Ann Smith Gordon has worn many hats: nurse, scuba diver, photographer, philanthropist and veteran traveller.

At age 90, she can add writer to the list.

Ms Smith Gordon has just released her memoirs, Ann’sTrue Tales from The Bermuda Triangle, detailing her many adventures above and below the sea.

After hearing some of her stories, it was business coach Jan Fraser Coles who first encouraged her to write about her life.

“Jan said you have to write these stories down,” Ms Smith Gordon said.

She took that advice to heart not long after retiring as executive director from Pals in 2015. She ran the charity for 34 years.

“I started to write stuff down and she would come to my house and read what I had written into her telephone,” Ms Smith Gordon said. “She would put it on a computer.”

For the retired nurse the most difficult part of writing the book was just getting the punctuation correct.

Margie Lloyd, of the Bermuda National Trust, helped her with proofreading.

In the book she reveals how her passion for nursing started when she was very young, possibly triggered by early childhood health problems.

“I developed an allergy to just about everything in the book,” Ms Smith Gordon said. “I was having difficulty breathing and they thought I had asthma.”

Her symptoms were so bad her family moved overseas for two and half years to seek allergy desensitivity treatment for her.

“It was 1943, the middle of the Second World War and we went in a flying boat,” Ms Smith Gordon remembered.

In hospital, she was only allowed to eat five foods for six months.

“I also had to have shots for four years to desensitise me to the things I was allergic to,” she said. “I went through injection after injection.”

At 8, she was keenly interested in what went on around her in the hospital.

“One year I had to spend Christmas in the hospital,” she said. “My parents were devastated. I had a great time.”

All the shots worked and she is allergy free.

The book also details her love of scuba diving.

“I’m not sure why I started scuba diving,” she said. “I think I just asked Harry Cox to take me out with him. I started in the early Sixties.”

They did one memorable dive in Crystal Caves in Hamilton Parish.

“Opposite the pontoons in the cave, there is a platform,” she said. “We went 90ft under that. We turned the lights off once. As much as I close my eyes, I cannot make it as black as that was. The water down there was like black ink.”

During another dive they went into the waters off the Mid Ocean Club in Hamilton Parish.

“We stood on the bottom at 200ft,” she said. “People today would be horrified at the equipment we had.”

She began diving a few years before the Professional Association of Diving Instructor Certification was introduced.

“Harry Cox got his Shearwater diving boat and he needed a master diver, so it made sense for me to get certified,” she said.

A more experienced diver took her to the stern of the Queen of Bermuda, docked in Hamilton Harbour, and dove with her to the bottom.

“Someone had dropped the end of a very heavy dinghy on my foot and broke my toe,” she said. “I dove with one flipper on while the other leg dragged along.”

On the sea floor her instructor made her remove her mask.

“I did that without choking to death,” she said. “He turned my air off, which I didn’t realise until I couldn’t breathe any more. Then we did buddy breathing.”

The buddy breathing came in handy years later when she was swimming around North Rock while friends dived. She saw a shark deeper in the water, so dove down to her friends to take a closer look. They did buddy breathing with her so that she could enjoy the spectacle.

“There were several visitors on the boat who were not divers,” she said. “They had just come along for the ride. I did not realise that they had seen the shark also. They assumed the worst when they saw me disappear under the water. They were in a panic, but there was nothing they could do.”

When she came back out of the water she was astonished to see the expressions on the onlookers’ faces.

“They looked like they had seen a ghost,” she laughed. “I had only been gone a few minutes, but it was way longer than I could have held my breath.”

Her biggest diving regret is that she missed the opportunity to dive with Jacques Cousteau, through Teddy Tucker and Harry Cox, when he visited Bermuda some years ago.

“I was doing private nursing at that time,” she said. “It would not have occurred to me to say I am not coming to work today, because I want to go diving.”

She no longer dives.

“I miss it, but you adjust,” she said. “Writing this book has consumed me. It took me for ever to write it.”

Friends helped her to move the memoir to publication.

It will be available at Pals, the Bermuda Bookstore, the Book Mart and the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute for $60.

“It should have been on the Air Canada flight, but got bumped last week,” Ms Smith Gordon said.

• Ann’s True Tales from The Bermuda Triangle is now available at the Bermuda Bookstore and at Brown & Co