Like many sports enthusiasts whose instinct for self-challenge attracted them to
the exploits of HARRY HOUDINI, this ex-British navy diver eventually found his way to the FETTERS catalogue of RESTRICTIVE PRACTICES.

Sports kit was his ‘thing’ and, in particular, heavy-duty diving gear.
He was careful from the start to make clear to me that he was very definitely NOT GAY ...
but happily admitted to being kinky. His special liking was for being totally encased in his diving kit, whether dry suit or wet suit, and staying in it for long periods
however uncomfortable it might become.

He and a few diving mates would get together and deliberately subject themselves to dives in
extreme conditions of cold or rough weather.
A small house and out-buildings on the edge of a remote loch (lake) was where they met,
often staying there for three-day weekends.
An ex-SAS hard-nut owned the ramshackle stone house and barns ...
and often devised challenging games for the group.

 
A chaotic workshop packed with gear was an excellent venue for other activities which a bunch of lusty sporting types might get up to after a few drinks.
‘Buchanan’, still hiding behind his alias, eventually began admitting to a certain amount of rough-and-tumble during these what he called endurance tests.

Examples included deliberately snagged lines during a dive or keeping somebody in water after they wanted to get out. Favourite was refusing to lend a hand when an already exhausted diver was ready to get out of his kit. This, he told me, could lead to hilarity or on occasions real anger and potential violence ... which might, in turn, lead to having to subdue the angry ‘team member’ until he’d calmed down: nothing that any of these guys hadn’t done previously in the services or sports clubs high-jinks.

During his time as an official Naval Diving Instructor,
he told me, a training dive might involve having your hands tied behind your back while finding your way through a complicated under-water training area ... and he had the photos to prove it.

The gang he hung out with in and around the remote
Scottish lake in dry-suits or wet-suits (sometimes all day and even through the night) were, it seems, occasionally up for all sorts of devilment between themselves.

Among the junk in the ‘workshop’ there were two obsolete, really heavy old fashioned canvas dive suits complete with lead weighted boots and belts, plus solid metal helmets. These needed a couple of assistants and a spanner to get them on and off - if the assistants were in a mood to co-operate.

He also described in enthusiastic detail, the difficulties of getting out of a heavy old fashioned neck-entry dry suit without assistance.
With my encouragement he also admitted how, on occasions (both in the Navy and more recently) he had been forced by ‘mates’ to stay imprisoned in a particular suit which was rubber inside-and-out until a forfeit was paid. This, he explained, could be as simple as buying a round of drinks - but could also involve some form of humiliation.
When I wrote back and asked for further details he did not answer the question. But later, when I got to know him better and met him face-to-face, he revealed with some embarrassment that on more than one occasion, diving cronies had forced one or more of their members to stay in suits until after they’d had had no choice but to both piss and crap in their suits - and still be forced to live with it.

After I expressed a certain doubt, he added the information that he personally had forcibly administered castor oil or liquid paraffin to guys to speed up the crapping inside a suit. When asked if this had ever been done to him he said no. Was he telling the truth ... and if so, was he perhaps a bit disappointed? Without pushing the point, I did ask whether he would secretly have liked to have experienced it ... and he turned the conversation to how one of the liberating factors of these no-holds-barred testosterone-fuelled hi-jinks was that you could endure a lot more when all choice had been removed. Among this group of 'mates' it seems the word s bondage or kink were never mentioned. This was virtually impossible for me to believe, but later having met one or two of these characters, I realised that 'Buchanan's fear were justified ... hang-ups about homosexuality were dangerously close to the surface around these men - and could result in serious violence ... but that's another story.

Another valid point he made quite early in our correspondence about this group of what were obviously closet masochists, was that provocative attacks on others in such a group of hard-nuts, often indicated what sort of thing the attacker would like to have happen him. Deliberately inviting violent retaliation was perhaps something ‘Buchanan’ spent most of his life doing. Our correspondence continued for so long because physical challenge and endurance situations were what pushed buttons for both of us.

PHOTOS ON THIS PAGE:
To protect the identities of men mentioned in this text,
all pictures used are from other Internet sites; not of the group described here.
If owners of these photos get in touch with me
I will credit the photos or immediately remove them from this site on request.

Interrogation exercises


Action-men in action

Between themselves, experience in how to survive rough treatment in the past was perhaps what bonded them. The techniques for testing men ‘beyond endurance’ was common currency within the group.
Just how often such skills were exercised during their horse-play I could never be sure. The distinction between enforced discomfort rather than deliberately inflicted pain was Buchanan’s thing whether giving or receiving.

GENUINE INFORMATION supplied by this experienced hard-nut gave me material which later I used in fictionalised scenarios. The fire-fighter and other characters in the long story 'Houdini Connections', and the challenging under-cover agent Harry in 'Man-to-Man Stuff' story are both based on the mind-set of this life-long self-challenge nut, his mates and the games they used to play.

After retiring early from the Navy, he had kept himself in prime physical condition by continuing to wet-and-dry-suit dive, box regularly, wrestle aggressively and play Rugby football in Scottish rain, sleet or snow ... plus inviting/provoking a certain amount of sometimes quite punishing "rough-housing", as he called it, with sporting cronies.

But sadly, he never admitted to any gym partner or team mate what really turned him on. He did eventually share some of his long-suppressed natural instincts with contacts made though FETTERS as long as they were not on his home territory. Not only did he write for me a step-by-step description of how he achieved elaborate self-bondage without outside help, he eventually wrote two long-suppressed wishful-thinking scenarios. These are now on-site via the link to SPORTS GEAR AS BONDAGE.

Luckily, he also managed to get a few opportunities to experience seriously challenging ‘endurance’ bondage game-playing (always anonymous in sports kit or full rubber) before he died unexpectedly in his late forties. His death was not caused by any play-related activities but, sadly, many early opportunities to turn his fantasies into realities ... he resisted.

Moral of this story - don’t pass up opportunities. Certainly don’t leave it until you are physically no longer able to deal with the intensity of the sort of experience that you fantasize about.