Exotic challenge completed. Bathing platform for Middle East playground

Suez and Aqaba meet. Within the next two weeks it should be delivered

on-site.

Most of what is inside had been fabricated in the Argyll town in a

mere 18 days, with welders working into the early hours of the morning

under arc lights to complete the job. ''I don't believe another place in

the UK could have done it,'' says Robin Turner of a job which involved

both the local sub-contractor Weldfab and a number of other Scottish

suppliers stretching from Glasgow to Tain.

When the container reaches the massive Sheikh holiday and leisure

development, which runs along two kilometres of coast, the contents will

be reassembled to make possible a second-stage fabrication, the creation

of a large offshore floating bathing platform for use by those who come

to enjoy this new Middle East playground.

The ambitious Sheikh complex, a joint Italian/Egyptian development,

lies near Egypt's Ras Mohammad national park. Beneath the shallow shore

waters lies a protected coral reef. Depending on the state of the tide,

the inshore water is as little as 40cm deep. Beyond the reef is deeper

water and beyond that an exceptional 1400m trench which, says Turner,

provides some of the most spectacular marine experiences available

anywhere in the world. As someone with 25,000 dives already behind him,

Turner saw his very first Manta Ray diving in these waters.

But, if others enjoying the Sheikh development are to be able to swim

and dive in equivalent expectation of seeing some of nature's marine

wonders, a major technical obstacle had first to be overcome. A floating

platform in the deeper waters, connected to the shore, was vital if

bathers were not to injure themselves or wreak havoc on the inshore

coral.

But how to get the component parts of such a pontoon out there without

inflicting even more damage on the reef? The national park authorities

would have no truck with solutions that meant construction barges taking

lumps out of the reef either. In any case, the only things afloat in

that remote area were tourist craft. Another solution had to be found.

The manufacturer of the components which will make up the finished

bathing platform -- an Austrian company -- turned to Turner, whose own

business Seawork (Scotland) is based at the Dunstaffnage marina north of

Oban. What Turner came up with, thanks to a design executed by Alisdair

Salmon, a naval architect who rents space in Turner's modest HQ, is a

pontoon which will float, fully loaded, in those 40cm shallows. Thanks

to a solution hatched in Oban, the tourists in southern Sinai will be

able to swim without inflicting so much as a scratch on the reef.

The contract will also involve Seawork in one of its core

capabilities. It will moor the finished platform to the seabed, a skill

it has developed over the past decade, initially cutting its teeth on

local Scottish challenges like fish farms and marinas but, increasingly,

taking its expertise to the Mediterranean, to markets as diverse as

Spain, Sicily and Croatia.

To maritime innocents, mooring floating structures to the seabed may

seem pretty basic technology -- a heavy weight on the bottom, a length

of chain or rope and a small plastic buoy on top. It seemed like pretty

basic technology to Robin Turner when he first started asking questions

in the early eighties. Even Royal Naval types told him the secret was to

make the chain on the sub-sea mooring heavier than the one attached to

the boat. ''That way the boat chain breaks first,'' explains Turner,

adding mischievously ''and that's the principle on which they moor

aircraft carriers, by the way.''

As someone who studied mathematics to degree level, Turner was not

impressed. He set about soaking up all the available literature in a bid

to upgrade such low-tech thinking. You may wonder: Why bother? Fish farm

cages in sheltered sea lochs and those bobbing red buoys at many a yacht

anchorage don't look as if they need a technical reappraisal. But you

would be wrong.

Some of Seawork's mooring systems have withstood extraordinary

conditions. Turner describes one fish farm in Shetland whose

Scotwork-designed moorings withstood winds in excess of 200mph and 15m

waves. Even the fish inside survived. It took the later Braer disaster

to wipe them out.

That growing expertise -- and a lifetime's devotion to diving -- has

brought Turner and Seawork a growing international reputation, from

British Columbia and the Bay of Fundy to the Gulf of Aqaba. But, as he

himself readily explains, the journey from a childhood in Yorkshire and

days spent caving (and diving) there to exotic Middle East contracts,

has had as many downs as ups.

