes. The entry clerks were great, things were very relaxed and they really took the time to explain to me, the intricacies of the arcane system that was customs clearance in the 70s. The vocabulary alone was mind-boggling, but it wasn’t good enough just ‘to talk the talk,’ you definitely had to ‘walk the walk’. It was of paramount importance, to know where all those strangely named documents fitted in order to create the synergetic whole, which would result in customs clearance, and a stamped docket proving such to be the case. Two groupage (mixed consignment) trailers and two or three 20 foot containers of woollen yarn arrived from the agent in the UK every week. The trailers were unloaded into the B and I Ferry Port customs controlled, groupage warehouse, and the containers were cleared for delivery to the small warehouse under our office on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay.. Every entry was hand written in triplicate, so in any week over a hundred entries would be produced and processed through the customs clearing system. On the first day I was driven by everybody’s grandad, who brought me into the Customs House and showed me the various desks in the Long Room, where Duty entry’s, Free entry’s Excise entry’s and VAT entry’s, were handed to a generally uncaring civil servant, in a jumper, who was more concerned with the weekends GAA football and hurling, than a customs clearance agent bearing a big pile of newly written entry’s. For the rest of the week my elderly colleague drove me in his car, and waited while I went in and out of the various Landing Stations lodging entries and collecting clearance slips. I learned extreme politeness doing that job, any hint of rudeness, agitation, desperation, exasperation, anger or aggression, on the part of the agent, would mean that the entry that you desperately needed processed, would go to the bottom of the inward processing pile. So despite the urgency, the awful weather, the pressure, the stress and the terrible jokes in a constant stream, I waited quietly at the counter until somebody noticed and took your entries, you then smiled politely. The customs officers in the Long room took particular glee in rejecting entries, which they did for the smallest error or omission. They would smile imperiously as they handed them back. If I could, I dealt with rejected entries in the house, getting them back in as quickly as possible. But once an entry was rejected, upon next submission it was going to be inspected with a microscope, so in many cases they were rejected a second time, after which they had to go back to the clerk who prepared the original. Each agent had a pigeonhole in the foyer, where other runners left paperwork for shipments which had arrived on other services, but which were routed through them. It was also my responsibility to pick up such paperwork and prepare the entries on the greasy counter in the Long Room, where a grubby, dog-eared tariff book was left for us to use. Of course I left any paperwork going the other direction in the appropriate pigeonhole. Before I knew it, my week was up and come the following Monday morning I would be on my own and on my bike. On that last Friday afternoon, I was terribly nervous about the future, and profoundly unsure of my ability to do the job after such a relatively short period of training. I was sitting at the spare desk late on the Friday afternoon of my first week, desperately looking at the open tariff book in front of me, as if I might remember every tariff code contained therein. The boss came out of his office, walked quietly up behind me, and put one hand on my shoulder, whilst depositing my see-through pay packet on the open tariff book in front of me. Then he said so that everyone in the room could hear, “don’t worry Jimmy, it will be fine. I have been watching you with our entry clerks, and dad reports that you have learned very quickly, now have a good weekend” And so, hesitantly and ineptly I joined the society of dock runner’s, like army ants, not in numbers but in behaviour. We walked, cycled, motor biked and some even drove cars. However our common behaviour was to follow the well-worn routes via the Customs House, to the various landing stations of Dublin Port, and tenaciously pursue our objective, getting a stamped clearance docket! My bike was a comfortable six-speed Raleigh ‘United States Tourer’ which I opted to use rather than the twelve gear racing bike offered by my new employer. I did however take the set of yellow rain gear which went with the bike. The weather that morning was rather benign, but it was unlikely to stay like that for the rest of the winter. It didn’t even stay like that for the rest of the day. Crossing the Liffey on the ferry from the steps at Sir John Rogerson’s quay to those opposite on the North Wall, with my bike hooked over my shoulder and for a few pence (recoverable as expenses) was akin to being caught in a storm at sea. I was drenched with spray before I even got a chance to put my rain gear on. I muddled through the first weeks of my novitiate, with the help of a couple of my friendlier fellow runners, who witnessing my bewilderment when up against an unexpected obstacle, offered assistance. We became friends and swapped our itineraries offering to take entries to such and such a landing station, to save each other journeys to the more desolate ones, at the end of North Wall extension and South Bank Quay. Of course, because my company’s freight was landed at the B and I Ferry Port, the bulk of my work was down there, and no matter how keen to assist me, my new mates were, I had to keep up my relentless pursuit of clearances at that station in person. My twice-daily trip, pretty much every working day, took me across the Liffey on the ferry, to the Long Room in the Customs House, to stack F which was only across the road, buried now forever beneath the gleaming outrageously monstrous, AIB bank building. There might be a call to stack R a little further down the North Wall, now buried under the IFSC, and then the dreaded cycle on blustery wet days of yesteryear, the thousand miles (or so it seemed) of the North Wall extension to the B and I Ferry Port. On windy winter days, the trip became positively Sisyphean. For every 360° cycle of my bikes pedal crank, it felt like I had been pushed back -720 degrees. Oftentimes until my Honda 50 arrived, I dismounted and pushed. As the result of phenomena, never explained, the wind seemed to blow both up and down that desolate stretch of road. The train tracks from the Point Depot, which in those days was an actual railhead, turned at the top of N. Wall Extension Rd. So the novice cyclist expecting traction on wet tram tracks, or hoping to be able to turn without getting the wheel of his bike stuck between the rails, was destined to be disappointed and tipped onto ones arse One learned to dismount for the turn onto North Wall extension. If a Hot bitumen train passed while one made one’s way along the extension, the cloying smell of it would choke you all the way to the ferry port. Once during that first month, I had needed to go to Southbank Quay in Ringsend. It was a long way away, but the approaches were not as exposed to the weather as North Wall extension. However, I remember the smell of coal dust and the taste of it in my mouth and throat, from the truck after truck motoring heavily past me, on their way up from the Coal Quay, trailing in their wake, like a malevolent Disney characters cloak, the black dust of their cargo. The Customs Clearance ritual was 99% pure; there could be no deviation from procedure under normal circumstances. The paperwork went through the Long room, where I paid the Duty, VAT or excise by either my companies cheque if the importer could be trusted, or their cheque or cash, if not, and once processed there, then to the customs landing station. Using speed, guile, charm, flirtation, seduction, tears and when necessary bribery, I did my job. I abhor corruption, but there were certain individuals back then, who would make it quite clear, that in order to speedily import or export the consignment of sport shirts, shoes, tracksuits or other desirable whatever, that he would really like a gift of a size 9 pair of shoes or a size 16 ½ shirt. The officers at landing stations were Absolute Christ God Almighty Incarnate on a Blazing Chariot, in the porta-cabin or customs hut that they inhabited. They had no boss to complain to, so best to give them a little gift to get things moving. The pilferages was never serious, mostly not even noticed, and even the worst offenders of them, was unlikely to ask for a car engine, a fifty-kilo sack of plastic pellets, a carton of air filters or a pallet load of gear cogs. On a whim these officers could send, one shipment or one whole trailer for Examination, in which case it was my job to make sure that everything was visible to anybody examining the contents. During my time on the docks, it was up to me how I facilitated his access and egress, I might have to pay a forklift driver a couple of quid to help me out, I might drive the forklift myself, or I might be able to pull everything around in the trailer on my own. More than once after several backbreaking hours on my part, shifting cargo around, his nibs would come out, look cursorily in through the back doors, and nod his acceptance. A month after I started with the company, I was presented with an almost new, red and white Honda 50 motorcycle, which came with its own set of blue oilskins and a yellow motorbike helmet. Everyone had believed my interview lie, so at around eleven that morning .I donned my new foul weather outfit, my helmet with raiseaple visor, and slinging my satchel full of entries across my breast, I went down to my motorcycling destiny. Getting it started and off its stand was reasonably easy, and within a short time I had the little engine put putting away below me. Tentatively I probed the gearbox, by pushing down on the gear-lever under my left foot, and Yahay, it was in first gear and I was away. I was wobbly, yes certainly, and blessed that no cars were passing transit house at that moment, as I shot out from the cobbled area in front of the warehouse gates, on to Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. My days crossing the Liffey on the ferry with my bike were over so I had no option now but to cross at Butt Bridge, a mile or so up river, towards town. I had steadied myself after forty or so yards, so I tried to select second gear because the engine seemed to be squealing quite a bit. However, try as I might that lever would not select anything, so I had no choice but to de-accelerate which slowed the progress of the bike considerably, so then I had to accelerate again and repeat the process, YehYawing up city Quay , over the bridge and so to the Customs House. I had hoped that one of my motorcycle riding chums would show up, but they didn’t, so after the Customs House, I had no choice but to face down the North Wall, with the prospect of repeating my Yeh Yaw’ ing all the way to the Ferry Port.. When I had reached the North Wall extension gates, I almost gave up. Of course it was raining and even though I had not exceeded three or four miles an hour at any stage of the journey so far, I came crashing to the ground , when my front wheel-tire lost traction on the smooth wet railway tracks. The harbour policeman, who came out of his hut enquiring after my welfare, looked down benignly at me lying on the ground in the rain. His pity left me no choice, for my pride alone I had to keep going. How my Honda and I got through that journey, I will never know. We made it to B and I, I did my job, even though I was in a high state of perplexity, it was like a nightmare from which I could not wake. I was afraid that I was damaging the bike, I actually prayed for somebody of my runner mates to come by, but it seemed that I had been abandoned in this wasteland. I yeh yawed back up North Wall extension and when halfway up, with profound sense of relief, I saw the Honda 90 of a fellow runner outside the British Railways office. I pulled in, parked, lit a smoke and waited for my saviour to appear. Fifteen minutes was all it took to teach me how to change gear. I had not been pulling the gearlever up, I had been persistently pressing down. Oh the freedom! No longer did the little engine squeal, it purred contentedly, and I was back at the office in minutes. The morning’s journey had been exquisite torture, but from the moment that I learned the secret, I took a great deal of pleasure from scooting around, for work and play, on my motorbike. While not riding, I developed the confident swagger of a dock runner, who knew what he was doing. When my tenure on the docks ended and I was promoted to fully-fledged entry clerk, with my very own desk and tariff book. I handed the Honda 50 keys and crash helmet, over to the new dock runner, who had done the job for another company, so he didn’t need me to tell him how to suck eggs. He had, like me, also assured the boss that he was proficient at Honda 50 riding, and he was. The end In 1990 I became the victim of an idiot who couldn’t count and who didn’t understand Nitrox decompression tables. The consequences of which, was that I got a rather serious bend, and my diving medical, which was in effect my permit to dive, was revoked for two years.
