At 11.43 this morning (7th November) Clyde Coastguard paged Oban’s RNLI Lifeboat, Mora Edith Macdonald. requesting a launch for a diver in trouble.

At 11.51 the lifeboat launched under the command of Coxswain Ronnie MacKillop to rendezvous with the dive boat Elizabeth G, whose divers had been diving the wreck of the Rondo in the Sound of Mull.

The female diver, who had been judged to have made an over-rapid ascent, was transferred direct to the hyperbaric facility at Dunstaffnage arriving at 13.22.   The lifeboat returned to her berth at 1347 and was re-fuelled and ready for service at 14.00.

Now - here’s a curiosity. For Argyll happened to be at the Lifeboat Station at the time, with Pat Maclean, the Mora Edith MacDonald’s former coxswain,  now the station’s Press Officer. The uninitiated like ourselves talk about ‘the bends’. The lifeboat crew, with 2 experienced divers among their number, talk about ‘a diver with a bend’.