Turner's father hailed from Monymusk in Aberdeenshire. He worked in

the fire service down south and then ran a furniture business which also

made the wooden frames for aircraft like the Avro Anson. His mother was

of Yorkshire/French extraction. Turner's

great-great-great-great-grandfather on his mother's side was Hargreaves,

inventor of the spinning jenny.

Their son studied maths at Edinburgh but, because of a serious

illness, never sat his finals. ''I wasn't good enough to be a top

mathematician,'' he says now, although he can still quote the

mathematical constant e off the top of his head, to more than 20 decimal

points. I've heard him do it.

Instead of taking his degree, Turner went off to sea for six months to

recuperate. He tried to be a management consultant, working briefly like

his father before him in the furniture industry. But life was about to

take another twist.

His love of caving was complemented by a love of climbing. That

increasingly took him to Glencoe and Skye at weekends. Eventually, in

the mid- sixties, he decided to move to Argyll. At first he made a

meagre living as a part-time guide and roadsman in Glen Etive. He became

a member of the Glencoe mountain rescue team and devised an airbed race

down the River Coe to raise money for the group.

Then he took to sea again, working on a puffer sailing out of

Ballachulish. That gave way to skippering someone else's fishing boat,

sailing the waters of Mull in search of prawns. The diving he had first

tried out down Yorkshire caves -- Turner once made the headlines getting

stuck for three days down Dowberghyl Passage -- was revived. He went

diving off Mull for clams.

By this time he was living in a caravan at Bunessan and later, with

his first wife, in Tobermory. His first boat of his own was acquired in

1974. Having been turned down for grant support from the HIDB, because

its board thought him ''too small and not able to withstand the cold'',

he swopped thoughts of a 40-footer and borrowed from the bank for a

23-footer instead.

He called it Ros Ban (White Rose) and fished with it for years until

interest rates soared and he found himself working for the bank, living

in the fo'c'sle and subsisting on soup. After the break-up of his first

marriage Turner moved to Oban and decided to specialise in developing

better mooring systems.

His first big contract, in 1983, was to moor the pontoons at the

Craobh Haven yatching development south of Oban. Not for the last time,

the project fell into financial difficulties and Turner didn't get paid.

For the first five years he worked out of a Portacabin. Seawork was

selected as one of the final candidates for backing by Highland Venture

Capital, a scheme set up by the old HIDB in the early eighties. Turner

turned his back on that. He has developed a healthy scepticism of those

who come bearing gifts, with strings attached.

As mooring contracts and regular diving service work came in, Turner

continued to use his mathematical training and growing marine experience

to devise better mooring systems. Eventually he was approached by

insurance underwriters to provide a wide range of specialist consultancy

advice. A second company, ARMACS, was set up to handle that.

But the home market for diving services, which was Seawork's bread and

butter was turning nasty. Rival diving firms began to cost-cut to gain

work. Egged on by accountants, fish farms were increasing their stocking

densities and triggering disease among the stock.

It was becoming a very tough market. ''A lot of people were coming in

and bidding silly prices to get work. We refused to sharpen our pencil

any further and so we lost contracts, like routine work taking dead fish

out of the cages,'' explains Turner.

Progressively through word of mouth and by exhibiting at trade shows

in France and Spain, Seawork began to pick up overseas contracts in

Spain and Malta, Italy and Greece, and now in Egypt. That came from the

Austrians because they had collaborated with Seawork on a pier

refurbishment programme at Millport harbour.

Robin Turner is now 55, married again, and clearly enjoying these more

exotic challenges. He has one unrealised dream. It has nothing to do

with making piles of money. He seems too free-moving a spirit to be

over-influenced by that.

Turner sees Oban as the ideal site for a trials and training centre, a

kind of marine university. The sea, he argues, is the next great

frontier, one we can exploit in a sustainable way for food, minerals and

much more, if we have the will. He would like to see the frontiers of

diving technology expanded by the use of rebreather techniques. And

Oban, he argues, is the ideal location for a European centre of

excellence.

Who knows, if Oban can solve a tricky problem at the bottom tip of

Sinai, that dream too may have some substance in it.