The time: 1992
The place: St Thomas - Caribbean
The man: Gordon Ramsay - Chef
At 25 I was taking some serious time out, after intensive training in Paris with renown chefs, Guy Savoy and Joel Robuchon. My head felt stuffed. So I accepted a job on the private yacht of Reg Grundy which at 75ft is like a floating Dorchester. I was hired to cook just for the Grundys and their occasional guests, with three in the kitchen I couldn’t believe how easy it was. The crossing from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean, however, was a nightmare. We hit some bad weather - force ten. I had to strap myself to the floor and I was vomiting violently for four days. I never went anywhere without a bucket round my neck.
When we arrived at St Thomas, I became obsessed with diving. Especially as it is a very physical sport and I found it difficult living in a confined space. I was doing two tank dives during the day and after dinner would discretely do a night dive off the back of the boat. We would take torches and flares and sneak off without them knowing.
One fateful day we went on a specialist dive down about 28 metres to watch sharks at a shipwreck. Sharks form a type of barnacle on their skin and to clean them off would go inside the sunken engine room to scrape their undersides and their fins. It would have been fascinating to see, but to get there we had to swim through two decks. The deeper into the boat the darker it became, one of my friends took an underwater picture of a shark so I looked back but couldn’t see anything. Unfortunately I also managed to drop my torch, as I dived down to try and catch it. My buoyancy jacket became trapped in my emergency breathing apparatus and I found myself jammed up against a pipe on the roof of this sunken wreck. I couldn’t tie knots behind my back, so I had to remove the jacket which was a frightening and daunting task. I came very close to blowing it. Under pressure while I tried to free the emergency regulator, I caught the tubes for my tank somewhere and I was loosing air and finding it incredibly hard to breath. For a few seconds I had to take off my mouth piece and try to unwrap it. Lots of thoughts were flashing through my mind. I remembered the three body bags which were loaded at Gibraltar! A picture of my mother came next, I’m very close to her and I wondered what she would say if you could see me now and the huge mess I’d got myself into! My death would have destroyed her in a big way. Half my friends didn’t even know where I was. They thought I was still training in Paris, and I imagined their shock of hearing that I had been killed diving in the Caribbean.
Although it was dark in the wreck, through the murky water I could see just enough to unravel everything. I had to work my fingers incredibly quickly because every second counted. Untangling the tubes to my tank so I could maintain breathing wasn’t the end of my problems. By taking off the buoyancy jacket I floated up towards the roof of the cabin and the right hand side of my arm and my neck hit the ceiling which was covered with fire coral which burns. It is like putting your hand into a naked flames and even through my wet suit I could feel it. So I was also in serious pain too! Finally I struggled back into the jacket and with the extra weight floated down off the ceiling. It was still important for me to control my breathing because the more anxious you become the more oxygen you use and with quite a deep dive we had less bottom time.
It was only when I made it back to the surface that I realised just how much danger I had been in. Had I panicked or lost control I would still be there now! To show you how shocked I was I forgot to retie my buoyancy jacket. Nobody could quite believe what had happened, they were gobsmacked. My skin has never been quite right since, when I go in the sun and start to tan you can still see the outline of where the coral burnt me.
I still have nightmares about the dive, especially in the summer when is hot. In them I don’t get out of them cabin. I’m underwater, holding my breath and then I start swallowing water. I blank out. My friends arrive too late to rescue me and I die. The memories are not an easy to forget because the nightmare was within a whisker of coming true.
My biggest mistake was taking on too big a dive too early. I should have done thirty of forty easy dives before tackling a wreck. I suppose I was far too ambitious and pushed myself too hard to compensate for being told, at just 19, that I was a failure by Glasgow Rangers. I had thought that my whole life was in professional football, wrapped in cotton wool and earning lots of money. I would sign autographs on the way to training each day but after an injury to my knee the team released me and I lost everything! It was very hurtful but has given me more determination. I’m an extremist, I can never settle for doing anything to a mediocre standard, which nearly proved the end of me!
First published in The Independent.