I had been engaged in an MPI survey on Zuluf gas separation platform GOSP. It was summer, so too bright to carry out MPI during the day. It was a succession of unfortunate events that led to me suffering the decompression incident. The weld that I was inspecting was on an X node at 75 feet. The first part of my dive went without incident. I cleaned the weld and set up the magnetic measuring tape and idents for my datum points. When all was ready I called for my permanent magnet and the ink bag to be sent down via the work line. However, when my gear arrived the heavy magnet had become wrapped around the bag, squeezing it empty and useless. I reported this to the surface, but instead of just taking the bag back up on the downline to refill it, my supervisor ‘Mac’ ordered me back to the surface with the bag to have it refilled. There is a danger here that I could get overly technical in explaining ‘No Decompression Time’ ‘Nitrox tables ‘and ‘Surface Interval’ but I’m not going to. In professional diving one must have absolute faith in one’s supervisor, whether or not you like them as a person has nothing to do with it. Your life is in their hands and that is not an over dramatization, if he on the radio gets it wrong, the diver could literally pay with his life. I have named my antagonist here, but I will probably take the name out as I edit this manuscript. I didn’t like him, he was an arse, and I suspected that he was taking steroids to bulk up during his time offshore. However he was running the dive, he had the decompression tables and the stopwatch, so while I felt maybe that I had been in the water longer than the ‘no deco’ time, I trusted him. That was the first of the unfortunate events. I came up to the surface and tried to hand the bag to the deck diver who met me at the ladder. Unfortunately his glasses were completely fogged over, because of the almost 100% humidity in the heat of a Saudi night at sea, made a wild grab for the bag and pulled the nozzle off. The bag had to be repaired and refilled while I waited on the dive ladder. I did ask more than once about my surface interval and no decompression time, but he became short tempered with me and dismissed my reservations. It seemed like an hour to be standing on a ladder, but was probably something like ten or fifteen minutes. He should have known that I was out of time and not, as he accused me of trying to get out of doing any work. He didn’t like me either. My protestations were overruled and I was sent back down with the now repaired and refilled bag. Decompression sickness is insidious and slow. I felt fine and got on with the job, and I saw the most incredible spectacle while I worked. Before I turned my hat light out to take my readings by blacklight, a Manta Ray gave me an extraordinary exhibition of flying through the members below me, weaving left and right up and down through the forest of steel work, an incredible feat of manoeuvrability as a solo participant, but this one had a small replica of itself mimic and mirror the exact moves of the adult without being in contact with her back. It was a staggering exhibition of coordinated movement. I have often wondered since if that was a mother Manta Ray taking junior through his paces. I don’t know much about Manta Ray behavior, do they tend their young? I still don’t know, but that’s what I saw. Even though the consequences of those unfortunate incidences were quite dark for me, I did get to see something amazing. I’ll flip quickly through what happened next. I finished the job and did a decompression stop at 10 feet on the way up and I was back in the chamber at 40 feet within the three minute allowance. I did a normal decompression for my time and depth, but I should have done an omitted decompression treatment table, because of the time I spent on the surface mid-dive. There is irony here because the treatment table was not appreciably longer than the normal decompression. The upshot was, that after a night of fitful sleep, I woke up feeling shit and I was beginning to lose sensation in my lower legs. And so I found myself back in the chamber, then in a TUP (Transfer Under Pressure) module on the back of a pickup truck being driven to Algosaibi’s operations base in Tanajib near the Kuwaiti border, with Martin Peters, one of the few people in the company who actually knew what he was doing, astride the module speaking to me on the telephone. I was inside a pressurized 8 foot length of 30 inch diameter pipe with bolt on flanges at both ends and a Plexiglas port roughly in line with my eyes, breathing oxygen through bibs. I had been slid, craned, forklifted and finally strapped down for a drive across the desert. I knew that if my module lost pressure for any reason, I would be dead, what’s to worry about? There followed a two-week treatment table, created especially for me by the hyperbaric Centre, Aberdeen. In the Pressurized Habitat, in the warehouse. It was pretty big compared to the chambers on the boats, but I could not stand up and the air conditioning unit struggled to cope with the Saudi Arabian summer heat, so sweat poured off me; I was skinny going in and like a skeleton coming out. He had done a real number on me, and then attempted to falsify records to exonerate himself, but he was caught and sacked. Then there was the neurologist in Dammam every day testing reflexes and sensation et cetera et cetera. Then the decision to send me home to have an MRI scans. Then the nineteen ninety World Cup where Ireland got to the quarter-finals and I saw the penalty shootout in Dhahran airport, knowing that it was Ireland but not knowing the context. And then there was the huge long line of military vehicles on the highway to Kuwait. Initially I thought it was the Saudis showing off, but a lot of the vehicles had small pennant American flags flying from there their aerials. Ireland kicked their penalties into the quarter-finals of Italia ninety and I watched the buildup for the first Gulf War right there. In both instances not having a clue as to the momentousness of what I was seeing. Saudi Arabia is a closed country, full of foreign workers from home they withheld news of the outside world. The only thing on the TV whilst I waited for a decision on my future, was the king whoever, meeting this guy and that guy in his sumptuous palace somewhere. The narration was in Arabic with subtitles in Arabic, accompanied by John Paul Sousa or Monty Python martial marching music. I arrived home from almost the centre of the Gulf conflict, without having a clue about it and to Ireland in the quarter-finals of the World Cup, incredible! Two MRI scans confirmed that there were several lesions in my spinal cord and in the occipital lobe of my brain; these lesions are caused by nitrogen bubbles, trapped in the fibers of my spinal-cord, weeks ago when the person that I trusted with my life, messed up. In 1988 we bought our first house, using the proceeds of the Juaymah trestle windfall to secure a mortgage.
Elaine was in late pregnancy with our first child, so I did a very well paid nixer for Oceaneering International, while home on leave from Saudi Arabia. My day rate while with them leapt to 850 pounds sterling, that was an example of the big-pay packets, rumored at when I trained for the profession initially; very handy money if I could do my shift in a month. A huge pod of dolphins skimmed the surface below us on the way out in the helicopter, it’s hard not to feel uplifted in the presence of these ever smiling cetaceans. That job was a totally different ball game (I was going to say kettle of fish, but). When working we wore hot water suits, and Oceaneering was all together, much more professional than Algosaibi Diving and Marine Services. The diver was delivered directly to the job via a basket lowered from the surface, and instead of being festooned with tools hanging from every available D-ring of his waistcoat; everything needed came down separately in a work basket. The water was still crystal clear, but very cold; those hot water suits were needed. As in the Persian Gulf, marine life abounded around the Marathon Alpha and Bravo platforms about 30 miles off the coast. Our job was to clean both platforms followed by an inspection programme of critical nodes, from the surface down to the seabed at 370 feet below. From the surface down to 10 m of any structure in water, is known as the Splash Zone. It’s the most difficult area to work in for divers. The swell and heave, even in relatively flat conditions, will make life very difficult and uncomfortable, as you hang on for dear life, while trying to do your job. Because sunlight it is strong at the surface and penetrates to a depth at about 20 feet, it is also the area of most marine growth buildup. Mussels proliferate in colder water and even in the short space of a year since the last cleaning programme; the Splash zone of every brace and leg was covered in about 500 mm of them. Because the platforms had to be cleaned to relieve them of the weight and drag of hundreds of tonnes of mussels, we had a ‘mussel bashing’ team and an inspection team. I was one of the inspectors, so I got to wait while the heavy cleaning was going on. We could watch from the surface as, just like in the Persian Gulf. A rare feast was provided for the local marine inhabitants of these artificial reefs. Shoals of mackerel, cod, halibut and sea trout appeared, from our vantage point they appeared to be attacking the diver as he cleaned, smashing up the colonies of crustaceans. Big crabs and Atlantic lobsters came from every nook and cranny to partake of the unexpected feast. A pilot whale showed up a few times, coming in very close to the diver, perhaps attracted by the light or the noise or the food in the water, or maybe just having a look-see. It took about a week before things were ready for the inspection part of the programme, and on my first dive it came in around the diagonal and horizontal braces, to have a look at me and me at it. From a distance of about 6 feet we eyeballed each other, it having to look at me sideways because of where it’s eyes are, but he or she was looking at me, maybe trying to understand who and what I was. There was a lot of talk about pods of killer whales in the area, but we never saw any. I would not have minded one bit. The only instance of a killer whale harming a human was from the movie Orca where there was a need to show Bo Derek’s legs to maximum effect, just before the eponymous Orca bit one off, and he (Orca) was on a mission to avenge the killing of his mate and their unborn calf. I worked on Marathon Alpha for three weeks, earned a lot of money, enjoyed the experience, but I went home when the expected day of the birth of our baby arrived. Daire was born a couple of days later and I was lucky enough to be there for the birth, which was jaw droppingly incredible, actually the midwife had to tell me to close my mouth. A week after, his birth I went back to Saudi Arabia for another one hundred and ten day trip. When I left home Daire was a tiny baby, but one hundred and twelve days later, he was sitting on Elaine’s knee, entertaining those waiting at the old arrivals area Dublin airport, with his winning ways smiling and waving. Most of the time that I worked in Saudi Arabia, there was a war being fought between Iraq and Iran, and much of the action laid out not very far from where we were. There were always a lot of American warships moving around in the Gulf , and fighter aircraft regularly screamed past us responding to tankers under attack in the Straits of Hormuz. One of our captains was not a dour Hull trawler skipper, he was an extrovert Swede and his name was Sven. During the day if there was a crisis somewhere, he would patch the emergency radio channel through to the galley, so that we could listen to the panicked May Day from the tanker captain as his vessel was attacked by the Iranians fast patrol boats. The John Wayne response from an American warship, and then count the seconds before two F-16s went screaming south in response. Usually the fighter aircraft showing up was enough to discourage the attackers. The war ended in 1988. From 1986, when the contract on Juaymah trestle finished, to 1990, with the exception of the job in Shuaibah when I did a five-month trip, I did the normal one hundred and ten day trips with thirty days at home. The majority of the dives that I did were in the crystal clear, full of life, waters of the Persian Gulf. I saw incredible things and thinking back it’s difficult to say which one was the most incredible. Who would hope to see whale sharks moving gracefully through the clear water, or hundreds of manta ray, the ever present barracuda, octopuses, grouper, sharks, moray eels? Every