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Ian Taylor ~ Skipper Skin
Deep  Click
here to see my photo gallery
Profile of Ian Taylor Skipper
/ owner of Skin Deep dive charter
Ian Taylor was born in Portsmouth in July 1971; the son of
a shopkeeper/part-time fisherman .He grew up in Portsmouth
and started a relationship with the sea from early age fishing
with his father. At the age of eleven Ian joined the local
bsac diving club and was taught to dive by a policeman Fred
Clarinbould, by the time he reached thirteen he had done his
first scallop dive on Lulworth banks in Dorset (little did
he know that 15 years later he would be making his living
on the same coastline.)
After leaving school in 1987 he moved to Northampton and then
back down to West Sussex whilst training to be a gamekeeper
and by the age 19 he was a single-handed keeper on a 1000arce
estate in Compton, West Sussex. During this time he carried
on his passion for scuba diving and spear fishing in the Solent
and around the Isle of White.In 1992 Ian was made redundant
from his Job as Gamekeeper but managed to get a part-time
keepers job on a nearby estate .At this time in his life he
decided to try commercial diving and completed a commercial
diving course in Poole in the July of 1992. Ian has since
worked as a commercial diver for numerous diving companies
on jobs around the UK and as far away as the Gulf.
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During his diving career Ian had been involved
in many types of jobs including, cable laying, construction,
demolition, wreck salvage, cargo salvage, lifting Donald Campbell’s
Blue Bird and various other documentary work. In 1997 Len
Hurdis of Autumn Dream in Weymouth offered Ian a job skippering
his shuttle dive boat ‘Kyara Too’. Working through
Parry’s dive centre which he ran for the duration of
that summer providing a shuttle service to the wrecks around
in and around Portland. During the winter of 1997 Ian ran
winter weekends on SKINDEEP for Andy and Margaret Smith.
Left; Ian Taylor was one of the lead divers on the expeditions
that went in search of Limbourne and Charybdis the warships
lost in the English Channel, expeditions led by the late Keith
Morris. The image to the left shows Ian inspecting a heavy
duty porthole on HMS Charybdis at a depth of 85m. This story
was cover in many magazines across the world, here Ian appears
on the cover of the magazine 'After
the Battle'.
More info on these expedition can be seen on Leigh Bishops
website under the HMS Limbounre & HMS Charybdis at www.deepimage.co.uk.
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In 1998 Ian became good friends and worked for Grahame Knott running
his new dive boat Atlantis 11 which they had fitted out together
earlier that year, that summer saw Ian taking divers out of Weymouth
and Portsmouth aboard Atlantis. During the summer of 1998, Ian through
Grahame became interested in the deeper side of wreck diving and
was quite soon talked into (after the usual 60m plus air dives with
no wings, no memory etc), doing his tech nitrox and then trimix
courses with the late Keith Morris. During November 1998 while working
away as a diver in the Bristol Channel Ian like many people had
the devastating phone call from Margaret Smith telling him that
Andy Smith was in hospital after suffering a Brain hemerage. Ian
with the help of Grahame Knott and Jon Aling carried on running
Andy’s boat for Margaret and Andy for the remaining booked
charters while Andy was ill. Sadly Andy never fully recovered and
passed away in the beginning of December 1998.
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Early in 1999 Margaret smith came to Ian and
offered him the great honour of taking over the boat side
of Skindeep diving and after getting the ok from grahame to
stop running Atlantis 11 accepted and there started a business
relationship and friendship that has gone from strength to
strength ever since!
Ian kept up his passion for diving during this time and was
privileged to join Keith Morris’s expedition aboard
Grahame’s boat Wey Chieftain II to locate and dive HMS
Charybdis. During that June 2000 expedition Ian became the
first diver of the expedition to descend to the wreck some
85m deep. In 2001 Ian took the huge step and ordered a new
skindeep selling the old vessel to Richie Stevenson who changed
the name to Seeker before selling it on to Ian’s friend
Steve Wright who continues to operate it as a wreck diving
charter from Plymouth. (See boat page).
With the new SKINDEEP Ian has kept a top class reputation
of SKINDEEP DIVNG as one of the best dive boat charters in
the UK. Ian has pushed his offshore and expedition diving
to the max and has found and dived more undived shipwrecks
than any other boat on the south coast, including the significant
2001 expedition to locate and dive HMS Limbourne in which
Skin Deep played a tremendous part. The last few years has
seen Ian and skindeep venturing to other areas than Weymouth,
these include trips to isle of Wight, France, Alderney, Guernsey,
Salcombe and 3 very successful trips with wreck explorer Leigh
Bishop to locate virgin shipwrecks in deep water off the southern
Cornish coast .
In 2001 Ian joined the RNLI Weymouth lifeboat crew and during
the last 4 years has been trained by the RNLI in search and
rescue and commanding search and rescue and has qualified
as a boats navigator. In March 2005 Ian passed all his exams
to become Weymouth deputy life boat coxswain and now takes
turns covering Weymouth lifeboat station as coxswain when
the full time Cox has time off. See
my photo gallery click here |
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