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At the moment when the tide turns to run in the opposite direction, the current, which relentlessly ebbs and floods in these six-hour cycles in UK waters, drops away and lessens to almost nothing as it swings around to begin to move in the opposite direction for the next six hours. It’s the magical time called slack water.

Divers in tidal waters always aim to arrive on site well before slack water to give time to shot the wreck by dropping a line with a heavy weight tied to one end that has a buoy on the other end to keep it afloat. Sufficient time is always allowed for divers to get kitted up, everything being timed so that the water is just going slack as you enter the water to begin your dive. (In diving we say that you can never be too early for slack water. It will always come – but if you are too late for slack water, slack water won’t come around for another six hours.) Divers descend down the shotline, often called the downline, and then for safety, at the end of a deep decompression dive or a dive in an exposed location, will tend to return to the downline to ascend.