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Mark Longstreath
Mark Longstreath
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Into The Lions Mouth - The Wildrake Incident

    On August 7, 1979, Richard Walker was in one of his melancholy moods. Married and the father of a 15 month-old daughter, he was thousands of miles away inside a saturation chamber on board a diving ship called the Wildrake in the middle of the North Sea. Lying on his bunk just before his next dive he began a note in his diary:

    7 August - On location at Thistle. The boat heaves a lot. Roger says there are conger eels all over. We will find out today. Poor topside management. Two guys in here are both nuts (ungood nuts) and dear god, I want out...

Into The Lions Mouth

http://lionsmouthpublishing.com

I was sent a copy of this book to read and comment on before publishing. To be honest, it is one of the most incredible books on diving that I have read.

The write up that describes the book on the website is as follows:

On August 7, 1979, Richard Walker was in one of his melancholy moods. Married and the father of a 15 month-old daughter, he was thousands of miles away inside a saturation chamber on board a diving ship called the Wildrake in the middle of the North Sea. Lying on his bunk just before his next dive he began a note in his diary:

7 August - On location at Thistle. The boat heaves a lot. Roger says there are conger eels all over. We will find out today. Poor topside management. Two guys in here are both nuts (ungood nuts) and dear god, I want out...

Soon after writing in his diary, Richard and his partner, Skip Guiel, climbed into the Wildrake bell on a routine dive to 524 feet for British National Oil Corporation. Within a matter of hours they were fighting for their lives on the bottom of the sea.

In the genre of Into Thin Air and In the Heart of the Sea, Into the Lion's Mouth is the true story of the most notorious "lost bell" diving accident in North Sea history. It covers Walker and Guiel's entry into the little-known world of saturation diving, how they came to be trapped on the bottom of the sea, the dramatic rescue bid to save their lives, why it failed, and the nearly decade-long struggle by the relatives to achieve justice for their deaths.

Written by former deep-sea diver Michael Smart, this book is the culmination of eight years of research to solve the haunting mystery behind the dual fatality and the discovery that it was not a "pure" accident, but that a cascade of failures and criminal negligence were responsible for one of the most awful scenarios ever imagined.

I started it in the morning, and finished it that evening. Couldn't put it down. The testimonial that I sent Mike Smart after reading it was:

This book is explosive! It should be made part of every diver's library, and should be essential reading for anyone considering diving as a career. It should also be placed on every diving operator's desk to remind him of how not to go about running an operation. From page one you are catapulted into the life of the offshore commercial diver as it was in the 1970s. Be prepared to go through a range of emotions from apprehension, incredulity, anger, disbelief, disgust and deep sadness as you live through the events that lead to the unnecessary deaths of two experienced professionals. The cover-ups that followed and the despicable manner in which the families were treated will leave you wanting to pound on doors and demand justice.

The book has been meticulously researched, and is difficult to put down from the turn of the first page until the bitter bitter end.

It is a story that demands to be told!

In light of the events on the Koosha 1, I would recommend it to every diver.

Things haven't changed!

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I highly recommend this book. If you are currently or ever were a diver, this book will transport you back offshore before you know what happened. If you never were a diver, or have never been offshore, this book will introduce you to a world that will amaze you, and steal your heart.

READERS ARE STRONGLY CAUTIONED: once you have cracked the cover of this book, life as you know it will cease until you have finished. Sleep, food and all else will fall into the category "unimportant". Prepare for an emotional roller-coaster ride.

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Had we had a Divers' Association in 1970 such an incident may never have happened. I know - I dived the Wildrake just before the incident. So much has been improved since then but SO much is still to be done - if you are in the Diving biz, join the Divers' Association and be ACTIVE. The steel and oil can't be killed - divers don't have to be...

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This was just the unacceptable tip of the iceberg. Mike has uncovered a plethora of incidents that were inadequately investigated by the DoE during that era.

Professor WG Carson, who began an investigation into all fatalities and injuries both topside and subsurface, exposes the woeful lack of government enforcement of safety in the NS in his book "The Other Price of Britain's Oil". A number of copies are currently available from Amazon UK.

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The Client was the government owned British National Oil Company. Neither they nor the diving contractor Infabco had informed or received permission from the DoE for any of their diving operations as they were required to do by law. They were never prosecuted for this transgression!

Although the sheriff had commented on Masterson's intransigence and perjurious statements in the criminal court the procurator fiscal, even though he was appealed to by Richard's wife (Documentary "The Last Dive"), chose not to charge Masterson with perjury and contempt of court!

This failure to implement so obvious a course of action raises very strong suspicions that the due judicial process in Scotland was seriously interfered with on this occasion by some government agency!

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