day that I dived I saw these amazing things, and I often took time out from my job, to just watch and marvel. In the main, there was no shore side life to speak of in Saudi Arabia. Transit between arrival in Dhahran and landing offshore was very swift indeed. Because I did not have a Saudi Arabian work permit for the first couple of years that I worked there, about ten days before I was due to go home, I was transferred to a small barge, the Algosaibi 1, which was usually tied up at West Pier, so that exit formalities could be carried out. To get an exit visa for somebody who did not have a visa to come in to the country in the first place, Algosaibi had to prove that, that person was not working. I know it’s crazy, like what had I been doing for the previous hundred days. But thems was the rules under which Algosaibi got the majority of their divers into Saudi Arabia to work. Our Seaman’s books were stamped in and out in the country as if we were joining a ship there and leaving the Gulf. Of course it was a scam, a loophole in Saudi Arabian immigration rules that Algosaibi took advantage of. The little barge wasn’t too bad, it got extremely hot below deck where the sleeping accommodation was, because one air-conditioning unit was not really up to cooling a steel box, left broiling in the vicious Arabian sun for twelve hours a day. The cockroaches were no bigger or more plentiful than on any of the other boats, and there was no work. Bronzing for those ten days or so was a bit of a problem, because Arabs don’t really understand Europeans need to get a tan, and to them taking off your shirt is, somehow sexual and dirty, a bad thing. It was possible, between seven and eight in the morning before either the sun or the Arabs, were at their most vicious or libidinous. The rest of the day had to be spent, close to the AC unit, smoking, reading or sleeping. On the last day of ten or so needed to complete exit negotiations, the object of the negotiations was transferred to the Algosaibi ‘guest house’ in the centre of Dammam, for some last minute shopping. Dammam was full of electronic shops selling the latest in high-end hi-fi equipment, very cheaply. There was no tax in Saudi Arabia or copyright either. So if Sony for instance, sold their equipment in there, any smart kid could buy a system, take it apart and reproduce a knockoff half as good for ¼ the price. This lack of copyright respect was universal throughout the Arab world, so you sold your stuff there at your own risk. Years later I bought two ‘Alcatel’ mobile phones for the kids in a genuine telephone shop in Dubai. The guy in the shop showed me that they both worked, and that was the last time that they did. When was this European going to get back to Dubai to bring the faulty goods back to the shop? And what could he do when the law was on the side of the shopkeeper? At the time that I was in Dammam, it was probably 1987; I was very interested in DAT technology. They were mini digital tapes that were released by Sony, just around the same time as CDs, and so sank like a stone out of sight and memory. On that particular evening before I went to the airport, I wandered around the shopping area of Dammam, popping in and out of the various electronics stores, looking at their DAT players. In one shop, I hunkered down for a closer look at a Sony DAT system, and then in the process of ‘de-hunkering’ I clattered into a woman who had quietly (to me) sneaked in behind me to look at something above my head. It was purely automatic impulse on my part, I spun around and steadied her by putting my hands on her, coffee colored, henna tattoo covered, but otherwise bare forearms, and looking through the slit in her hijab, straight into her startled, but beautiful beyond belief, dark almond shaped eyes. Of course I immediately released her and apologized in English, but her husband who saw everything went ballistic. Not only had I touched his wife, his exclusive sexual property, but I had looked through that slit in her veil into her eyes. I could have been in a lot of trouble if he had fetched the much feared religious police, or if he had had his ceremonial dagger upon his person, however thankfully neither option was pursued. The owner of the shop intervened in Arabic, the lady stepped back and demurely looked down, I stood quietly just outside the epicenter, while the two men argued loudly in their language. Eventually, my guy won and Mister and Missus left the shop, Mister looking back whilst talking loudly and gesticulating, in Arabic. I felt very grateful to the shop owner who spoke some English also, so grateful in fact that I bought a portable CD player and two CDs, the Gypsy Kings and J.J Cale. I couldn’t afford a DAT player at the time, and boy was I glad. That incident is so prominent in my memory, that I can remember the two CDs, and I remember hoping that they and the CD player were both originals. I can speak in all truthfulness that the two CDs were perfectly original and served us for many years in their person, and still serve me as ghosts of their hardcopy selves, in my iTunes library, their real selves live in a cardboard box in the attic. Unfortunately after only two or three years of service, very good service, to us hitched up to the auxiliary connector on my Schneider hi-fi system. The player, which I had loaned to a friend of mine for a party, ended up smashed on a road after he had stupidly and utterly without care, left it on top of his car, and driven off. From the guesthouse we went directly to the airport for the ritual humiliation by the departure customs authorities, who liked to scatter our belongings all over the desk and floor, just the same as their colleagues in arrivals liked to do. They were looking for dirty pictures, unprocessed film or any signs, even pictures of, drugs or alcohol, but mainly dirty pictures. Practically every time I went home from there, I had several pieces of coral or shells which I had taken from reefs in the Gulf, but they were never bothered about those. I remember holding my newly acquired Sanyo portable CD player, and my two precious CDs, protectively in my arms while the rest of my gear was thrown around the place. It was always good to get home from Saudi Arabia. My first trip on the Umka lasted from 4th of June to 17th of July 1998, and was not a happy time for me. I was completely stressed out about things at home, contact with the kids was zero, and conditions on the ship were awful. T had realised very early on that I knew next to nothing about ROV’s, and he very kindly took me under his wing, to teach me something of the workings of the Seaeye Surveyor on board. He was a good teacher, and he patiently explained things to me, during the many hours that we spent on shift together with the vehicle on deck., and on the few times that we dived during that six weeks or so. I found it very difficult to understand what I was seeing on practically every screen, except the forward looking camera. Initially, I just couldn’t make any sense of the graphic data from the sonar and the TSS. Eventually though, under his expert tutelage, understanding dawned I learnt so much from T, and I was so very, grateful to him. He did twelve weeks on his first trip, and was paid 350 pounds a day, that was a lot of money. When I had been on board a scant six weeks, we both left the boat together in Carmen and stayed in the worst hotel in the world. There was no water, no food, no air-conditioning and when we arrived at 10 PM, we found four people, one of them the receptionist, asleep in hammocks in reception. I was hoping that the business venture with my brother would begin to bear fruit, and if so, I intended to apprentice myself to him, and become a carpenter. Nothing in my personal life had changed, so the only thing binding me to home were the children I could see that my brother wasn’t sticking to the spec for the job, and that it was getting away from him, as every job had heretofore. He had a list of ‘extras’ totalling thousands of pounds, which had not been agreed with the client, and was representing work which we should not have been doing. Of course the client and his architect were quite happy to allow our men toil on their behalf, for nothing. I presented this list of extras to the client, who explained to me that, while he was delighted to have the entire outside of his house rendered and pebble dashed, he had not asked for it to be done, and therefore he was not willing to pay for it. A The business arrangement with my brother was heading for disaster; but the magnitude of that fiasco had yet to unfold. The only good part of being home was spending time with Daire and Caoimhe. I dropped them to school in the morning and picked them up in the afternoon. I cooked for everyone, and at the weekends we took Mac to the Phoenix Park for walks in the ‘spooky (pookey) woods.’ When my time came to return to Mexico, I chanced my arm, and asked my employers for an increase in my day rate to 250 dollars a day, and amazingly they gave it . 250 Irish pounds per day, was enough to convince me to go back. I flew from Dublin to Chicago on 5 August 1998 and from there to Mexico City on the same day. T was due to arrive a few hours after me on a BA flight from London, so I left a message for him at reception and I went to wait for him in the bar. I was there having a beer, smoking American cigarettes, and reading every second or third word in Le Monde, which an Air France pilot had kindly given me when he left, and listening to the Mariachi band. Things were more relaxed that second time through. The hotel was prepaid, dinner room and breakfast. Also my salary for the previous forty-four day trip, 6 600.00 dollars, which at the time was almost the equivalent in Irish pounds, arrived into my bank about two weeks after I got home, relieving our seriously besieged financial situation. I had been in the bar about 20 minutes, when T rushed in, red-faced and flustered, babbling about an attempted robbery with violence against him, somewhere in Mexico City. I asked why he didn’t come directly to the hotel; it’s a walk of some ten minutes only. He told me that he didn’t know that the Marriott was in the airport, because the first time he came through in April, he went straight to the local flight to Carmen. The taxi drivers/robbers/conmen congregate at the entrance gates, and pick on innocent travellers as they come through. They prey on those looking around quizzically and obviously a little discombobulated. The police, who patrol the airport conspicuously armed with pump action shotguns and silver plated pistols, move them on every so often, but they always come back, and they always find a victim. I had seen them, but I had been through enough confusing and potentially perilous airports in Africa, to know that it is imperative to get through the initial wave of scammers, to the area of calm beyond, to assess your surroundings without being confused by their clamour, their ‘scammer clamour’. So I waved them aside as I came through the first time, the last thing they want is somebody who knows, or look like they know, what they’re doing, so you just have to pretend that you do. In that area of calm, I had looked up to my left and saw the big sign for the Marriott, I was going to say that you can’t miss it, but obviously you can. T fell for the taxi driver/robbers Spanish patter, and was quickly directed outside and to a car that looked a bit like a taxi. He had told the driver that he wanted to go to the Marriott hotel at the airport, but the driver took him to some secluded laneway in the city, where he produced a knife and presumably demanded T’s money and valuables. However, luckily for T he was in the back seat with his bag, so he simply opened the door and ran towards a busy street close by. His would be robber, was probably so startled by this sudden departure, that he didn’t pursue his would be victim. T made it safely to the busy street and flagged down a real taxi, which took him back to the airport. It was not a pleasant thing to happen; tourists do get robbed and killed on a regular basis in Mexico. You have to be on your guard at all times. I got him a beer, and he calmed down somewhat, calm enough to check-in, and to take his bag to the room and come back down to join me for dinner and mariachi. We got back to the Umka on 6 August 1998 Nothing had changed on board; conditions were still appalling, so much so that shortly after our arrival back on board, the Italians asked me to write a letter in English to the overall contractor Pemex, detailing the vessels shortcomings. They figured that a letter in English would carry more clout than one in Italian or Spanish. It didn’t take me long to do as they asked, and I wish that I had retained the original, as it obviously carried the required authority. However I then became very ill with a gastrointestinal malady, probably dysentery, so I spent ten days on antibiotics, in my bunk, and I lost 15kgs. As a consequence of my letter, faxed to Pemex by the Italians, the boat was ordered