EAST, WEST AND FAR NORTHERN DIVES GALORE
It's been a long time coming. Mind you, this latest Diver Guide - Dive the Isles of Scilly and North Cornwall - has been worth the wait. Putting North Cornwall and the Scilly Isles together in one book is a good idea. They fit together well, particularly as the few boats wreck-diving North Cornwall are often the same as those in Scilly waters.
     If you listen to Richard Larn and David McBride, both former Royal Navy divers, you will realise that it was the North Cornwall half of the book, listing 234 dive sites from Sennen Cove to the Devon border at Morwenstow, which took up most of their time, even though launch places are few and far between.
     Walking the territory to discover launch coves in valleys running down through the huge cliffs was often the only way to produce a complete diving guide. The Scilly Isles was easier, as both men live there and are vastly experienced wreck-divers in their home waters.
     Larn told me with enthusiasm that you could regard North Cornwall as virgin wreck diving territory. Indeed, it is only recently that there has been an upsurge in diving services, much of it centred on Newquay.
     The authors give freely of their expertise, particularly in such areas as "treasure" ships and "salvor in possessions", listing three such Scilly wrecks. These are the Association; the Colossus, which, strangely, is not only a protected wreck but has a salvor in possession (the Receiver is busy sorting that one out); and the Schiller, of which Larn and McBride are salvors in possession.
     Most wreck-divers will want to get their hands on the book for the North Cornwall chapters alone. There are more than 2300 wrecks off that coast. Not all, of course, are in the book, but many are. These include sailing victims of that hard coast, the losses from the Bristol Channel trade in Welsh coal and Cornish tin, dozens of steamer war losses in both world wars, the 8825 ton liner Armenian, the destroyer HMS Warwick, the Navy submarine L1, and intact U-boats, mostly deep.
     This is not the only long-awaited diving guide. Shipwrecks off North Norfolk, author Stephen Holt assures me, covers the coast from Hunstanton to Cromer. He tells me that diving is booming in that area, and lists 150 wrecks with diving detail and pictures or silhouettes of each.
     Surprisingly, Holt is not a diver, although he crewed for his son James, who ran a boat for divers out of Wells. In his introduction, he admits his total reliance on divers and charterboat skippers regarding the current state of the wrecks, and says that he owes them all his thanks. They have done him well. This book fills a big gap in wreck-diving literature.
     Buy this book and you may gain the impression that it has been written by one "Ayer Tikus". This is in fact Malay for "water rat" - a nickname Holt picked up while living in Singapore.
     Third of the new guides for divers is Bob Baird's Shipwrecks of the North of Scotland. A keen diver for 25 years, Baird has made this one a big, thick, carefully researched guide to losses off the coast of Scotland from Stonehaven north to Duncansby Head, then west to Cape Wrath and the Minch.
     It covers the Scottish areas not included in his first two volumes - Shipwrecks of the Forth and Shipwrecks of the West of Scotland.
     Though Orkney and Shetland fall into this latest guide, he does not write about the wrecks of Scapa Flow - "there seemed little point in me regurgitating what others have done so well... preferring to concentrate on wrecks which others have not written about". And then, generously, he lists all the major Scapa books for his readers.
     Wreck-divers will be interested to note that, of the 422 wrecks in the book, some 181 are due to war, of which 102 were "submarined" by torpedo, gunfire or scuttling charges.
     They will find a lot of detail about convoys, and the German Navy grid square code system with tables of long and lat positions worked out by Baird for the grid squares around Scotland. It is this sort of attention to detail that makes this not only a hefty tome but an extremely valuable one.
Kendall McDonald

SATISFYING STAN
Veteran underwater film-maker Stanton Waterman once gave me some advice on making underwater documentaries. Don't just film what you did on your diving holiday, he said. Find a niche, something that hasn't been done before, a new story, unusual marine behaviour or rarely seen creatures. I have been watching two new videos that do just that.
     Email From a Shark has taken some fairly commonplace footage from the Cornish coast featuring basking sharks and turned it into an underwater mystery by combining it with the work of two researchers, Dr David Sims and Colin Speedie. Where the sharks go in winter, what they do and where they come from has always been a mystery. Dr Sims' project aims to solve it by tagging 10 sharks with devices that will send back emails indicating what they get up to when they're not visible near the surface.
     The team experience the frustrations of tagging such big creatures as Speedie tries to photograph them at the surface. It would be unfair to reveal the results, but they do smash many existing theories.
     The content is excellent, though it doesn't match production quality you would expect from the BBC or Channel Four. Also, it's only 25 minutes long, and with imagination could have been extended and made more dramatic. Still, if you like basking sharks this video will be a hit in gift stores in coastal Cornwall.
     You wouldn't buy The Secrets of Southern Australia unless you were going on a diving holiday there, but after watching it I felt this was just the sort of destination I should be visiting.
     Over 55 minutes there was plenty of footage of unusual marine creatures such as leafy and weedy seadragons, saw sharks and giant Australian cuttlefish. More common creatures are made all the more fascinating by revealing clips of behaviour rarely seen by divers, including mating habits, electrocution of fish by the numb ray and crabs mugging each other.
     It's everything Stan Waterman recommended a film should be and, despite the rather amateurish production quality, I preferred it to many of the more expensive wildlife documentaries.
     A surefire hit on the shelves of the Warrnambool gift shop and worth the trip there to get a copy.
Brendan O'Brien

