Diving was another sport which I took up briefly, starting with the Scouts in Edinburgh and also through George Heriot's School, where I was teaching at the time. I only kept it up for a few years. That was around the end of the 1960s.
The highlights then were trips to Skye and to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. The latter was a proper expedition, led by Cliff Johnstone, a marine biologist. My major achievement was in an experiment where we tried to track the movements of sea cucumbers. We attached labels to the hapless beasts with rubber bands. When we came back an hour or two later to see how far they had travelled, they had all disappeared. So much for my scientific achievements.
That wasn't the end of my sub-aqua efforts, though. Much later, in 2001, with new friends from Germany, I took up the sport again. We chartered the Basholm, a converted gaff-rigged fishing trawler, with its skipper, Charly Saller, setting out from Trogir to sail through the attractive Croatian islands. Our diving instructor, Klaus Pappenfuss, gave us a full course on diving and we all qualified as PADI Open Water Divers. It was a very enjoyable trip. Sadly, I have never managed to dive again since then, though I feel the urge every now and then.