into Dos Bochas; a port near Veracruz in Tabasco on 17th of August, for an audit and that’s where I came out of my fever. A team headed by three Americans came on board to assess the conditions, and promptly declared them unacceptable. Everything was shut down, and the diving, trenching and the ROV team’s, were relocated to a hotel in the pretty little town of Paraiso, a scant kilometre and a bit up the narrow ribbon of tarmac, through a mangrove swamp, alive with the cries of exotic birds and the buzzing of exotic insects. One evening, before I knew that the Spanish words Vipora, Peligroso and Caiman on the road side signs, meant Snakes, Danger and Alligators. I decided to walk back to the boat as a way to build up my stamina again, after my period of sickness. A pickup truck with several Mexican workers standing up in the back stopped for me and insisted that I take a ride with them. They repeated over and over “mucho Peligroso and Vipora” gesturing with their hands in a winding motion, which I guessed to mean snakes, snapping jaws indicated with two arms coming together forcibly, must mean crocodile or alligator, so Peligroso must mean some other beast that lives in swamps. It doesn’t, it means danger in Spanish. Vipora, Viper, Caiman, Cayman the South American alligator, I must have been pretty dense after my illness. Paraiso, the Spanish for paradise, while slightly overstated in general, in comparison to the boat, it certainly was a pocket sized heaven. The town was centred on the beautifully tiled, and raised central square, the Parque. Shaded by trees and dominated by the multicoloured mosaic covered church (Iglesia) on one side, and then surrounded by, the local bank (banco), the local hotel, the police (policia municipal) station, the post office (oficino postal), the town hall (ayunamiento) and the assorted shops (varias tiendas) selling clothing (roba) hats (sombreros) shoes (zapatos) electronics (electronica) Music (musica) souvenirs (recuerdos) and a supermarket (supermercado) on the other three. There were park benches for sitting in the shade during the day, to watch the beating of the little towns commercial heart, or for people watching, in the cool of the evening. Our hotel was on the Parque, and the room given to T and I had a veranda overlooking it. Coffee there after sundown was a real treat, which would have done justice to a Hemingway novel. Every evening a singular event, the ‘paseo’ took place on that Parque. It seemed to us, that the entire population of the town came out for a clockwise walk after sunset. Elderly couples walked a leisurely pace, young married couples with children and young sweethearts, hand-in-hand in love. The children played together as the adults did six or seven circuits of the square, perhaps wheeling a buggy with the infant inside, or walking the dog or their toddler. Every time they passed each other; they bowed and smiled in what has to be the cutest societal ceremony that I have ever witnessed. Even the birds in the shade trees joined in, chirruping like a feathered orchestra playing the accompaniment to this most leisurely of strolls. Vendors sold bags of pecans; huge bags, maybe half a kilo for a few pesos, cold drinks, cigarettes and ice cream. Any nuts dropped inadvertently, were instantly picked up and whisked away by the birds, or the squirrels that were so habituated to humans, that they would scuttle quickly over the shoulders of somebody sitting on one of the benches, in pursuit of their favourite food, almost like furry snakes. On a few nights, T and I joined in, and we were saluted with a semi-bow a genuine smile and a "buenos altos".
Olmec Basalt heads in Villahermosa, and the Mayan ruins at Comalcalco and Palenque, Mexico. August 1998. The TSS which we used, or would use in the future (maybe) to follow buried pipelines underwater, is a portable magnetometer, hooked up to the ROV’s electronic circuitry. It consisted of three magnetic coils, arrayed like a whale’s tail on the back of the vehicle, and an electronics pod. One of the coils had burnt out in an unfortunate incident, where it was left powered up whilst on deck. The system still worked with only two, but its accuracy was affected and under the job specifications would not be acceptable. Our Italian superintendent, decided that while we were in Paraiso, he might as well send the damaged component by DHL couriers back to Italy, so that they could send a replacement. The nearest depot was in a town about 60 km away, called Villahermosa, so he decided to hire a car to take the faulty unit there. He could not go himself because he was needed for planning meetings every day. So he asked me to run the errand on his behalf. He knew that I had been busy learning Spanish, with the exception of the words for snake danger and alligator. I was flattered and I instantly agreed; a chance to drive in Mexico, and see a bit of the countryside was too attractive a prospect to turn down. I knew that ‘Hermosa’ meant beautiful, and Villa meant Pancho, no it meant town. So I was guessing that it was a beautiful town. I was to drive to Dos Bocus to pick up the package early the following morning, and then go straight to Villahermosa. I asked T if he wanted to tag along, but he wasn’t enthusiastic,. I think that his unfortunate experience in Mexico City and then, with that awful hotel in Carmen when we were going home last time, had put him off Mexico. So he wasn’t terribly keen to experience the Country any more than he had to. Hertz dropped the car off at the hotel the night before, so after a hearty breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, tortillas, orange juice, and coffee; I set off just as the sun was rising. The boss was already at the boat and he had wrapped the coil in cardboard and Impresub tape. He had also typed out the details, weight, measurements, consignor consignee, and full contact details. And on a separate sheet, a map and directions to Villahermosa. The directions stopped at the outskirts of the city, so I guess it was up to me to find the DHL office. My car was a white Toyota sedan, something about the same size as a Ford Escort. The coil was in the boot, I had my paper work, I had a full tank of gas, a full pack of cigarettes, the sun was up and I was wearing sunglasses. There was only one thing to do; so I hit it! I didn’t know if there was a highway in that direction, the only thing I knew for sure was that Villahermosa was south of Paraiso, in the direction of a small city called Comalcalco. I very quickly picked up signs for highway 186 heading in that direction, so I opened the window turned up the radio and cruised, that is until I hit my first ‘Topes’ bumper. Driving in Ireland, one is used to encountering speed bumps on residential roads, and we are also used to seeing signs warning us to slow down. I discovered that day in Mexico that, sometimes there are signed warnings, mostly not, and the authorities are quite happy to have these speed ramps, on what we would consider major roads, but not motorways. I had less than a second to react once I had seen it, so I did slam on the brakes, but way too late to avoid an uncomfortable jolt amidst the smoke and the squeal of tyres. My equilibrium was upset for a few moments, but I learned a valuable lesson about driving in Mexico. Keep your eyes open and don’t speed at night on secondary roads. Highway186 bypassed Comalcalco, but as I drew near to the town, I saw touristy type signs by the roadside, advertising Mayan ruins, quite close by. There was a photograph on the signs of ‘a partially reclaimed from’ the jungle, stepped pyramid and buildings surrounding it. How very exciting I thought, something to visit on the way back perhaps? On I drove through virtually flat green countryside, with jungle very close by on both sides.. The large green fronds of the tropics dominated, impenetrable, and I wondered what treasures lay waiting to be discovered behind that thick green curtain. Some way further on from Comalcalco, similar roadside billboards appeared advertising those amazing Basalt Heads, and encouraging tourists to visit the museum and La Venta Park OMGosh would it be possible to see these incredible artefacts that I first heard of through the books of Erich von Daniken, in which he erroneously claimed that these sculptures represented extra terrestrial beings, who visited Mesoamerica to instruct the natives on how to build their stepped pyramids and temples. I recall that he offered as proof positive of his theory, the obvious aviator’s helmet’ and ,how else could those huge lumps of rock be transported over one hundred and fifty kilometres, from the Sierra de los Tuxtlas, but by space people levitating the rocks in a ‘tractor beam’? There were a few pseudo scientists who engaged in this ‘science-fact’ gibberish, attributing everything from the pyramids, to the Great Wall of China to Stonehenge, to extraterrestrial visitors; obviously the only ones who could manage those Herculean feats……….apart from Hercules. Their quasi theories were very popular among my hippie friends in high school, but even looking at the photographs that were offered as ‘incontrovertible proof, ’ anyone could see that the claimed aviator helmets and delta winged jets, were simply headdresses and tropical birds.. I thought to myself, as soon as I make my delivery I will find that Park and the museum. I drove into the centre of Villahermosa, it was indeed a picturesque town, I drove around the parque twice. It had the typical raised square, with seats, shade trees and the Iglesia dominating one side. It was a busier town centre than Paraiso; also it was a bigger square and church. In those days before GPS, one had to ask locals for directions, so after my double circuit of the centre, I stopped on one of the corners, intending to ask a shopkeeper for directions to the DHL office. I went through the Spanish of it in my head, because I was unlikely to find an English speaker, so “Disculpe, ¿podría decirme la dirección de la oficina de DHL por favor?” I figured that even if I got it arseways, I would sound lost and polite,. There were three roads leading off from where I was parked, and on one of the corners there was a music shop, selling all the latest CDs. This was just one of the many thousands of small music emporiums, assuaging the seemingly insatiable musical appetite of Mexico. I had witnessed this phenomenon in Carmen during my stay at the Acuario. Each store plays music at ear-splitting volume from speakers outside, and I fully expected as I turned my radio off and swung the driver’s door open, to hear Juan Gabrielle singing Asi Fui , his latest runaway musical success. But, what do think I heard? Only the Corrs ‘Give me a Reason’. Well I couldn’t help having a little smile to myself, so I sat with the door open listening, waiting for the ubiquitous diddly idly di bit. I saw it as an omen of good fortune, a blessing on my little trip of exploration. I just had to seek directions from the pretty little girl, almost lost behind the CDs, hanging on the walls and ceiling in prodigious profusion, and piled high on the counter of the tiny record store. The shop was more like big stall, which I imagined would be folded up at night, thrown in the back of a pickup and driven off somewhere. I had to bend almost double to go in, and even so the see-through cellophane packages trailed along the back of my head and neck as I was ‘tractor beamed’ in almost by the most beautiful dark eyes imaginable, which locked on to mine before I even crossed the threshold. She drew me in, her olive skin, her deep dark eyes, her black shiny hair, a bare smooth be-bangled arm outstretched towards me. She was the most beautiful and tiny thing I had ever seen. As I took her hand and blurted out my prearranged question, she held me with those incredible eyes and intoned “buenos dias alto, cómo estás?” She held my hand and then brought her left hand up, to begin stroking it gently. As she stroked, she held my eyes and smiled up at me. “Ah si, La oficina de DHL está a Dos cuadras arriba a la izquierda, she broke off momentarily to gesture in the direction the “dos cuadras” (two blocks up, on the left) lay. She then resumed, in what was the most delicious and sensual manner, even if it was completely innocent and not meant as such. I was utterly captivated, and it was she who broke the ice. Continuing to stroke my hand gently, stare into my eyes and smile, she asked me “Gringo?” “¿Eres Americano? When she spoke, the tips of her front teeth appeared briefly, pearly white against the ruby red of her lips. “No, soy Irlandés, de Irlanda.” She looked at me quizzically, “Irlanda? Inglaterra?” “Proxima Inglaterra” I answered. “Ah, bueno” she said. I was feeling a little bit awkward, not really sure what the hand stroking was about, so I gently and reluctantly withdrew mine, smiling as I did so, and asked her for a CD of Juan Gabrielle. She produced from behind her counter, a double album, which cost me eighty peso’s, about eight dollars. The huge hit, Asi Fui, was on it along with a