Deep Blue.

Deep Blue.

There is an old Sea Captain (Neil) who just keeps on calling and asking me if I want to go deep-sea fishing with him. I always say “Maybe”, and then when the day comes I just don't pick up my phone and then call up later to say how sorry I am and that it ran out of batteries or I had to work or something. (Sorry Neil) Well every time this happens, Neil doesn't get angry, he just tells me what an awesome time he had, but every time I can hear the disappointment in his voice. So a week ago today, instead of saying “Maybe (meaning no)”. I said “Yes (meaning yes)” and the next day we set out from Avonmouth docks for a three-day expedition. One day out, one day's fishing and one day back. Anticipating mostly boredom I pack a lot of books.

We leave Avonmouth on the ‘Morning Glory’, a 40-foot hydrofoil, capable of doing 39 knots on all but the roughest seas. The hydrofoil, Neil tells me, is also remarkably fuel efficient, as it uses tiny underwater wings to lift the hull and reduce drag; it really is an amazing craft.

We speed down the Bristol Channel in glorious weather passing the lumbering container ships and bouncing off their wake. In what seems like twenty minutes, but was probably much longer, we are in the open sea and headed out towards the south coast of Ireland, where we will pick up more fuel, (it's cheaper there) and then speed off into the Atlantic. Neil has dressed me in a woolly jumper and a dry suit with a life vest sown into the jacket. It's great during the first part of the journey when it feels like I am just being pelted with buckets of ice-cold salty water, but as we start to get up to speed and the wings do their work, there is less and less splash, I realise I am boiling and that no one else is wearing any of this stuff. I strip down to sunscreen and shorts and wait till the rest of the guys had stop giggling about the land lubber's new clothes. Neil tells me not to lose track of them, that we are going to need them where we are going, that they may well save my life.

I realise I have no idea where we are going at all. I just assumed that we would sail in a straight line until we lost sight of land and then just drop a line or two. Neil laughs, ‘No,’ he says, ‘I said deep-sea Fishing and when I say deep I mean it. We’re going to 'Challenger Deep'

He's not kidding.

I learn that Challenger Deep is in fact the deepest part of The Mariana Trench and apparently the deepest place on Earth. It’s a Mecca for deep-sea fishermen who go there in the hope of catching new species. If they do catch something that hasn't been seen before then they get to name it. Neil tells me that people pull up something new, about once a month. He in fact has a bright blue puffer-fish in the British Museum of Natural History, which he is waiting to be verified. I ask him what he's going to call it. He laughs and says that he was just thinking of calling it ‘Spike’.

We stop off in Dingle for petrol, barrels and barrels of the stuff. I feel guilty about the cost of all this, But Neil tells me that it's OK, there is a research foundation that pays for him to come out here. Apparently he's not the only person interested in catching new species.

Leaving Ireland behind we find ourselves being followed out of the bay by a single Dolphin, Neil actually has to slow down so that it can keep up. Something he claims to do purely for my benefit. Its smiling dolphin face comes popping out of the water every thirty seconds or so as he jumps and plays in the wake of the boat. I am reminded of how we did a similar thing with the big cargo ships leaving Avonmouth. We are not even halfway to Challenger Deep and already that seems like an impossibly long time ago. As we get further out our dolphin starts to look more and more nervous, and eventually turns back for the shoreline. That’s ‘Fungie’, says Neil.

Apparently Fungie is a lone male that lives in the bay all year round. He is a major tourist attraction around here; people come to swim with him. Neil guns the engine.

I had no idea that the trench was close enough to Britain to be able to get to within a day, I had previously thought it was somewhere near Japan, living in the UK has given me this idea that anything exotic or exciting should be half the world away. But after 14 hours, of listening to the purring engine, and Neil’s jokes about the movie Jaws, (we're going to need a bigger boat) we have traveled close to 400 miles. Neil announces that we will drop anchor just off Alamagan Island, which is part of the Mariana Island Chain, and is just about the closest landmass to the trench itself. The area we are due to fish tomorrow is marked on the map in his neat handwriting as follows: Challenger deep, Danger Very Deep Water. It is named, Neil tells me, after the HMS Challenger that sailed over it in 1875 and sounded it's depth to be 4475 fathoms. Later, with more advanced technology, it was discovered to actually be nearly 6000 fathoms, a depth of 11000 meters; that's 2000 meters deeper than Everest is tall.

