Rod Macdonald

Rod's diving career started a very long time ago in the early 1980's - before even Wham were popular. Within a few years he had developed a particular interest in shipwrecks which was to take him all over the world from Scapa Flow to Truk Lagoon to the South China Seas.

The paucity of information for divers about the scuttled German WW I High Seas Fleet wrecks lying at the bottom of Scapa Flow led to the publication of his first book, Dive Scapa Flow in 1990. This book has been updated and expanded over the years as the wrecks decay and fall apart and a Centenary edition was published in 2018 to mark the 100th anniversary of the scuttling of the High Seas Fleet.

Since then, Rod has gone on to write a dozen books about diving shipwrecks around the world in places such as Truk Lagoon and Palau in the Pacific. He has also written two books on WWII naval history: Task Force 58: The US Navy's Fast Carrier Strike Force That Won the War in the Pacific, and Pearl Harbor' s Revenge which covered the Japanese surprise attack that sank or damaged all eight US Navy battleships present in December 1941, and how 6 of those 8 battleships were repaired and returned to the war.

Rod has written for most dive magazines and has been involved in several TV productions such as Drain the Oceans, Wolrd's Greatest Shipwrecks, Timewatch:The Death of the Battleship and Equinox: Lethal Seas.

He is a keen sailor and lives in Stonehaven, a small historic fishing town just to the south of Aberdeen where he served as lifeboat crew and then as RNLI Lifeboat Operations Manager of the Stonehaven Lifeboat service.

Rod is a Fellow of The Explorers Club of New York. In 2016 after receiving a Licence from the UK Secretary of State for Defence, he led the Flag 192 Expedition of specialist international divers to survey and record the wreck of HMS Hampshire off Orkney. In 2022 he led a team of specialist divers on another Explorer's Club flagged expedition to survey the wrecks of the two British submarines HMS K4 and HMS K17, victims of the so-called 'Battle of May Island' in the Firth of Forth in 1918.

He is a Patron of the GB & Ireland Chapter of The Explorers Club.