“I still check the news every day,” says Vivien Clowes. “I search for diving incidents in Dorset, hoping someday his body may come home to our family.”
Vivien’s husband Steve Clowes went missing some 28km off the Dorset coast on the afternoon of Saturday, 25 May 2024, as reported soon after the incident on Divernet.
Few details were available at the time and the diver’s name was not announced. A full-scale air and sea search and rescue operation was stood down the following day – but his body has yet to be found.
In the intervening year, Vivien Clowes has struggled not only with her sudden bereavement but with the distressing red tape involved in the vital task of obtaining a death certificate for someone who disappeared without trace.
Twelve months on today from her husband’s departure, Vivien also tells Divernet that she wants to correct any impression that might have arisen – because of the limited information put out at the time – that he had been an inexperienced diver. She had not been given the opportunity to make a statement about him last year, she says.
Steve Clowes was 57, a senior electrical engineer with a passion for diving. “He was diving with one of his best friends, and it was him who called to tell me,” Vivien told Divernet. She understood the realities of scuba-diving because she had been a Master Scuba Diver herself, though she had hung up her kit in 2010.
Day of the dive
The fatal descent should have been what Vivien describes as “a routine recreational dive” onto the wreck of the sv Aracan, although at a depth of 56m and well offshore the wreck of this Victorian merchant sailing ship, which had collided with the steamship American in 1874, was a serious dive.
However, Vivien describes her husband as an experienced PADI Master Instructor and TDI Instructor and a lifelong diver, one who had spent many years exploring the waters around Portland and had no shortage of technical expertise.
“Over 25 years he had trained countless divers and was known for his calm presence and meticulous approach,” she says.
“On the day he was lost to the sea he had reached his 15m safety stop, standard procedure after a recreational deep dive. Then, nothing. Just a locked-off reel and a surface marker buoy to say he’d been there.
“The Coastguard launched a major search involving helicopters, fixed-wing planes, lifeboat crews from Weymouth and Swanage and others boats in the area. They searched well into the night, but Steve’s body was never recovered.
‘My rock’
However, for Vivien and her family Steve was “more than a missing person”, she says. “He was a husband, a father, a friend. Steve and I had been together since we were teenagers, 40 years in all, and married for 35 years.
“We raised five children together – our youngest was just 15 when Steve went missing. Steve was my rock, the one person who was always there for me.”
At the time of his disappearance, the diver was wearing his late father’s 1967 Rolex Submariner watch, a family heirloom that had been destined to be inherited by one of the couple’s sons, Jack. “Its recovery would also mean the world to us,” says Vivien.
“I’ve since donated to the Exmouth lifeboat wheelhouse in Steve’s name and that of his late father, a Royal Navy veteran. It’s a way of keeping them both at sea, still helping others.”
Bureaucratic toll
One of the most difficult aspects for the family of a diver who remains missing is the application for a death certificate. On Divernet in 2019 Rosie Moss, the widow of Kent diver Ben Moss, described experiences similar to those of Vivien Clowes.
“The emotional toll was compounded by a bureaucratic one,” says Vivien. “The legal process of obtaining a presumption of death certificate was long, costly and emotionally draining. It involves submitting a formal application to the High Court, placing public notices in newspapers and often hiring legal representation.
“It’s thousands of pounds at a time when you’re barely functioning. But without a presumption of death certificate I could not settle Steve’s estate, so would have lost our home. I raised the issue with my MP, hoping to spark reform, but nothing came of it.
“My hope now is that by sharing Steve’s story, someone might come forward with information – or that future searches might be possible with the right equipment.
“But more than that, I want to shine a light on the quiet, often invisible grief of families who lose loved ones at sea.”
Also on Divernet: Search for diver off Dorset stood down, Diver lost 11 months ago still ‘missing person’, ‘Some comfort’ for widow at diver’s inquest, Search underway for diver missing off Dover coast
Some years back the body of a diver who disappeared off the Dorset coast was caught in fishing nets off the Dutch coast by chance. Unfortunately the likelihood of the missing diver being found are very low.