Midge Ure – Swimming off the submarine – Hands to Bathe and BBQ

So, the Captain will surface the vessel, as long as the weather looks good and normally in these far-off places it usually is quite good, he will declare ‘hands to bathe’ for an hour, so you can go up on the top and he tries to tie it in with a barbecue. I think that’s become less and less just purely because of Health and Safety.

So, what they do, they’ve got old oil drums and they’ve got some sort of holder that will hold a barbecue in place, put a load of coals in there. Chefs will come up, cook a load of burgers, sausages and you eat all of them on top. It’s all hands in. It’s everybody mucking in, getting that done, and then we’ll have a ‘Hands to Bathe’.

So, what they do is, again depending on where you are in the world and it was safe to do so and it was nice and warm, you will literally put a cargo net down the side of the submarine, and then you’re allowed to run off the side of the casing at certain areas, jump off the fins and stuff like that, into the water, be in there for a short period of time and come back out because you just never know what’s in the water.

We always have Shark Watch, so there will be a guy on the Conning Tower. In fact, there will be two or three. There will be a Navigator, there will be a Sailor and there will be somebody on binoculars and there will be somebody with a gun.

I don’t know many Matelots that can shoot guns straight. I would hedge my bets it would never hit a shark if it came up and tried to get you. He would probably kill more Matelots than he would sharks, so I don’t even know why he was there half the time but you took a risk, you jumped in the water and quite often we did that, it was good.

And then obviously you’d make your way to the submarine. But this submarine is a massive, big wall in front of you so you’ve got to then climb that cargo net to get back up. And by the time you’ve done that three of four times jumping on and off, you just think ‘oh, I can’t be bothered with that anymore’.