Early in June last year a couple of fishermen came round the corner at Trypot Bay and got the fright of their lives. An oil rig (called ‘A Turtle’, but known for it’s entire existence as ‘Petrobras XXI), standing 40 m clear of the water, 100 x 100 m, was sitting snuggled up against the island, just 300 m from the beach and in 10 m of water. When colleagues contacted me to see if I wanted to join a crew to dive on the rig for 6 weeks, doing a biological inventory (the collection of corals, mussels, oysters and schools of alien fish all speaking a Brazilian dialect of Portuguese) was impressive!), I couldn’t exactly say no.
It was awesome to be back at the island and doing such cool underwater stuff, my previous experience in these waters being confined to a seriously dodgy ‘wreck-dive’ with Petrus Kritzinger and Martin Slabber in 2003. The Titan salvage crew, who were spending R1 million a day while trying to get the rig off the island and scuttle her, were an interesting bunch of guys (hard and rough doesn’t quite do them justice, despite several of them having engineering degrees). But they did a superb job and got the rig off on the second attempt, early in February 2007.