Respected diver Steve Cheshire has died after surfacing rapidly off the Dorset coast while investigating a Victorian wreck.
Fellow divers have paid tribute to Mr Cheshire, 37, a former naval aircraft engineer and father of two, from Yeovil.
Portland Coastguard scrambled their helicopter to fly Mr Cheshire to the decompression unit at Poole General Hospital after receiving a mayday call from the dive boat Wey Chieftain in the Channel, 20 miles off Portland Bill, at 11.15am on Monday.
Mr Cheshire had surfaced semi-conscious and was winched into the helicopter and flown to Poole, but his condition was judged to be so serious that he was flown to the accident and emergency department at Dorset County Hospital, Dorchester, rather than being taken to Poole General's decompression unit. He was pronounced dead on arrival.
Mr Cheshire, who worked for AgustaWestland, was a keen researcher of wreck sites. He and seven others were involved in diving on the wreck at a depth of 60 metres.
Graham Knott, skipper of Wey Chieftain, said yesterday: "He came to the surface very rapidly and was face-down in the water. He just managed to lift his arm up. The sign for help is a raised arm with fist clenched. I was already right on top of him – I saw him come up – and got the dive lift immediately and brought him into the boat. He was obviously unconscious by that time. I cut him out of his diving gear, called mayday and gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
"He was a very experienced diver, a jolly sort of chap who had spent a lot of his time researching shipwrecks, and I think he planned to write a book about them eventually. He was trying to identify the wreck, which he had dived on once before and which I think dated from the mid-1800s."