collection of his music, some live, mostly studio, all of which were to become dearly loved by me over the intervening years. The actual double case with discs is somewhere in a box, but I have its ghost in my I tunes music collection and in the cloud. Songs from it come around every so often on my ever playing shuffled playlist, and when I hear one, in my mind I can I see the sleeve art with the now dead singer, flamboyantly swirling across the stage, mic in hand, thrilling the crowd at the Opera House in Mexico City. I recall instantly buying the album, and that beautiful girl in the record store on the Parque in Villahermosa Mexico. Her stroking my hand gently, allowing me to fall into her beautiful dark eyes. I remember the Corrs, and as I backed out with a “muchas gracias hermosa mujer, adios” her farewell “ Mi nombre es Lourdes, Adios mi Irlandés” (goodbye my Irish.) It was only when I reached the car that I realised that she had told me her name, it was Lourdes. The DHL office was indeed two blocks up and on the left, so I dropped my parcel off, got a copy of the waybill, and headed off to see the massive Olmec heads. It crossed my mind to go back to the record shop to ask Lourdes for directions to La Venta Park, but much as I would have appreciated a second meeting, my life was complicated enough at that moment, so I decided against it. The Park and Museum wasn’t far, and it wasn’t difficult to find. Parking was not a problem and incredibly there was no entrance fee. The heads, there are three at that site, are breathtaking. They have been dated to between three hundred and one thousand BCE, and those archaeological treasures were discovered on, our under the site of the ancient Olmec city of La Venta. The heaviest of the three is 11,000 kg, and in the absence of aliens with tractor beams, they would have had to be dragged, without the use of the wheel, all the way to where they were found. In total there are thirty-three large artefacts on view. As well as the three heads, there are numerous altars and other symbolic carvings, stelae and monoliths, all Olmec in origin. Before the sterling’s, the American archaeologist husband-and-wife duo systematically excavated Olmec sites, the culture had been unknown It was a wonderful experience to walk among them, and be so close to archaeology which is profoundly important to the heritage of humankind. I had a nice lunch of fresh fish in the restaurant right on the banks of the lagoon, in which they had been caught. While I ate, I watched languid pelicans skim the glassy surface of the lake, so close to the water that their wing tip feathers ruffled the surface momentarily, as the great wings flapped slowly. Huge purple, blue and red dragonflies whose diaphanous wings prismadically, it seemed, projected the light of the sun, skipped across the silvered surface, their trailing legs dipping and dappling the water as they skipped. Myriad green lizards scuttled through the rattan roof of the restaurant. Thick green jungle surrounded the lagoon on three sides, and the heavy air was full of the cries of exotic birds and the buzz of exotic insects. After a long and languorous lunch, I set off for the Mayan pyramid and temples in Comalcalco. In less than an hour I was parked at the site. For 150.00 Peso’s, which included the entrance fee, I hired a very knowledgeable young archaeology student, Teodoro, to guide me in Spanish and English, through the various buildings and the temple. The excavations were ongoing while I was there, but at that time some three hundred human built structures had been found, ranging from a large Acropolis to a number of individual temples, a palace, smaller municipal buildings and burial sites. My guide took me through the small museum, exhibiting the many beautiful Mayan artefacts found to date. Comalcalco is thought to have been a satellite city to Palenque, some 200 km to the east, although it is unique in Mayan civilisation, in that it is built of fired bricks, held together with cement made of water and crushed oyster shells, rather than worked sandstone. Many of the bricks are carved on one side, but for some symbolic reason the carved face was the one turned downward. So the carvings were only seen again over a thousand years after they were laid down by the Miami bricklayer, when excavations began in the 19th century. Construction of the grand Plaza was begun around five hundred CE, and it was finally abandoned around one thousand CE, when the Mayan civilisation collapsed. By the time I had finished my tour, and bought my tour guide coffee in the cafeteria, it was late afternoon, and I needed to get back to Paraiso. However, based on Teodoros recommendation, and assuming that I was not required for work. I had decided to ask if I could keep the car and drive to Palenque the following day. Of course I had heard of those most famous Mayan ruins, but over coffee he gave me a very good general background to the site, thoroughly whetting my appetite for a visit in person. It had being a wonderful day for me. Through the artefacts that I had seen, I had immersed myself in the pre-Columbian history of Meso America, which close-up is utterly breathtaking. The beauty of the Olmec and Mayan carvings art work and architecture, is truly stunning. Those civilisations, which collapsed in ruins long before Cortez and his destructive conquistadors arrived in Mexico, had reached a level of craftsmanship and a social sophistication, nurturing the later civilisations of the Mexica, who stood firmly on the shoulders of those early giants. As it happened I was not required for work and the boss had decided to keep the car in case he was needed in Carmen or Veracruz for meetings during the week. I asked if it was okay to take it to go to Palenque the following day, and he readily gave me permission. Palenque is in Chiapas, the neighbouring state to Tabasco, and some 220 km from Paraiso, about a three-hour drive. So I headed off after breakfast the following morning. Notwithstanding the occasional ‘topes’, driving in Mexico was a great pleasure. With the window down and the warm air swirling around the car, getting inside my shirt, caressing my skin. The sunshine brilliant and that blue sky. I drove between vast swathes of tropical jungle, which straddles the border between the two states. Palenque is perhaps the pre-eminent Mayan site in all of Mexico, everything else radiates around it. When I visited, the excavated area occupied approximately 1.2 Km squared; however it was estimated that eighty percent of the ruins, still waited to be discovered in the almost impenetrable jungle, behind the great Pyramid. Seeing the Palenque ruins, for the first time, I was simply transfixed by their Majesty. The cities that the Mayans built for themselves between two hundred BCE and seven hundred CE, while uniquely Meso American in design. In terms of architectural sophistication and artistic beauty, had no peer in their contemporaneous world. Teodoro from Comalcalco had recommended his friend Miguel to guide me through the Acropolis, and as luck would have it, he was free when I arrived. For two hundred pesos (it’s a bigger site) I had an excellently guided tour through the more than sixty individual constructions available at that time. It is estimated that the entire site when fully excavated, comprise more than five hundred. Everywhere one looked, on practically every surface available, there are stunningly gorgeous bass relief carvings and inscriptions, which to a large extent tell the history of the Mayan civilisation. So, Palenque has been instrumental in providing most of the substantive information, on that great civilisation. The Usumacinta River cataracts impressively through the jungle adjacent to the ruins, its crystal clear cooling water, and the smooth rocks, over which it splashes against the forest’s verdant back drop, create a truly idyllic scene. However the river was not simply a cute backdrop for the engineers whom raised the city. There is a large body of evidence, which indicates that they also built a plumbing system, providing water throughout, via an aqueduct and pressurised water flow, up to a height of 6 m. Prior to that discovery, it was believed that the Spaniards brought the first pressurised water systems to the New World. But like so many hard and fast historical rules, the Americas seem. to have broken that one as well Miguel and I had lunch beside the small museum, after which I bought some souvenirs, a beautifully shiny and deeply black carving of a Mayan mask, and a hand painted Mayan great circle calendar, on animal hide, both of which are still on display in our house. The sensations of wonderment that the beauty of the Olmec artefacts in La Venta Park in Villa Hermosa, the Mayan ruins in Comalcalco, and finally the breathtaking gorgeousness of Palenque, engendered in me, do not pass quickly, and never pass fully. The cave paintings in Faunte du Gaume in the Dordogne in France, you whoever in The pyramids, the Sphinx, the Valley of the Kings, New Grange in Ireland, Stonehenge, ancient Rome and the Acropolis in Athens, also engender within me feelings of amazed admiration at what the ancients created, and how the same as us they were. Those three places, visited over two days in that sweltering late August of 1998, were added to the list of places that I have seen which have quite literally taken my breath away. I don’t generally think myself lucky, given my situation; such a belief would be outrageous. However, in terms of the places I’ve seen I am, and writing about them brings back that sense of wonderment anew. In July 1989 the diving company A, asked me to take a diving team to the Red Sea, for a civil engineering job. I readily agreed, because a new environment would break up those excruciatingly long 110 day trips. My day rate was increased by $50.00 as I would be supervising the job. There was a lot of paperwork, identity passes, Saudi driver’s licenses and letters of permission to travel within the kingdom, all in Arabic with photos attached, to be applied for and secured before we could go anywhere. Those bureaucratic formalities took several weeks, but eventually the team was ready to go. I was to meet with a representative of Mitsui Engineering, the builders of the plant, where the job in question was to be carried out, in Shuaibah, upon our arrival there. The scope of work as A understood it was to demolish some concrete piles. How the job was quoted for and the contract awarded, was a mystery. Most likely the Arab owners of Al a were related to whoever was the ‘big noise’ over that side, or whatever. The diving team, as selected, consisted of me, two Filipino and two British divers and we were to work during daylight only. Our gear had to travel across country by truck, so we spent two days selecting all that we would need from the huge, well stocked warehouse in Tanajib while our paperwork was processed. Our chamber, all the diving equipment, breathing air compressor, road compressor, hydraulic power pack, a collapsible dive shack, to be de un -collapsed on site, four quads each of breathing air, Nitrox and O2 plus the mountain of tools that might be needed. Two days after loading the trucks and armed with a thick sheaf of transit paper paperwork each, we went to Dhahran airport for our ritual humiliation by Arab immigration and Customs. In those days, internal flights within Saudi Arabia left and arrived from a different terminal to international flights. So at this other terminal, we were given a good old ‘scrutinization’ by the authorities, who probably saw us as somewhat exotic, non-Muslims travelling within the kingdom. I was taken into an office for some extra ‘going over’, where I became very worried that, that extra attention would include an internal examination. However, a very large and mustachioed military officer came after a half hour or so, and told me in English that my Saudi identity cards details had not been sent to the immigration police in time. However that was all sorted out now, so me and my colleagues could pick up our belongings and repack them, after they had been thrown around the place by the immigration and customs officials. The Saudia flight to Jeddah, took a little over two hours, a dry flight obviously, Nescafé, some cake and Coca-Cola being the order of the day. Jeddah is close to Mecca, so the flight was full with pilgrims doing Hajj, dressed in their typical white toweling pilgrim wraparound garb, a bit like Mahatma Gandhi’s daily apparel, even though he was Hindu. It is the solemn duty of every adult Muslim to make Hajj, at least one time in their life, once they can afford the journey, and the upkeep of their home and family, whilst they are away. This duty is of sacred importance to Islamic people, and the trip is often taken by those who have saved for years, and have little knowledge of modern travel. The departure lounge in Dammam was a scene of utter pandemonium, as families, groups and individuals, all dressed similarly tried to bring huge cardboard boxes, and rope secured packages of belongings, through to airside. I was surprised at how guards, and other officials treated these relatively naïve people with utter contempt, and occasionally aggression. Spare clothes, footwear and other non-essential items had to be jettisoned at the gates The aircraft stewards had their hands full too. On a full to bursting flight, controlling passengers, who disregarded, or did not understand warnings from the cockpit, seemed an exasperating and endless task. One steward on our flight, had to use diplomacy and anger to dissuade a group who were on the verge of lighting their paraffin stove in the aisle, to brew their ‘chay.’ And I had to show the elderly Pakistani couple next to me how to buckle up, they were trying to tie the two ends of the seatbelt in a knot. In Jeddah, where our documents were scrutinized closely but smilingly and politely, unlike in the Dhahran, firstly by immigration, then police, followed by army and finally a few civilians in short-sleeved white shirt and black trousers. They all riffled through our papers, shouted rapidfire Arabic into their respective radios, whilst regarding us intensely but in a not unkindly way. It took a long time to get through, but it was not an unpleasant experience. There was no threat and the people who examined our credentials, smiled at us and nodded a lot. When we did get through, and emerged into arrivals, I’m sure that we looked like aliens, real space aliens to the almost 100% Arabic Muslim crowd being disgorged at that time. We were picked up by a very dark Arab man, dressed in once white Berber clothes, who fussed over us in Arabic as he herded us to his dusty white minibus, that didn’t have air conditioning. Our destination, Shuaibah was just over two hours distant, skirting Mecca and then across some Sun blasted brown dusty desert. We bypassed Mecca on the eight Lane ‘pilgrims’ highway, which caters for the huge numbers of Muslim pilgrims, converging on their holy city at various times during the year, particularly Ramadan. The highway itself is vast, with overhead signs indicating in Arabic and English, which lanes drivers should occupy, depending on where they were going. The one that we mooched over into, seemed to be a lonely little lane, set aside for ‘Non-Muslims’. That’s what it said, we felt discriminated against. We stopped for fuel at what must be the hottest service station on earth, it passed as a motorway services in Saudi Arabia. There didn’t seem to be any reason to have services just there, apart from the road. Our driver indicated to us that we should have something to drink, and take a pee. Having something to drink was reasonable, but using the toilet was out of the question. It was filthy, smelled abominably and was literally covered with flies. We all decided to hold on until we got to where we were going. Inside the sweltering interior, there were fridges with bottled water, and cans of Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Fanta, Dr Pepper et cetera et cetera. Overhead fans swished desultorily and three or four Arab /Berber men, reclined on benches, smoking through their hookahs. They were not particularly interested in us foreigners, who had just appeared from nowhere. My colleagues opted for soft drinks and water, as did I, but I wanted to try Arabic coffee. I indicated to your man behind the desk, while saying coffee in as many languages as I could, that I would like some. He disappeared behind some American cigarette display cabinets, and reappeared a few moments later with a filthy cracked, probably once upon a time, maybe nice piece of ceramic tea ware, handle less cup of grey, primarily grinds, liquid, which he offered, rotten tooth gapped smilingly, to me. I was horrified, but my adventurous spirit had caught me out, and suddenly I felt every eye in the room upon me. I politely took the dreadful cup of tepid concoction, smiling weakly, but there was nothing for it, I had to drink it, so I did. Back then‘twinkle, twinkle’ (little) ‘Star’ wasn’t even that in ‘Bucks’ eye, but if that vile ichor had been coffee, that wonderful partnership, and the many others dispensing the wondrous brew, would never have come about! Whatever it was, Coffee it was not! Heck knows what it was, but it took all of my self-control to smile and indicate that I liked it. I have never tasted swill, but I’m guessing that that drink was similar in taste. Even though I tried to filter out the grit with my lips, some got through and grated on my teeth , until I could wash my mouth out with water, out of sight of the ‘services’. Pepsi got rid of the horrible rank after flavor of it. In our travels, we saw herds of goats and camels, with their masters sheltering in the shade of the former beasts, and exactly what the animals were eating, I had no idea. At first sight, life appeared very different on this side of the Arabian Peninsula. There didn’t seem to be any Filipinos or Indians doing the work. Arab men themselves were carrying out menial tasks such as driving and serving in the shop. The people were also much darker and more polite than their compatriots on the Persian Gulf side. The road that we were on, the service station, and the huge desalination plant were the only man-made structures that we saw after leaving Mecca; there was no oil boom over there. Apart from the city, one wonders if this side would be settled at all, Really if they weren’t going to develop tourism, Allah and Mohammed should have thought the thing out a bit better. My first sight of the azure blue of the Red Sea, almost took my breath away! It’s hard to describe its exquisite beauty. The Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, nothing in my experience, compares to it. Even the Northern part of the same sea, where it is heavily touristed in Egypt and Israel, could in no way be described as a muddy pool, but in comparison with down there, I’m not sure. It’s like a jewel, a Sapphire set in the desert. I have never seen anything as exquisite. Shuaibah is a place on the red Sea about two hundred km South of Jeddah where Mitsui construction was building a huge desalination plant. There was no sign of there ever having been human habitation in the area. Once through the gate of the site, our driver took us directly to the Mitsui construction office, where amid much bowing to several Japanese engineers and site managers, we eventually got to our guy. Believe it or not his name was Mr. Fukhi. He briefly explained the job which we wouldn’t see until the following day. Our gear was waiting for us at the site, and we would have the use of a van for coming and going to work. In addition we would have a crane, a forklift and a 40 foot flatbed trailer with truck and drivers for each, on hand when we needed them. Another man with English came out and took us to the accommodation block, where a slight conflict arose when he showed us ex-pats to ensuite single rooms, but Nap and Sonny, our Filipino colleagues to a barracks like hall of a place, housing twenty or more people. it app eared perfectly reasonable for them, to house their Malaysian, Indian and Sri Lankan workers in accommodation strikingly below the standard that they would accept, or that they would expect Europeans to accept. I was very diplomatic and polite but insistent nonetheless, that Nap and Sonny should have accommodation of the same standard as the rest of us. There didn’t seem to be any problem whatsoever, our guide seemed slightly bemused, but allocated single rooms to them without further ado. There were no ramifications from head office so; I guess Mitsui did not negatively report back, that their diving supervisor had ruffled feathers within minutes of arriving. The dusty white Toyota hi Ace van parked outside our accommodation block, was for our exclusive use, and was all ready for me to drive to the mess hall, with our guide riding along. It was late in the afternoon by the time we had gone through the formalities, about fifteen minutes before the dinner siren would go off, but all was ready in the huge dining hall. When we got there, it was empty but surely at mealtime, hundreds must be catered for. There were refrigerated units all around the room, in which just about every sushi dish in the sushi cookbook was represented. The main serving area was across the front of the hall, which was manned by ten or more chefs in sparkling white clothes, and wearing proper chef hats. They all smiled and bowed, as we did back. In this hot food section, there were boiled potatoes and boiled chicken, lots of boiled vegetables like cabbage, carrots, turnips, cauliflowers, peas, string beans, pettipois and others that I didn’t recognize. Even if sushi was not your thing, none of us were going to starve. That first evening the five of us began our meal alone, but shortly after the air raid type dinner siren went off, crowds of Japanese, Malaysian, Indian and Filipino men descended upon the place, in a very orderly fashion. The Japanese men made great ceremony, bowing to us as they passed; I guessed that they all knew who we were, and what we were there for. Nap and Sonny were in fish heaven, and I tried a few sushi dishes myself, along with my boiled potatoes vegetables and chicken. J and M, our British colleagues, stuck as close as they could get to typically British fare. Sushi was fine, I had never tried it before and I found the tastes subtle, except for the ‘Wasabi’ paste /garnish which looked like mushy peas, but which would blow the top of the head clean off. The Filipino lads told us that it was really good. Following what had been a busy day of travel, we all slept well that night. After a breakfast of rice, fried eggs and Nescafe coffee, at 5:30 AM next morning, our guide from the previous evening, rode with us to the dive site, to meet with the engineers overseeing the project. Mitsui had made efforts to make the camp as pleasant as possible, given its location in a seaside desert. The accommodation was laid out in straight lines and consisted of many rectangular shaped huts, each containing two individual single man ensuite units, and the bigger huts containing the barracks like accommodation and the mess hall. The walkways throughout all of the living accommodation were covered with trellis supporting permanently sprinkled climbing plants, which did provide a little dappled shade from the fearsome sun. Our guide drove our van through the complex which was huge, factory sized buildings, rank after rank marched out into the desert. There were already smoking chimneys, so something was happening here, whether desalination or electricity generation, something on a huge industrial scale. We drove along the coast for a kilometer or two, and even there with all this industry going on, the sea still looked exquisite. On our right side stacks of huge pipes ran alongside the road, and even though we had driven some distance from the accommodation, we were still within that intensive industrial zone. Mr. Fukhi and two other Japanese men met us on the road, above a tanker loading or unloading facility. Our four trailers of gear, a mobile crane, tractor unit and a very big forklift were parked close by. Again after much bowing and smiling, I was shown the plans and I was given a briefing by the chain-smoking engineer, as to what was needed from us. A gas tanker coming in for unloading, had collided with and demolished, one of the mooring dolphins below us, and we were needed to inspect and report on anything that was left of the concrete pile, and then to carry out repairs or demolition and rebuilding, depending on what was found. I was assured that any of Mitsui’s immense resources were at our disposal. By simply looking down from the road, we could see the concrete stump sticking up out of the sea bed. However, we needed to see if that was cracked or in any way undermined. The water was ridiculously clear, it was 75 feet to the bottom, and we could see it clearly. It took us three days to set up on the flat section of the adjacent Dolphin; everything had to be craned down by our multitalented Malaysian driver, Eric. He was a great guy, always smiling, Pidgin English speaking and happily jumping around between the tractor unit forklift and the crane. We worked from 6 AM to 5:30 PM, with one hour for lunch, which was delivered down to us from the mess hall every day at 12 AM exactly. We had six, thirty litre water coolers, which were filled for us overnight, every night! We also had a kettle, as much Nescafé coffee, Lipton’s teabags as we needed, an inexhaustible supply of Styrofoam coffee cups and sugar. Milk didn’t fare well in the heat, so it was black coffee for everyone. We worked our asses off, mobilising our diving system in that tremendous heat, and by 6 AM on day four, we were ready to go to work. The Japanese were impressed, because they told me that they had allowed a week for mobilisation. We were all well capable of running the dives and working out decompression schedules, so I rostered myself into the diving program. We spent two days thoroughly inspecting the stump of