Death seems intent on proving itself to me to be life’s last ‘Great Adventure’. On the weekend of October 4th & 5th 2025, yet another of my closest – and longest lasting – friends died. John Whitehead was a man… Read More ›
commercial diving
The Cell Door Saga
On Tuesday, 13th April, 1999, John Lippmann, the late, Bob Ramsay, Grahame Weir and myself settled down in the former Billiard Room at Raffles Hotel, Singapore, for a quiet little drink as a prelude to the start of the following… Read More ›
Vale Michael Menduno
On the 3rd October 2025, Michael Menduno – one of modern diving’s most enigmatic personalities – died following a stroke. Despite a public persona as the person whose name will, forever, be synonymous with the advent of ‘Technical Diving’ (as… Read More ›
The North Sea Bus
In the early ‘Seventies, the work-horse helicopter of choice for North Sea operations was the Westland Wessex – usually flown by former Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm pilots – with the pilot sitting higher than the cabin. Obliged to always… Read More ›
The Navy Comes to Town – HMS Invincible
A forgotten South Atlantic ‘outpost’ of the former British Empire, the Falkland Islands came to public gaze when, on 20th April, 1982, Argentina’s ruling Junta asserted their claim to the islands by seizing military control. Their actions elicited a military… Read More ›
Leaving Laos – 1989
I have enormously fond memories of the time that I spent in what was then a quiet and forgotten backwater of Indo-China; a small Asian country that had had more bombs dropped on it during the course of the Vietnam… Read More ›