Over very deep water, Neil tells me, the currents can do extremely odd things. In a response to some eddy or fluctuation in the complex layers of water beneath, large waves will pop up vertically from an other wise flat sea, thirty feet high and to an angle of 60 degrees or more. Similarly sea-pits can open up, sometimes dropping down as much as 40 meters below sea level, only to have the surrounding ocean tumble in to fill the space. I look out at nearby Alamagan. It looks safe and comfortable, and they probably have a bar. Neil’s sees my expression and adds the disclaimer that both these events are extremely rare.

That night as the boat pitches and yaws I dream of sea monsters. I dream that the sea itself is a monster, rising up and tipping us over. I dream myself at the bottom of a sea-pit, looking up at a wall of incoming water, like a Biblical soldier pursuing Moses across the Red Sea. A wall full of strange looking fish, ready to crash down on me, none of them particularly happy to be there.

Despite the long day yesterday I wake up at close to four AM to hear heavy rain striking the deck above me and then suddenly the distant rumble of thunder. I begin to wonder what else lurks beneath the deep waiting for us to find it. What other creatures were so hideous and evil that they must be hidden under mountains and mountains of water. I begin to think, ‘What right do we have to hook them and then pull them up?’

Neil told me yesterday that some fish explode when they reach the surface due to the lack of pressure around them. This is starting to feel like a really weird weekend.

By the time the sun comes up at 6am the storm has passed, the sea is calm and Neil is checking the equipment. We don't use anything that even looks like a fishing rod. We do use a reel. It is massive. It is not even fishing wire but rather several miles of fibre-optic cable. The wire is connected to a large lead weight, about a foot long and streamlined to look like a rocket. This is so it will be able to get down faster into the pitch dark of the trench. Above the lead rocket the fibre-optic line splits into several threads that are kept apart by collapsible carbon-fibre rods. The end of each strand has a bead of glass on the end that glows when light comes down the fibre-optic cable. These get further from the original wire as they go up, so once it's submerged and the topside flashlight is lit, it looks quite a lot like a very large, sparsely decorated, upside down Christmas tree.

Neil says that hooks are not always the best things to catch a deep-sea fish with. There is no way to tell when you have a bite so you cannot jerk the hook to make sure of the catch. Also many of the fish are too soft or oddly shaped to take a hook. Hagfish for example cannot bite at all, but instead force a circular row of teeth onto their pray and then spin around to take out a chunk of flesh leaving the dead or injured fish to sink down to the bottom. They also have 4 hearts and 2 brains, and when caught produce a whole bucket of slime... no word of a lie.

Time is always short and to maximize their chances of a catch, some of the lights are baited with what look like cages which snap shut if anything tugs at the bead. Some are also baited with suction bags which expand and fill with water, pulling in any nearby fish. The whole operation is far more high tech than I thought it was going to be.

As we put the 'Tree' together, I can't help feeling like we are putting together an IKEA flat-pack. Like it's the most normal thing in the world. A group of guys on a project, a few beers, an upside down Christmas tree to light up the impossible depths of the ocean.

We set off with everything ready to go and reach the trench after about an hour. I expect there to be some sign. Like a buoy or wooden post sticking out of the water reading 'You have now reached the oceans deepest point.' perhaps even a visitor’s centre where I could get a Ridge Burger and a Bottomless Coke... but there is nothing. Nothing but ocean as far as the eye can see. The only reason we even know we are in the right place is the Sat Nav. Neil gives the order to drop the line and reports our progress on the radio. It will take three hours for the tree to get to the bottom. Bare in mind we are talking about a rocket shaped piece of lead, falling through water with little or no resistance and it's still going to take three hours, It's a long, long way. During this time we take turns, lubricating the bearings on the reel with refined coconut oil and topping up the cooling system with water. Neil switches on the high compression freezer compartment which is where the catch will be stored. I keep an eye on the sea around us, just in case it does anything funny.

