Diver Sean McGahern may have spent nine hours and 45 minutes under water at a temperature of 15°C but it was not enough of an ordeal to get him to break the Guinness World Record cold water, open-sea dive.

His ambitious goal on Monday failed due to adverse weather conditions and he was forced to call it a day five hours before reaching his target, set at 15.

The world record is 11 hours and 42 minutes, so, technically, he would have only needed to withstand the force five winds for another two hours.

“But I had a three-metre swell above me,” Mr McGahern recounted, explaining how, after almost 10 hours of holding on to rocks on the seabed, he was forced to throw in the towel.

He decided to quit his dream when he realised it was taking the safety divers 30 minutes to reach him with replacement cylinders instead of 10.

Asked how he managed to stick it out for so long, Mr McGahern said it was thanks to “a bit of courage” and “hanging on to the bottom” due to the current.

He entered the water by Starfish Diving School in St George’s Bay at 11 p.m. on Sunday night but by seven the next morning he realised there were problems and if the divers did not manage to reach him he would have difficulty getting out and would remain “stuck at the bottom”.

“After half an hour all alone, I decided it was not worth it and that there was always another day.”

Mr McGahern has not given up and has scheduled his next attempt for January next year as the sea temperature will soon start rising. Only last week, it was 16°C but once it dropped to the required temperature, the wind had picked up, causing other problems.

In 2009, Mr McGahern broke the world record for the longest dive in warm open waters. He has since lost it and is planning to take back the title in September while preparing for a round-Malta dive.

The diver has not been back in the water since Monday and is not planning to return until next month, having suffered from fatigue after the dive and breathing oxygen for 24 hours to flush out extra nitrogen from his body.

Despite the failure of the attempt, some good did come out of it and Mr McGahern managed to raise £500 for cancer research, his chosen cause after losing several members of his family to the disease.