Caring and sharing for video amateurs
John Boyle is unique among professional film-makers. Instead of coming up through the ranks of film technicians, learning his craft from practising masters, he started as an amateur, learning the hard way.
     He was a successful lawyer based in Cornwall who loved diving and got hooked on moving images. So he started making amateur videos, and progressed to selling them.
     However, you won't find him using Arriflex or Betacam or HDV, nor will you find his work at Wild-Screen, the wildlife film-makers' showcase. Instead, he wins prizes at the Antibes underwater photography and film festival.
     What he does is possible for any of us to do. He uses equipment that is both available and attainable by amateurs, and when he modestly talks about how he goes about making his videos, it means something to any of us who are foolish enough to jump into the water with expensive albeit amateur video equipment. His book A Step-by-Step Guide to Underwater Video is exactly what it says it is.
     Boyle is a generous man. He openly shares the valuable lessons he has learned, often at considerable cost to himself. He also gives plenty of credit to his young sidekick Fionn Howieson, something unheard of in the tough, competitive world of the professional film-maker.
     Video is an instantly gratifying medium. By and large, if you can see something moving on the screen you have got a good shot.
     But, as anyone knows who has sat through hours of blue fish images, that is not the same as making programmes. Boyle assumes that you have read the manual and addresses the problem of making watchable material.
     He covers everything you need to know before hitting the water but also what to do with the shots later. He writes about how to get the shots but also how to link sequences to achieve an overall effect.
     It's not cheap, but I hope lots of people buy and read this book so that next time, when someone puts on their underwater holiday video, I won't find my eyes rolling back inside my head after fewer than 20 minutes.
John Bantin

SHARKS, THE CRUEL AND THE CUDDLY
Xavier Maniguet's The Jaws of Death is everything you've been persuaded sharks aren't - they'll bite through your leg, rip your head off and, after enough time to properly digest your soft bits, the shark will eventually be caught and cut open to reveal the remains of your dismembered limbs.
     If this sounds gory, then you ought to read the book. It is a spectacularly unsettling read for the diving community and its collection of "disturbing photographs" in the centre is enough to turn the strongest stomach inside-out.
     We're so used to hearing how sharks have been massively misunderstood, particularly since Jaws. This book seeks to subvert such theories. Most of it is devoted to the shark's physiology; its ability to attack humans and "1001 uses of a shark".
     The directory of sharks at the back seems to be written with the sole purpose of reminding us just how dangerous these creatures are.
     The book has been peer-reviewed by an eminent expert in the field and the contributors include people with titles such as Dr and Professor, so one would hope for scientific accuracy in Maniguet's work, but I'm not convinced. I've dived with numerous nurse sharks in my time and found them to be nothing but docile - Maniguet would have me believe that I was at a real risk of been bitten.
     I also disagree with the assertion that the Galapagos shark is particularly dangerous to swimmers off Bermuda. Having lived and dived for many years on that island, I can say with certainty that this is not a fact. I'd never even heard of the Galapagos shark until I read the book.
     The book may be readable but it reminded me of the '70s, when such sensationalism was the norm. Read it and tremble - just think, the arm that turns the pages could well be the one vomited up by the next shark brought into captivity!
     If you want the caring, sharing and cuddly side of sharks, Jonathan Bird's coffee-table book Adventures with Sharks fits the bill. The author has been filming and photographing sharks for 20 years and must have an enormous collection by now.
     Sensibly, he has turned his best pictures into a book. They are exceptional, pin-sharp and mostly taken with the shark coming head on and very close. After reading The Jaws of Death, I'm surprised Bird has any limbs left!
     The shark info panels are just long enough to read without your attention fading. I was particularly interested to read about how sharks bite humans only by "accident." I remain unconvinced. I've seen the pictures!
     While the photographs are of a sufficient quality to hold their own, the text isn't. It's 5000 words' worth stretched out to 50,000, written almost like a personal diary.
     After 100 pages I was bored with reading about how: Bird's wife was going to a conference; he might join her; call some friends; book a boat and go diving in North Carolina. Too much useless detail for my liking.
     Good as the pictures are, this book will probably end up in the bargain bin - you may want to wait until then.
Brendan O'Brien