Now we wait. The lure will be down there for two hours and then take a further nine hours to come back up. I read my book. I write some notes on my laptop. All of us catch up on some sleep, yesterday was a long day and today will be even longer. By my calculations we will not get back to Alamagan until at least Midnight. Neil tells me my calculations are wrong. We will not be going back to Alamagan at all. Once the catch is on board it's a race against time to get back home. The longer they are stored, the more likely they are to lose integrity and will therefore become harder to correctly identify. As soon as the tree is up, he says, I'll gput my foot down and you and the lads will sort the catch on the fly.'

I wake up at seven. It's still very light. The others are up already. A meal has been made. But before we eat, Neil asks me if I fancy a dip. This seems crazy. 'What's the matter,' he says, 'Afraid to get out of your depth?' This is once in a lifetime stuff. This is an offer I cannot refuse.

'Lets go for it'

Neil dives in first followed by one of the crew. The next in is me. It's impossibly cold. I am just about able to gasp a few breaths and swim around. I can feel the depth beneath me. The theme to Jaw's won't stop playing in my head... I can feel the life down there - nasty spikey life, rising up at 1000 miles an hour to bite my toes off. Something grabs my foot I panic and make for the boat like a man possessed. It's Neil goofing around. 'If you’re scared now, Wait till we get the tree up.' he says. 'Then you'll see what we've really been swimming over' I start to wonder if anything can match my imagination for horror.

We get out of the water. Once I am dry, as a reaction to the cold my whole body starts glowing like a furnace, it is an amazing feeling. It's like how those adverts from ReadyBrek, pretend ReadyBrek will make you feel, the lying bastards. More than anything else I feel great because I am still alive.

The meal, seafood chowder, tastes amazing. We are all laughing and joking when an alarm starts going off. I panic inside, I’m half sure it means a sea-pit or a freak wave is coming but apparently this is just the signal that the tree is up. It's merely a wake-up call. It's time to stop goofing off and get busy again.

We all get the tree on board; four of the cages are shut and three of the bags are full. There is even something that looks for all the world like an aquarium goldfish on one of the hooks. I mean exactly like a goldfish. It's the very last thing I was expecting, and shocked for a moment I just stare at it, look into its little black eyes. I go to touch it, when one of the crew stops me. 'Gloves' he says. 'I know it looks like a tiddler, but you never know’ Neil gets us underway and very carefully, in the ships lights we get the bags, cages and fish into the compression freezer. Some of the cages have what look like tentacles sticking out of them. One even has a bone-white stick with a blob on the end. A blob that glows on and off in a series short bursts. There’s something weird about it, like there is a sequence there, something it is trying to say. One, Three, Five Seven… The crew seem unimpressed and pop the creature into the fridge with the others. The weather takes a turn for the drizzly and I am glad of my drysuit. Neil sits in a chair in front of the throttle with three cans of Red Bull and a little plastic tub of chewing gum. I tell him about the prime numbers but he seems more interested in the goldfish, he hasn't seen anything like that before, thinks I might be making it up. 'Screw the stupid goldfish,' I say, 'What about the numbers?'
He looks me in the eye, 'Since when did you learn to talk to fish?'

We come into the Bristol Channel at around 8pm. We've been gone for three days, but it feels like a month. Back at the docks I give back my woollies and my drysuit. Neil reiterates that ‘flasher's’ are pretty common; he says he'll let me know about the goldfish. I feel kind of shell-shocked as I get back into my little silver Peugeot. It's not just the lack of sleep. The past few days have been a brave new world, new people, and new creatures.

I don't even remember how I got back to the flat. I don't remember parking. I don't remember Ali asking me how it was, or my grunted reply. I do remember falling into bed at about 10pm and not waking up until well past midday. Andy Murray was struggling against some old timer in the first round of Wimbledon. I think he won in the end. Everyone knew he was going to... Neil called this morning to say that the goldfish is actually a kind of dwarf eel, and a Swedish fisherman named Armond Jacobson had already discovered it about four months ago. The jury is still out on his puffer fish, and when I asked about the ‘flasher’ he just laughed.