Birdmen of ness on film

The guga hunters at work on the uninhabited islet of Sula Sgeir

A gale was raging, the waves below were immense - the vicious tail of a hurricane that had already lashed the east coast of America, now in its death throes off the north-west tip of Scotland - and Mike, on his first day making his first film, could have been forgiven for wondering if it might be his last.

A few weeks earlier, he'd been tidying up legal wrangles in the Persian Gulf, cosy and cossetted from the elements, a world away from this Hebridean hell where the Atlantic threatened to engulf the fishing trawler, sweeping him and his precious camera equipment to the bottom of the sea.

"I thought it was all over," nods Mike from North Berwick. "The trawler was sinking, I was being winched off and all the kit I needed was still on the deck. Meanwhile, my brother was in another boat in the same storm, in the same situation and with a broken radio. You could say I was a little concerned."

Indeed, his attempt to capture an ancient Hebridean tradition on camera might have been the shortest ever career in filmmaking. Having taken redundancy from his law firm and thrown himself into pursuing this lifelong dream, he was now at the mercy of elements so fierce that even the hardened islanders he'd come to film were shaking their heads and cursing how bad it was.

But it was going to take more than one of the worst storms in decades - and two further agonisingly close brushes with death to come, one of which left him fighting for his life in an Edinburgh hospital - to sweep Mike's plans overboard.

Redundancy cheque in pocket, he had arrived in Stornoway eager to fulfil his ambition to become a filmmaker, a career for which he had slowly been preparing for years.

"I arrived in London from Dubai and went straight to North Berwick to get a boat to sail through the canal to the west coast and then up north," recalls Mike, 31. "I was, literally, a week out of the office and I was on my way to make a film about the disappearing culture of the Hebrides."

He'd heard that every August a ten-man team from some of the smallest villages on the northern-most tip of the Isle of Lewis set sail for the uninhabited islet of Sula Sgeir, 40 miles north, in pursuit of a centuries-old tradition.

On reaching the isolated islet they stay for around two weeks when, much to some animal welfare charities' despair, they perch on the edge of sheer cliffs and pluck 2000 young gannets from their nests, despatching them with a blow to the head then plucking, quartering and salting them ready for transport back to Lewis.

Known as guga, the pungent seabird flesh is an acquired taste but a prized delicacy on the island and abroad. These men of Ness are the only people in Britain allowed to hunt seabirds. And so protective of their tradition are they, that the annual guga hunt has not been captured on film for 50 years.

And after that first terrifying day as he swung from the helicopter winch, wondering if his kit might be rescued too, the guga hunt might well have survived unfilmed for at least another year. But Mike, son of a merchant seaman who'd learned to sail off North Berwick as a lad and already had the Sydney Hobart Yacht Race under his belt, was determined not to be beaten.

Tonight, the results of that journey to film the 2009 guga hunt make it to the small screen, in a BBC2 Scotland documentary, The Guga Hunters of Ness.

But what went on behind the camera is nearly as breathtaking as the hunt itself. Joining Mike on board a 38ft yacht that doubled as the production unit and their accommodation for the fortnight filming, was his brother Matt - a one-time British Olympic sailing hopeful who had joined him on the Sydney-Hobart race - 19-year-old Will Brown, a marine engineer from Edinburgh and experienced sailor Aaron Sterrit, 22, from Kingussie.

And none, nods Mike, was fully prepared for the nightmare conditions they'd endure, from endless hours without sleep to scrabbling over rocks to film and the horrific weather. He says: "The lack of sleep for days on end was tough. Most of the time it was blowing a Force Nine gale and someone had to be on watch all the time.

"We were all nearly killed on the last day of filming when we were hit by a freak wave that came from nowhere and swept us over so we were almost horizontal. When the boat came back up, Will had fallen the full width of the boat and smashed our throttle controls so we were in this monstrous surf with no engine. We had to sail to a nearby island to rig up some ropes and cords which we used to control the engine."

Bad enough, but the drama of making his first film for his new company - the rather appropriately named Intripid cinema - wasn't over yet. He was busy editing his shots when he suddenly felt unwell. He woke days later in the Royal Infirmary, a victim of viral encephalitis.

He says: "It caused my brain to swell so much that it started to push my eyeballs out. I couldn't walk and I couldn't see. I was given a 70 per cent chance of dying or having some kind of brain damage."

He made a full recovery at his parents' Karen and George's North Berwick home.

But he accepts that these first steps into the world of filmmaking were infinitely more dramatic than he'd ever intended.

"It's not put me off, though," he grins. "I've got a very secret project - another quite sensitive topic - on the cards and I'm planning to shoot a feature film, a drama, next year."

And the plan is to avoid any more brushes with death.

"I've had three narrow escapes making this film," grins Mike. "I'm not planning any more."

The Guga Hunters of Ness is on BBC2 Scotland, tonight at 9pm.

Historic hunt

SEABIRDS, said to taste like a cross between mackeral and duck, were once a popular delicacy, but in island communities off the west coast of Scotland, guga formed a staple diet.

Hunting for gannets was outlawed in 1954, but the men of Ness were granted an exception - allowed to hunt for 2000 birds once a year on cultural grounds.

The practice has been branded "barbaric and inhumane" by the SSPCA, but the RSPB says it has a "neutral" stance on the hunt as gannet numbers are increasing.