Selective world of archaeology
The Encyclopaedia of Underwater Archaeology is a series of slim volumes aimed at a general readership. The books are well-designed and pictorially stunning, with superb photographs by Christoph Gerigk and Frédéric Osada.
     The introduction to the series, Underwater Archaeology, provides a broad-brush overview of the discipline's history and techniques. Though it achieves this basic goal, it is dominated by the work of Franck Goddio and his colleagues in the Mediterranean and Far East.
     While no encyclopaedia can cover everything, northern Europe and North America are not mentioned at all. What about the Vasa and the Mary Rose on this side of the pond, or the Hunley and La Belle in the States, not to mention a myriad of smaller but equally productive projects in both regions? Some degree of selectivity is inevitable, but the total omission of so much key material is another matter.
     Mare Nostrum, a volume which takes as its theme the Roman Mediterranean, is on stronger ground. Here the focus is sharp, with a tightly-written historical summary charting Rome's emergence as a seapower and describing the wreck of the oared warship at Marsala in Sicily.
     This is followed by summaries of 10 excavations of merchant shipwrecks which chart the Roman Empire's commercial expansion in the first two centuries AD through to its subsequent decline. Particularly notable is the big wine-carrier at Madrague de Giens, off the south coast of France, excavated in the '70s and '80s.
     Another highlight is the recovery of the Emperor Caligula's two floating palaces sunk in Lake Nemi near Rome, although this wasn't an underwater excavation at all - Mussolini ordered the lake to be drained to reveal the ships! Unfortunately, both were destroyed in World War Two.
     These two books and, I hope, others to follow in the series, provide an easily-digested and informative general introduction to the ever-growing achievements of underwater archaeologists.
     But they are not the last word, and (on the showing of these volumes) the series demonstrates a geographical bias which ignores our own archaeologically productive seas. Readers who want to know what's going on closer to home may have to look elsewhere.
Colin Martin

STRETCH YOUR BRAIN
I settled down with a can of Guinness in one hand and the second edition of Bruce Wienke's Basic Decompression Theory and Application in the other. I soon realised that it is not that kind of book.
     To follow it fully, it needs to be laid flat on the desk with paper and pencil ready to take notes and work through examples. I persevered with the lighter parts and skipped the heavier sections. At the lower level there is content most divers can understand, but it's still stodgy reading.
     The book provides a comprehensive grounding on decompression theory and other bits of diving maths, with an understandable bias towards introducing RGBM, which brings me to the new Reduced Gradient Bubble Model in Depth, exactly what the title says it is. Basic Decompression Theory and Application is very mathematical and RGBM in Depth is even more so.
     Bruce Wienke created RGBM, the advanced decompression model used on a number of extreme technical diving projects. RGBM is also gathering a fair following of everyday divers with its profiling of deep stops and in many cases a significant reduction in shallower stops. I can't think of anyone better qualified to write about deco theory.
     There is something to be gained from these books for the casual reader, but there are lower-priced and more readable alternatives providing an overview of decompression models.
     On the other hand, if you have appropriate degree-level mathematical skills and want to stretch your brain, these are the books for you.
     Is there enough information to write decompression planning software? I honestly can't tell. Maybe I should come back to this review in a year or more, when I've had time to study the books and brush up on calculus.
John Liddiard

Critters and no-kitters
Two new DVDs, and I watch them hoping to be informed, never having been to Indonesia's legendary Lembeh Strait or taken part in a free-diving competition. Two DVDs, but only one I would want to watch twice.
     John Boyle's compelling Critters makes it easy to see why his work has won such acclaim. Three 26-minute episodes about Lembeh and its peculiar cast of characters - by day, by night and among the coral - held me rapt.
     In daylight Lembeh's inhabitants resemble bag-ladies shambling around a waste-tip. They wear algae overcoats and drab colours to deceive predators and prey alike. By torchlight after dark there is more colourful life to be seen, but disguise and evasion remains the rule.
     The ultimate predators are frogfish by day and octopuses by night, with creatures such as mantis shrimps and cuttlefish also emerging as lethal feeders in this incredible microworld. Through John Boyle's lens and informative narration I enjoyed diving Lembeh by proxy. Now I want to do it for real.
     The only sour note was struck by fishermen free-diving to drag weighted nets across surviving coral. Their catch was pitifully small, the damage considerable. Yet this is subsistence fishing; what choice do they have?
     Free-diving, not for survival but to prove yourself before your peers, is the subject of Sony Freediver Open Classic 2003, the "official" DVD account of the championship event held in Cyprus last year.
     Like a wedding video, this appears to be aimed mainly at friends, family and those of the inner circle who couldn't be present. If you're a free-diving fanatic who can't get enough of people holding their breath, you may like it. But without wishing to detract from the real achievements of the competitors, little sense of the challenges involved comes over. There is no narration or attempt to put individual accomplishments into context.
     You'll find long interviews with competitors on the "extras" disc, and had the nuggets from these been woven in with footage of the higher-achievers, perhaps as voice-overs, a product suitable for a wider market may have emerged.
     After a while of intruding into this world, as private as that of Lembeh Straits but less colourful, I let them get on with it and enjoyed the original new age soundtrack while doing something else.
Steve Weinman