DIVERS

Jon May is a paramedic who is also trained to control deep sea dive systems attached to the world’s oil industry.

This is his own true story, starting in the holocaust that was the Piper Alpha disaster, this year, almost unbelievably, being its twenty fifth anniversary, and taking him from the North Sea to cleaning up offshore after the Kuwait War, to Bombay, the South China Sea and Vietnam.

It is a story shot through with the drama, gallows humour and suspense of one of the world’s most dangerous professions, carried on by an individual breed of men in some of the earth’s toughest corners.

One day Jon might be called upon to help rescue a skipper trapped below deck on a sinking ship, another he is treating a latterday victim of mustard gas or some passing boat people who could have been mistaken for pirates. He learns why never to expect any gratitude from a Bombay beggar and tells of encounters with angry sea snakes or a phantom oil rig.

The work of the men who descend to great depths to defuse mines, check pipelines and clear underwater disaster areas is described with absorbing documentary realism. It is the stuff of so much fiction, but for knife-edged excitement there is nothing to beat the truth and Jon May is as beguiling a yarn-spinner as one could ever hope for in this world of real life suspense stories.

Jon May was born in 1947 and spent his childhood in Cornwall. He graduated from the University of Hull with a degree in biochemistry and physiology and, after some ten years spent in teaching, he retrained as a diving life support supervisor and dive team paramedic. He joined the industry just as the North Sea boom period was passing its peak in the early ‘eighties. Since then he has worked on diving installations all over the world. He is married with two children and lives in Hull.