Termote started diving the icy English Channel at age 14 with his father, Dirk, a retired hotelier. It was mines like the one in Termote’s backyard that sent more of Germany’s WWI U-boats to the bottom of the channel than anything else. The dunes outside Termote’s house are still lined with concrete bunkers built by the Germans to defend its U-boat bases from British attack. Their U-boats were based farther inland in Bruges, just outside the range of British naval guns, and passed through canals that fed into the channel at Ostend and the nearby town of Zeebrugge. The Germans occupied the entire Belgian coast during World War I. Out in the backyard, there’s a creepy-looking mine from the First World War, about a foot in diameter and prickly all over with detonators. It was hand-forged for an old British man-of-war, and a trawler hauled it up from the seabed of the English Channel, a stone’s throw from here. Outside his house in Ostend, on the Belgian coast, stands the biggest anchor you’ve ever seen-over 16 feet high, weighing five tons. You get an idea before you even walk in his door that Tomas Termote’s life is bound up with the sea, or at any rate what lies beneath it.
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