Read the Book? Now dive the wrecks!

Rod and his dive buddy Paul are now running Dive Charters from Stonehaven. Dive some of the stunning local scenic dives or head to some of the wrecks Rod's written about in his world renowned books.
For more information go to www.haynesmacdonaldservices.com

I took up diving in the early 1980's - it seems so long ago now - before even Wham were popular. I went on to develop an interest in shipwrecks after my first dive trip to Scapa Flow in Orkney where the remains of the German High Seas Fleet from Word War I still lie on the seabed - 4 cruisers and 3 gigantic battleships.

When I was there I struggled to find any decent information for divers on the German wrecks and this led me to come up with the idea of writing a Dive Guide to the Scapa wrecks. The First Edition of Dive Scapa Flow was published in 1990. The wrecks have however decayed and changed so much over the years that the book has been constantly updated - it's now in its 4th edition.

Dive Scotland's Greatest Wrecks covered the histories of the classic Scottish wreck dives and was published in 1993. It is in its 2nd edition.

Dive England's Greatest Wrecks was a complimentary book about the top 10 wrecks south of the border and was published in 2003.

Each of these 3 wreck manuals covers the history of the wreck and its current condition. I tried to give hard diver information on each of them and commisioned a marine artist, Rob Ward to illustrate each wreck as it lies on the seabed today.

My last book Into the Abyss - Diving to Adventure in the Liquid World is a collection of all the incidents, hilarious and serious, that have crammed themselves into my diving career and covers my panic stricken first sea dives and subsequents forays into increasingly deeper water in search of virgin wrecks.

My latest book, The Darkness Below, was released in October 2011. It covers my transition from deep air diving to trimix diving - where we use helium gas mixes to make deeper diving safer. From there it follows the progression to rebreather diving - and along the way covers diving in Scapa Flow, the South China Seas, Norway and other fabulous wreck sites, some lost and forgotten for aeons. Join with me to be the first to dive, see and experience these hidden wonders from history.

Researching, diving and writing about shipwrecks has brought me a fair amount of contact from survivors of some of the wrecks I have written about - as well as from relatives of those who perished in the sinking or who survived but have now passed away. To date I have dealt with this in an ad hoc way as and when contact has been made with me.

Although there are Survivor's Forums for a number of well known Royal Navy vessels there has to the best of my knowledge never been a focal point where Survivors and Relatives of other vessels can come together to share information and make contact. Despite its faults, the internet has proved to be a wonderful tool for this sort of thing.

To give some structure to this and provide such a focal point I have created a Survivor's & Relatives Forum on this site. After following the registration process you can then start posting about ships of interest and start making contact. I truly hope that this will bring people together whose paths would never otherwise have crossed.

Click on the "FORUM" button on either the left or top menus of the site to access.