INTERVIEW
By the Dart INTERVIEW
DAVE BOND
Dave Bond. Pic by Ginny Ware
YeBallInG a live 1,000lb mine as it rolled around his feet on the decks of a fishing boat was one of a string of adrenalin-fuelled events Dave Bond faced during his daring career as a royal navy diver. In a vocation spanning 22-years, action man Dave has blown up hundreds of mines, dived to great depths, raised bodies and sunken vessels from the seabed, jumped from helicopters on perilous rescue missions and scaled the hulls of suspect ships in treacherous conditions. Nicknamed Jim by his diving mates in honour of his daredevil 007 “The name’s Bond, James Bond” namesake, Dave aptly revelled in his action-packed work and was fearless in the face of the obvious dangers of being blown to smithereens, a trait he attributes to the unsurpassed training he received from the Royal Navy. ‘Looking back on it, undoubtedly
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there were risks because we got up to some pretty hairy things but there were only two guys lost in the whole 12 years I was in the Navy’s clearance diving branch, which is not a lot and is a great monument to show how good was the training we received.’ Dave’s first foray into the underwater world was aged 11 when his father Frederick, a founder member of the British Sub Aqua Club, took him diving at Cobham Lakes in Kent, near his Maidstone home. Instantly smitten, Dave loved
exploring the watery depths as well as flashing through its surface in local
swimming competitions. He joined the Royal Navy as a
chef, following an uncertain few years after leaving school when he drifted between possible professions. ‘Frankly I was bored and fed up
and I thought “I’m going to go in the Navy and be a diver”.
“We were guinea pigs. They were trying to work the decompression tables out.”
Unable to enlist as a diver, Dave became a chef for the aquatic force but was finally accepted to embark on a clearance divers’ course. once qualified, he worked on
various minesweepers with the bomb disposal diving team. Sonar signals located possible metal objects on the sea bed and Dave and his fellow divers would dive to find out if the items were bombs - blowing them up if they were. ‘In the Second World War there
were millions of mines laid all around our coast and only 50 per cent were ever accounted for as blowing up. The rest were still rolling around on the sea bed.’ Dave recalled the alarming day a fishing boat netted a 1,000lb WW2 German acoustic in the North Sea. He was part of the team dispatched to deal with the dangerous beast. On arrival they found the ship apparently deserted and no crew to take their lines.
‘The mine was rolling about from one side to another and the crew
TELLS BY THE DART ABOUT HIS OFTEN PERILOUS LIFE AS A DIVER.
had panicked and hidden in the stern. They thought they would be safe there but they wouldn’t have been because if the bomb had exploded it would have turned the vessel to matchsticks. ‘I needed to hoist it up and lower
it over the side of the vessel but I didn’t know how to work the winches so i sent someone to find the crew.’
The team eventually managed
to safely detonate the mine at sea, leaving the fishing boat and its crew to gratefully return to shore. Dave also joined the deep diving
team, recovering crashed aircraft and sunken submarines. One harrowing incident saw him help recover the bodies of a number of servicemen who died after the two military helicopters they were flying in collided in fog off the Isle of Wight. ‘You just have to close your mind
to it. You can’t do anything about it,’ Dave said. He also spent time working as a search and rescue diver, jumping out of helicopters to assist ships in peril and their stricken crew. During this time Dave took part in 90-metre decompression trials where divers were fed a mixture of helium, nitrogen and oxygen in a bid to discover the safe combinations of gas for deep sea diving. He said: ‘We were guinea pigs.
They were trying to work the decompression tables out. Nobody knew about them in those days. ‘Every day there were divers who had oxygen poisoning or minor bends which resulted in decompression sickness. With
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