concrete, making drawings, taking many photographs, videoing the debris on the seabed and the remains of the pile from the bottom up to 45 feet off the bottom. We benefited from my inspection training, my prior knowledge allowed me to direct the program when I couldn’t dive myself, and prepare a comprehensive report, using C Swip and Lloyd’s protocols, to present to Mitsui. Based on that report, it was decided that we should clear the site of any concrete debris, build a new base of gravel, erect a cage of steel reinforcing bar 1.5 m² around the stump, then build a 2 m² shutter, initially up to the top of the stump and then once the concrete was poured, in 3 m stages from there. Mr chain-smoking Fukhi came back to us with a comprehensive work scope plan of his own, and drawings for each phase of the build, and allocating us an initial timeframe of eight months. Forget the job for a moment. The diving conditions were simply beyond belief. The water was warm, even on the bottom, so hot water was not going to be needed. Looking up from 75 feet, our dive platform was visible and if the diver required an extra tool, a hammer perhaps, those on the surface could simply, aim at the diver, throw it in, tell him that it was on the way, and he could watch it flutter down to him. Don’t try that at home folks. Obviously that procedure was not appropriate for heavier tools such as jackhammers. Even though the seabed there had been flattened to facilitate the piling in of mooring facilities, 20 m from the work site was a pristine coral reef, the like of which I had only ever seen on TV shows. Every exotic creature associated with warm water reefs were there in a profusion, and a gigantism that was breathtaking. None of us, not even Nap or Sonny, had ever seen anything like it. There were grouper so big that they could have swallowed a small diver if so inclined. There was a red snapper that was so big it could only swim head down, and there was a genuinely playful, or so it seemed to us, octopus that lived in an empty coral head, near our site but who, as time went on, was quite happy to roam around, watching us and feeling the tools that were lying around the site. The star of the show by a long way was the giant clam that was the size of a couch. There was no Wikipedia in those days but Sonny and Nap reckoned it to be over one hundred years old. When circumstances allowed, we all took the opportunity to explore the reef and take small shells and coral souvenirs. Some of those mementos still grace shelves in our house, and they still look spectacular. I didn’t pull rank often on anyone, we were a team and I depended on the diver’s expertise as much as they depended on mine. However I absolutely forbade the killing for food of the clam or our octopus. The odd shark (not whale), rays (not manta), snapper (not the huge one) and the smaller grouper in moderation, was okay, but not the big things. I mentioned this prohibition in my hand over notes for the Supervisor who took over from me, and I hope that those magnificent animals survived, and still live happily on that beautiful reef in Shuaibah Even though I was six weeks into my trip when I went to the Red Sea, I stayed there for three months. We did some great work on the erection of that new dolphin, and when I left we were a good three quarters of the way through the project. Mr Fukhi and I got on very well, and I took him diving after about a month, to see the progress for himself. He was a bit scared, but very happy to be able to get a close up of the work site. After three and something months in Shuaibah I was the colour of mahogany, my hair was shoulder length and while lean from the diet; my muscles were hard from the tough physical work that I had been doing. Steel erecting on land is hard, underwater it’s doubly so. In the dry, scaffolding would be erected to allow access, underwater there was no such luxury, we finned! I loved sushi and was eating more of that than boiled chicken and potatoes by the time I went home. They fed us and looked after us so well on that job, I really liked it and would have loved to finish it, but I was homesick and physically tired, seven days a week for all that time, takes it out of you. I left Shuaiba on the tenth of November 1989, and left Jeddah on an Air France flight to Paris on the eleventh. My driver to Jeddah was taking his proselytising vows as a Muslim very seriously indeed. If he had had more English than, whiskeya, fucky fucky, too and much, then I might be a Muslim now. Throughout the two hour journey to the airport, our entire conversation consisted of him gesturing with drinking motion and saying “too much whiskeya”, and then with a hip thrusting gesture “too much fucky fucky”, all the while pointing at me in an accusatory way with his gnarly brown index finger. There really was no defence that I could put up, so I sort of ignored him. I was sitting beside an American on the flight to Paris, and as we got palsy walsy over a few drinks and cigarettes, he enquired as to what I thought of the wall coming down, and I genuinely answered “what wall?” To which he responded “Goddamn son, were yall been? On the moon”. “The frigging Berlin wall” I then realised that in effect yes, I might as well have been on the moon. Letters from home were still going to the head office in Dhahran, and in the three months that I spent in Shuaibah, we had only had one mail drop from them. I knew nothing of the great and momentous movement that toppled the USSR, and it’s hateful symbol of oppression, the Berlin wall. My new best friend told me all about it as we drank and smoked ourselves to Paris. Diving
Some fifty five years ago, I was seven, and while on a family holiday in Killala Co Mayo, my parents bought me, after much whining on my part, a full diving kit consisting of snorkel, mask and fins. The memory of my first diving equipment is clear. Blue rubbery type plastic, but not modern pliable rubbery plastic, the old stuff, that was almost as unflinchingly non-malleable as the material used in the making of buckets. However they became my key to the undersea world of Jim Nelson. Marine creatures, sharks in particular but also whales, dolphins and swordfish were my obsession for as long as I can remember, and of course how better to see them up close than to go diving. The 6 inches of water in Killala Bay on the day I launched my diving career, could hardly be expected to be full of the marine creatures of my imagination, but with my flippers, my snorkel and my mask that leaked through the sides like a sieve, I explored the rippling sand, the drifting sea weed, the sea urchins and crabs in their rock pool homes, not catching them to watch as they died, floppy and limp on the dry sand, I was looking at them where they lived and I was hooked. I joined the FCA, the reserve defense force, 3 years earlier than was technically allowed (I was tall for my age) By so doing, I had hoped to join the Curragh Sub aqua club which was run mainly by the army. I thought that, because I was a ‘brother in arms’ they would overlook my age, and allow me to train with them. They used BSAC the (British Standard) open water diver rulebook. They wouldn’t even entertain me; eighteen was the minimum age at which one could be insured for diving. Anyway I was a sandbag, which was the pejorative term used by regular army personnel, to describe ‘comrades in arms ‘in the FCA. I was very disappointed but I continued to learn about the undersea world from library books and the shows on TV. I did my Inter in 1973 and my Leaving Certificate in 1975. In the interim I procured a better mask fins and snorkel which I used on family holidays, usually in the west of Ireland or Kerry, where I explored deeper water in tidal pools and off rocks, where I usually got scratched to pieces by barnacles and sharp stone. Things like football, rugby and girls sort of took over my life after I did the Leaving Certificate, so the idea of diving sort of went on the backburner temporarily. However, about two years after leaving school, my friend Michael and I found ourselves with some extra money, after having done a’ nixer’ for my younger brother and builder, over three or four weekends. So we bought our first real diving equipment in the Great Outdoors, outdoor adventure supplys. I did my course with Dalkey Scuba Divers putting up with the po- faced imperiousness of its owner just long enough to get my qualification. I bought a second-hand bottle and regulator from one of the members, and I already had my suit, fenzy, fins, weight belt and mask (this one made from lovely soft and malleable silicone which sealed to my face perfectly) so I had done my first open water dive a couple of months ahead of Michael. However as soon as he did his course we decided not to bother with the pomposity of the club, so off we went ourselves, Donegal, Kerry, Wexford and of course Dalkey. We dived all the good sites around Ireland. Michael worked in Mullingar so he dived with the local Sub Aqua club in one of the lakes thereabouts and I dived maybe two nights a week over the spring and summer, with whoever was taking divers across to The Mugglins beyond Dalkey Island, from Bulloch Harbour just below the car park of the Dalkey Island Hotel. Oh how we laughed; hare arsing off where ever we felt like, on a spring or summer Sunday morning with hangovers from the night before, made in hell. Throw the diving gear and sometimes my Collie dog Cuailain in to one-car or the other and take off. Often we went for weekends to Hook Head, a great diving site, not three hours from Dublin at the time, on the old winding and twisty N 11. There was often other diving clubs kitting up or diving around the lighthouse, so we found a quiet site on the seaward side. We had to suit up at the car, and then carry bottles weight belts et cetera for about 800 m over the rough rocky ground, at the base of the lighthouse. It was worth it even with the remnants of a hangover; we always tried and mostly managed to catch the tide after it had turned, that way the water was deep and crystal clear, the swell was gone and the gullies running out to sea full of marine life. The initial rush of cold water down the back of the wetsuit and the many Solpadine or other over-the-counter cures, washed down with cold Lucozade, Ballygowan spring water, coffee and Star Bars on the drive down took care of the hangover. Now we could enjoy the underwater world, unencumbered by rules and dickheads poncing around in the Long John of their wetsuit with knife strapped to leg, telling ‘trainees’ what to do. Michael and I were responsible for our own safety; our gear was good we both had a watch and a depth gauge. He had a contents gauge on his regulator and I had a built in 20% reserve bailout, which I activated when I felt my breathing becoming difficult. So we were up for our Sunday or weekend underwater adventures, apart from a hangover issue we like totally had it! Those gullies in Hook head were amazing. We could fin gently, carried with the slow water flow out toward the open sea. There were cracks in the sandstone where the spider crabs lived. We could glide gently past, neutrally buoyant, that means we could float in mid water, and to stop we just needed the lightest of touches to the rock and we could shine our light in at these big crustaceans, who seemed to be wearing camouflage outfits, so well were they hidden against the grey black rock. When one got fed up with the huge crabs, all you did was angled slightly downward and the soft current would deliver one too the sandy bottom, and the fish life of the gully. There were big ray and flatfish, all stubbornly holding onto their bit of seafloor by flapping their wings, to cover their bodies with a light sprinkling of tiny pebbles. I often wondered if I could stab one with my knife, and I often found out that I couldn’t, they were too fast. I decided that we needed a spear gun which could be used to spear the odd cod or conger eel that we saw on our travels. When we had got to around twenty meters water depth,, we usually knocked our dive on the head, and came up to five meters on the wall of the gully, and then finning a little bit harder against the current, we would return to the sometimes sun-lit shallows of the gully, decompressing as we made our way back. The dive took about forty minutes and was well inside no decompression time, and sure even if it wasn’t we did more than enough on the way back. 10 feet or so below me, in the dappled sunlight was the bottom of the sea! What a thrill. In those years with all the diving that we did, neither of us suffered any decompression issues, so even though we were a bit cavalier and gung ho, we got away with it, and the things we saw. Kelp fields, fronds 60 feet long anchored two rocks on the bottom and stretching up through the sunlit waters of the Atlantic in Donegal. Underwater crags and rock pinnacles covered in spiny sea urchins, starfish, mussels and limpets. Night dives where light could be generated simply by rubbing your hands together and disturbing the