Ainsley Umbrage was a singular sort of person, in the truest sense. I first met him in 1985, on a liveaboard out
of Oban. I was one of a group from London Branch - he was alone.
He told me was from 36 Chessington Avenue Branch - a new club based at his home in Northampton. "We're intending to apply for BSAC affiliation," he told me, "but we're encountering some stiff opposition from the Treasurer."
"Who's your Treasurer?" I inquired.
"I am," he replied.
Umbrage, it turned out, represented the entire membership of the new branch, which had no immediate plans to expand. "Perhaps one day," he conceded, "but at present we simply don't have the facilities."
It was evening, and the Jean de la Lune was ploughing up the Sound of Mull. The Beethoven violin concerto played softly while Umbrage read The Journey To The East by Herman Hesse - a slim, strange novel recounting a modern pilgrimage in search of lost magic and spiritual significance. I asked him how he thought it compared with Hesse's more famous novel, Steppenwolf.
"I wouldn't know," he said. "This is the only one I read."
While his answer struck me as slightly odd, I didn't understand its full implications until the music ended and I offered to put on another tape. "No, thank you," he replied. "I only listen to the Beethoven."
"Surely you can't mean..."
He nodded. "Absolutely. I realised long ago that everything worth saying about life and love and death are contained in bars of the violin concerto. To listen to anything else would be quite pointless."
It was the same with The Journey To The East. "I read a great deal when I was younger," he explained. "I suppose, like Hesse embarking upon on his great journey, I was searching for meaning and truth. "Once I discovered them," (he wagged the battered volume at me), "there seemed no point in trudging through The Brothers Karamazov."
Next morning, we anchored at the first site of our trip, the wreck of the Insider Dealer, sunk with all hands in a financial storm in the late '80s.
As we prepared in a mood of some excitement, I noticed that Ainsley Umbrage wasn't kitting up.
"Do join us," I called. "I'm sure we can find you a buddy!"
"No thanks," he replied. "I only dive Aig Sgheir."
Perched on the rim of the Outer Hebrides, this tiny islet was perhaps the most desolate spot in all the northern oceans. The last, wild inhabitants had been airlifted away to secure institutions in the 1950s.
"Everything you could ever hope to see on this trip," said Umbrage, "you will see at Aig Sgheir."
That was almost 20 years ago. Then, last week, I ran into the skipper of the Jean de la Lune in a Whitby drinking den. The rum ran free as we chewed over the good old days of diving before nitrox and lime-green fins. I wondered what had become of Ainsley Umbrage.
It seems he lives on Aig Sgheir, now - alone, of course, and with only a handful of belongings. Over the years, his tastes had become still more refined: he now reads only the second paragraph of page 39 of The Journey To The East, and has erased all but the last four bars of the first movement of the Beethoven.
He dives just once a year, on a site he describes as "The Twenty-Eighth Plumose Anemone from the Left of the Smaller of the two Valspar Extruberances at Thirty-Six Metres off the North-West Shore".
"If Beethoven and Hesse had been dive buddies," he says, "this is the anemone they would have dived on."
For more in a similar vein the book Blackford's Diving Life and Times can be ordered from Underwater World Publications, price £7.50 (tel. 0181 943 4288).
