JAMIE OLIVER rates him as the best fishmonger there is. Mark Hix - chef director of the Le Caprice group that owns celebrity favourite The Ivy among others - put his goods on his menus.

It's not an easy life but seeing the fruits of his labour being enjoyed by Britain's best chefs provides some comfort for Darren Brown. His company, Shell Seekers, started up after Darren left the Navy.

Since then, with more than 3,000 dives notched up in his logbook, he has become a favourite among the capital's foodies.

He dives for scallops and sells them to Jamie and Mark's restaurants as well as at London's prestigious Borough Market where he has a permanent stall.

"I dived in the navy and I knew that there was an outlet to supply dive-caught scallops to the top restaurants and miss out the middleman," said Darren, 38, at his Broadmayne home.

"Originally when I joined I wanted to be a clearance diver. I did my training and then on completion they told me that at 25 years old I was too old. I knew that if I stayed on until I had been there for five years they would have to resettle me back into civvy street and so when I came out I chose to do commercial diving."

It is a good thing the navy paid for his course. To dive commercially he needed a course accredited by the Health and Safety Executive that at the time cost £12,000.

Darren dives for scallops at West Bay and in Devon and sells them in London and occasionally at markets in Dorset. His wife Jo helps out, preparing the scallops and picking crabs which are also sold on his stall.

He and his diving partner Andy Musselwhite carry out between 300-400 dives per year and have even been recruited to test out wetsuits for Granby-based company O-Three, "seeing as we dive so much more than your average diver", he explained.

Darren describes a good scallop bed as being "scallops, scallops, scallops sat there smiling at you".

He said: "They sit embedded in the seabed, the round shell on the bed and the flat side on top. When they are on the bed they open up and you can see where they are because there's a little movement. If they sense vibrations they close and the sand coming out of them is almost like a little puff of smoke."

Being new to the industry at the time, Darren was put in at the deep end when he first started. He seems to be doing something right, though. He has been featured in numerous cookbooks and Jamie Oliver said Shell Seekers was his favourite fishmonger in an Observer article.

"A very good friend got me into it. We learned on our feet. We started finding nice spots and kept going back to them and just went on from there. A lot of it is a case of swimming and swimming, sometimes up to a mile, until we find somewhere. It's trial and error. That's why we are quite secretive of where we dive.

"What happens is that when we dive, we'll go out for one day and then the dredgers will figure out where we've been. The next thing we know they'll be on top of us.

"We can only be there one-and-a-half hours at a time and if they dredge the seabed we can't go back because it's all silted up and the bed is wrecked."

The controversial method of extracting scallops by dredging is something Darren cares very deeply about. He said other areas use systems such as no-tow zones and designated areas where certain operational methods are prohibited. "What that does is protect nursery areas and inside those areas scallops are allowed to spawn and it allows the ground to replenish. I'd love that to happen in Dorset. I've had to stop diving in certain areas because the bed has been destroyed.

"Environmentally diving for scallops has a really low impact on the scallop population because we are governed by five aspects - the time we spend on the bottom, the depth, the weather, dates and visibility.

"The seabed will look like a ploughed field if a dredger's been over it. It picks up everything. If you go over it after it there are crushed crabs, lobsters - smashed up to bits.

"If this barbaric way of fishing is not stopped it will be destroyed. Parts of the Jurassic coastline already have. It's like using a bulldozer to pick mushrooms. The dredgers and trawlers are the only people I know who will cut down an apple tree to pick the apples."