MONTY: Wonders of the ocean

Even the days that aren’t good are good, if you get my drift. I’ve always said that a terrible day on the beach is better than a splendid one in the office, and I guess this has been the perfect opportunity for me to prove it.

The long, warm days are celebrated with particular intensity by the local population. I think this is because in this most temperate of climates, the winters are of such savage intensity that sunlight and warmth mean life itself. Come November, it seems that the hatches are battened down, the fire is stoked, the whisky opened, and something approaching hibernation occurs for the next six months.

I have thrown myself with great gusto into the various activities that celebrate summer. I entered a local hill race, gasping and gurning up a precipitous mountain in the company of skeletal runners with the same body fat percentage as your average goat. I finished fourth – fourth woman, that is. By the time I got to the top, purple-faced, heaving and hacking, most of the men had finished and were already doing complicated warm-down routines hundreds of feet below.

I also entered the village Highland Games, fancying my chances in what is termed locally as the ‘Heavy Events’. These are steeped in tradition – I mean, you don’t get much more traditional than an event called ‘Throwing the Heavy Stone’, do you? I virtually brained several spectators with a caber that decided to go one way when I wanted it to go another, and then virtually brained myself with a poor attempt at ‘Throwing the Weight Over the Bar’. In the end, the only event I came close to winning was ‘Owner of the Dog with the Waggliest Tail’ – even then, we got pipped by a poodle. Very suspicious – I want that dog tested for performance-enhancing drugs.

While licking my wounds, I was chatting to a fisherman who told me about a dolphin encounter that he said was an absolute ‘banker’. We’ve all heard this before, of course, but this chap was adamant. With nothing better to do the next day, I thought I’d take the RIB round and have a look. And here, at long last, after the normal agonising and poorly structured preamble, we come to the point of this month’s column.

On a whim, I decided to take along the kids of my good friends Andy and Heather. Andy is the local joiner who helped me build the bothy. He never goes anywhere without two nail guns, and wooden structures appear magically in his wake. His eight-year-old daughter Bethany is completely obsessed with dolphins – as only a youngster can be – and yet had never seen one. Could this be the chance to provide a day that she would never, ever forget?

I piled the family into the RIB, and we sped around the headland. There, precisely where the fisherman had said they would be, were two young common dolphins that had taken up residence in the cove over the summer. And, precisely as he said they would, they exuberantly rode our bow wave, leaped through the surface only feet from the boat in glittering explosions of spray, rolled on their backs alongside the boat, and generally provided the full dolphin repertoire. We adults ran from side to side of the boat, laughing and shouting with the alchemy of the encounter, while Bethany lay in the bow, staring wide-eyed at the scene before her – every moment seared on her retinas, a memory that I’m sure will remain for ever.

We divers explore a world that is unimaginably exciting to kids, full of giants, serpents, mystery and magic; a combination of Narnia, Mordor and Hogwarts. Our sport means that if we turn up to talk at a local school, we are mobbed. If we kit up on a beach, it is to the accompaniment of excited young voices shouting ‘Divers!’

Aquanauts, frogmen, deep-sea divers: all dated terms sneered at by the modern diving fraternity, but to a child they mean explorer, pioneer, adventurer. For me, this dolphin encounter was enhanced beyond measure by sharing it with young eyes – a salient reminder to share our sport with kids as we keep an eye on the marine environment for the next generation of marine biologists, conservationists and rubber-clad, flipper-wearing, octopus-wrestling frogmen.