Some of the old soldiers died with honor, but these idiots dove into the ocean and then realized they couldn't get out.
Maybe you should try building a "swimming platform", small ramp area that goes into the water, so anyone who dives in has a way back into your fortress, but with the access from the ramps to your fortress being via floodgates (so you don't have to worry about a gobbo or kobold sneaking around & using it as an access point).
There are ways out of the ocean. It's just that my Dwarves are to busy fighting the zombie fish to swim to them. So by the time they are done fighting, they drown. Also the problem with installing swimming platforms in the fortress itself is that it just gives the undead another access point. Ever since the zombie whales rampaged through the dining room, I'm trying to limit undead access.
The only remaining soldier is too busy eating, drinking, and sleeping to help them.
Smartest one of them all, really.
Right now he's running around picking up equipment. He's currently throwing on adamantine armor and picking up an adamantine battle axe. Maybe the screams of his copper clad comrades convinced him to spend an extra 10 seconds running to the weapon stockpile rather than scavenge loot off the rotting goblins.
So can one adamantine clad novice take on a bloated, skinless dinosaur that spits frozen goo? Probably not. But I don't really have any other options.
But why bother with irrigation when we have perfectly good caverns to work with?
In all of my DF2010 forts, I've been unable to safely establish farming in the caverns before running out of food. In my most recent fort, I dug directly for them and found nothing but completely flooded caverns and a horribly frustrating mixture of wet stone, warm stone, SMR and no magma. Will be the third fort in a row I've abandoned for the lack of magma. Damned elves.
I've never had problems setting up in the caverns. It takes a lot longer to set up good irrigation, even with the ocean serving as an infinite water source. It's usually not hard to find a nice little area and then wall it off. I've never found a magma pipe though. I think those are pretty rare. In fact this is the only fort I've ever actually played enough to access the magma sea.
Edit2: Apparently she's been "utterly traumatized" lately by my amazing pet cemetery. None of the coffins in there are set to allow citizens, much less set up as tombs.
Nobles are weird. My baroness was apparently utterly traumatized by "a lesser's pretentious burial arrangements". This "lesser" was her deceased husband. Of course putting a zombie gorlak in her tomb solved that problem.
Speaking of which, I used to think she was getting promoted posthumously to the position of count/duke/ etc., but apparently she isn't. My new engraver just made an engraving of her being removed from the position of baron. The dwarves in the picture were refusing her, implying they took her out of power. I think he needs a history lesson though, since she didn't get removed by the dwarves. A darnen shoved a spear through her skull.
On second though, he can engrave whatever he wants so long as it doesn't have Dwarves being killed. The old engraver left us with enough demoralizing images of Shuturn the Ogre beating dwarves to death with a backpack.