Fishing Boat Captain Jailed For 9 Months After Diver Dies Off Fife

The captain of a fishing boat has been jailed for nine months after a string of health and safety breaches led to the death of a diver in Largo Bay off Fife. A sheriff ruled that Guthrie Melville, who's 60, had 'effectively no safety measures' on board the vessel. James Irvine, 42 of Glenrothes, died while diving for razor clams in March 2011 - he was using an unapproved technique involving electrified copper rods but the exact cause of death has never been confirmed. Stirling Sheriff Court heard there no way of knowing if the rods had killed Mr Irvine. They were found and photographed on the boat the day after the accident, but when police went back a week later to seize them as evidence they had gone - Melville told officers he had dumped them in the sea. After the sentencing, Mr Irvine's wife Hazel immediately called for punishments in such cases to be made comparable with culpable homicide. The father-of-two had been desperate for work and his only dive training had been a two-week holiday course in Turkey. When his body was found lying face-up on the river bed by a police frogman there was plenty of air left in his breathing tank, neither of his two air-supply regulators was in his mouth, but he had drowned. Melville was prevously found guilty of a string of breaches of Diving At Work regulations and health and safety legislation, "in consequence of which" Mr Irvine failed to surface and drowned. It was his first day's work as a diver. Melville was also found guilty of putting five other divers at risk through similar failings over a six year period between April 2005 and the date of the tragedy. He had denied the offences and claimed that he had been taking Mr Irvine out for "a pleasure dive". Sheriff William Gilchrist said that Melville had ignored safety requirements on board the Solstice for several years. Prosecutor Lousie Beattie said Mr Irvine had been left "truly on his own", eight metres down in the Forth, because Melville had no second diver on standby to rescue him, no means of communicating with him, and no means of getting him from the water onto the boat in an emergency. He had also failed to ensure that Mr Irvine was wearing an inflatable jacket, known as a "bouyancy control device" which he could have used to get to the surface quickly, and he had no lifeline. The only means anyone on the Solstice had of telling how he was getting on underwater was to look for bubbles coming up to the surface, and when they stopped, Melville and his only crewman, an elderly retired builder called Carl Smart, could only panic. Melville, who had failed to complete a diver-training course he had been on himself, could not even get his radio to work, and had to phone the police to ask them to call the coastguard. Outside court, Hazel Irvine said Melville should have been treated like a killer. She said: "I am disgusted with the sentence. He took my husband's life and he should have gone down for years. He should have been treated like it was culpable homicide, because that was what it was." Mr Irvine's son Alan, 25, said: "Nine months is a joke."