bioluminescent plankton in the water. I continued to dive every weekend and most Wednesdays in Dalkey, Killary, Hook Head I did my Leaving Certificate in 1975 and then two years at night training as a ‘Finished Artist’ in Rathmines College. Through my hobby I had got some fuzzy career guidance information on professional diving. I could spend less than a year training to be a commercial mixed gas diver. I’d still get to see all the wonders of the deep ocean and professional divers are really well paid…….I heard. Off I went, did the training at Pro dive Ltd Falmouth in Cornwall and launched myself on a cruelly disinterested offshore oil and gas industry. So much for my dreams of being paid a fortune to do what I loved doing. My first job as a professional diver was cleaning the inside of the dam gates in Poulaphouca reservoir, black boggy water and not a fish in sight. That was for Pro Diver (no relation to Pro Dive) Engineering from Hanover Quay in Dublin’s docklands. Frank Rafter, the owner , was an amazing person, and one of the first Irish men to have made a lot of money from ‘Deep Sea Diving overseas, came back to Ireland, and tried to create a professional diving company , one that operated professionally and safely. Heretofore diving in the docks, for the ESB on their and hydroelectric dams, or bottom scraping and fouled propeller clearing in the fishing ports, was performed by scuba divers without radio to the surface or standby divers or any kind of professional equipment at all. It was only after a scuba diver was killed whilst working in a semi-state installation, and the subsequently scathing fire department report, that those semi-states, whom might seek the services of divers began to look for a more professional solution to their diving requirements. Frank and Pro Diver Engineering tried to provide that answer. He brought helmets, proper professional suits, a recompression chamber and all the ancillary parts and backup equipment. He spent all his hard earned professional diver money on setting up the company. Us divers worked for 50 pounds a day in the pitch dark bog water on the dams, of the river Liffey and the just about zero visibility (vis) in Dublin Port, not exactly what I envisaged when I embarked on the very expensive training. Frank could never have hoped to cover his overheads with the odd days we got here and there, and we drank a great deal. I worked for him for about a year and a half and no matter how difficult his financial situation was, he always made sure that we were paid. He died shortly after I left to go abroad. In the summer of 1986 I got a full-time diving job. Algoaisaibi Diving and Marine Services, Dammam, Saudi Arabia, was at that time running the biggest diving project in the world. Juaymah Trestle; four and a half kilometers of suspended gas pipeline, running straight out to sea from the gas refinery on the coast, was held up by thousands of concrete piles, many of which were crumbling away due to so-called ‘concrete cancer’, after twenty years submerged in water. The solution, and by definition the avoidance of the entire structure plunging into the sea, was to wrap each pile , from a meter above high water mark to 500 mil below sea bed, in a proprietary grease -soaked hessian cloth and then completely covered in rubber jacketing , a very, very diver intensive contract. The system had been developed by a Japanese company, who were specialists in heavy duty rubber products. With literally thousands of 36 inch piles to be cleaned, and then treated, Algoaisaibi needed hundreds of divers, to complete the job between April and October 1986. An Irish accountant who worked for Algoaisaibi, recruited me in April 1986. He got my name from Pro Dive Ltd in Falmouth, and telephoned to offer me a job based on their recommendation. The starting day rate was $350, and he would expect me to do at least 110 days. Well it didn’t take a genius to work out that, I would earn a lot more money doing 110 days in Saudi Arabia, than I would in Dublin doing 10 or 15 in the same time frame. We were living in Elaine’s aunt’s house in Clanbrassil Street, just paying the council rent and Elaine was working, so it was not necessary for me to send money home. As it turned out I worked for 150 days and collected a box of money when I finally went to the office to be paid on my way home. Initially the box was filled with Saudi riyals but the accountant had made arrangements with a bank around the corner to change the riyals into dollars. I finally went home with fifty-eight thousand dollars in cash, fifty-two thousand five hundred in wages and five thousand five hundred as a bonus for staying so long. I hope that I didn’t break any currency laws at home, because I had dollars in every one of my pockets, and quite a few thousand in my backpack when I travelled , I didn’t declare any of it. That first job in terms of remuneration, was a fantastic stroke of luck for us and went a long way towards getting us our first house. The diving on Juaymah was hard physical work, but the water was crystal clear, and despite all the work going on, six diving vessels disgorging diver after diver and jacket after jacket, with tools going up and down all day, the local marine life seemed put out, not a bit. In the twenty years since the trestle had been built, each pile had been colonized by coral and all the other hard and soft marine growth which goes to make up a reef. Mussels were not common in the warm waters of the Persian Gulf, but their absence was more than made up for by the profusion of goose barnacles and oysters. From the condition of the piles as we found them in April 1986, cleaning had not been a huge maintenance priority. There must have been thousands of tonnes of marine growth dragging the structure down; it was no wonder that this huge diving contract had been started. Each pile in effect had become its own coral reef, inhabited by all the reef dwellers one would expect in a warm water environment. There were moray eels, clownfish, parrotfish and octopus, which we had to render homeless, but which quickly adapted and found homes in the debris that we left on the seabed, such as empty paint and epoxy tins, off cuts from jackets and the hard plastic centre cores of the hessian wrapping. All became new colonies of coral, and homes for the displaced. As we ‘mussel bashed’ our way through that forest of piles with water jets, hand scrapers and hydraulic brushes. We provided a banquet for the marine life the like of which they will have probably never seen before, Oysters, clams and barnacles, hard shelled mollusks that would rarely be on the menu for crabs, crayfish, octopuses, clownfish, parrotfish, stingray, moray eels, crayfish and you name it fish, were smashed open, and their tasty flesh made available for all, causing a feeding frenzy as every creature strove to get its share of the bounty. Of course, all of this activity at the reef level attracted the bigger predators, who it seemed were never far from the source of any action. Every day we had shoals of big barracuda, watching us closely, manta ray were regular visitors, expertly flying between the closely packed piles, hoovering up whatever nutritious bits were left floating in the water. Whale sharks and real sharks, bull and white tip, sea snakes, flying fish, octopuses and the full variety of those multi-colored coral reef inhabitants. Many times during that job we were machine-gunned by shoals of the most silvery of fish, the flying variety. Suddenly out of the water would come hundreds, driving themselves on their elongated lower tailfin, whilst flying with those oversized ventral fins. Unfortunately for many of them, they didn’t quite acquire the necessary altitude to clear the boats, so they would clatter into the side and fall back in the sea. It was an amazing spectacle, just one of the amazing spectacles provided by the Persian Gulf. Diving in those conditions I started to see all the things that up to now only Jacque Cousteau had been a witness too. All of those exotic species and more were my companions, every time I got into the bath warm, crystal clear water. Based on the advice from divers who had worked there for a while, big predators like sharks and barracuda, despite the latter’s ragged tooth evil look, and the former’s silhouette to be feared from my ‘Flipper’ experience, did not pose the immediate threat to us as divers. The well camouflaged Stonefish, the exquisitely beautiful Lionfish, the ubiquitous Sea Snakes and the gorgeous cone snail shell were the ever present dangers. However they were passive threats and only a very careless diver would poke around under pipelines, off cuts, abandoned pile guides or any debris left over from the construction or our intervention, where stonefish and lionfish were likely to have taken up residence. Or pick up a shell no matter how beautiful, that looked like a cone. A sting from the fishes venomous spines could certainly result in death by drowning, and sting from a cone snail can be fatal, even on land. Sea Snakes might appear aggressive because they will mob anything that disturbs the seabed or the reef, kicking up the tiny crustaceans that are their staple diet. Quite why they carry such deadly venom has never been adequately explained. However, unlike venomous land snakes they cannot dislocate their lower jaw to bite an almost flat surface, and they do not prey upon anything bigger than polyps. There were two old wives tales circulated among divers working in the warm oceans of the world. Number one: A commercial diver wearing a helmet, a waistcoat with lead in the pockets and tools hanging from carabiners, appeared as a metal object to sharks, and so inedible. Number two: Sea snakes could only bite on the ear or in the web between your fingers, so wearing a helmet a hood or even a T-shirt wrapped around your head in very warm climates, and gloves, would nullify that particular threat. The real danger in the Persian Gulf was jellyfish. Portuguese man-of-war and box jellyfish were common and required vigilance on behalf of the diver, to avoid the odd stings which were very painful, and the many stings which were excruciatingly so, and could be even more serious. It seems that it was mostly always summer in Saudi Arabia; it was certainly always pretty hot. However, when it was really hot, from April until October, that’s when the jellyfish came. I guess they hatched in some river estuary and were washed into the Persian Gulf as a consequence. On certain days when we came on deck to go to work, the surface would be literally covered with them, and in order to get divers in, the deck crew would use sweeping brushes to open a hole to let the diver to go through. Beneath these jellyfish was the business end of the animal, long tendrils of stinging cells, they were beautiful but nobody wanted to get too close. Everybody got stung to a greater or lesser extent, usually on the wrist between gloves and cuff of coveralls, or neoprene suit, or on the chin below the mask. The stings were like an electric shock! There was one young lad who got very badly stung around his face, and in trying to disentangle himself from the stinging tendrils, his hands also. When we got him back on deck we tried the acid and alkali test, lemon juice for acid and baking powder for alkali, and through that we found that these particular stings were acidic, because baking powder eased the pain. That was all we could do, apply baking powder to help him with the pain. He became very ill and the stinging sites rapidly became infected. The severe pain lasted for a week or so and it being Saudi Arabia there was no question of the boat going into port except in the direst of emergencies, and this didn’t qualify. His face and forearms became covered with puss filled abscesses and we worried, not for his life, but for potential scarring. I treated the infections by regularly cleaning them with TCP. The captain, an ex Hull trawler skipper was supposed to be the medic on board but he never even enquired as to how the diver was. I doubt that he had any antibiotics but if he had he didn’t offer them. After about three weeks the sores had scabbed over, and things look pretty good no real danger of serious scarring, but even when he had fully recovered, it was obvious that his face and hands had suffered some damage. It looked like he had been whipped with a hot wire. They were serious jellyfish, there is no doubt that when they stung an animal, it was staying stung. The strange thing being that they prey on small fish only , but are preyed upon in turn by large turtles, tuna and sharks, so I suppose the stings go some way to discouraging them. There were always sharks in the water but they seldom bothered us, except in a psychological way. The main varieties were Bull sharks and White and Black tipped reef sharks, there were also tiger sharks and hammerheads but not in the same numbers. |
AuthorJim Nelson is a sixty-two year old, wheelchair bound, incomplete tetraplegic, following a DIY accident in April 2016. ArchivesCategories |