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The very aftmost section of the stern is broken off from the rest of the ship, leaving a small gap, and just forward of the gap here, on either side of the keel bar, are set her four high-speed propellers. The long sections of free propeller shaft run forward from their support bearings and disappear into the shaft tubes before running forward inside the wreck to the turbine rooms.

For a battleship weighing in at some 25,000 tons you’d think the props would be massive – the props on the far smaller 10,850-ton armoured cruiser Hampshire at Scapa Flow are large 43-ton affairs, which dwarf a diver. But the props on Audacious aren’t of that scale – these were small high-speed propellers, designed for high revs.

All too soon, our 35-minute bottom time was up – and it was time to head back to the downline to ascend, rising up as we moved forward, the blink of our strobes easily visible far ahead in the beautiful visibility.

The beautiful visibility off Malin Head can seduce divers into staying too long on the wreck. I know it did to me on an open-circuit trip back in 2003 before I had moved to rebreather diving. We were diving 60–75 metres every day for about 10 days, and on one occasion doing two 75-metre dives in one day. Even although every dive was carried out flawlessly using the prevailing decompression software of the day in our computers, I still got badly bent with decompression sickness after the very last dive of the trip. You can read about the whole episode in more depth in the chapter entitled ‘Bent in the North Channel’ in my prequel to this book, The Darkness Below.