SOFT SPECIES, HARD DATA
Back from a diving trip, and with my photographs processed, the next stage is the hard work of sorting and cataloguing them all.
For UK diving, the first reference books I reach for to help me are the Marine Conservation Society/ SeaSearch guides.
Someone in the MCS must have sat down one day and thought out in detail just what the average diver wanted to glean from guide books about marine life in our home waters.
These principles have been refined with each new book. Clear organisation,
so that a book can be read or referenced. Common, as well as scientific, names. A bit of science, but without bogging you down in jargon. Sex (and lots of it). Where to find them. Good-quality colour reproduction. Attractive layout.
Photographs that illustrate the species but, in many cases, are good underwater pictures in their own right.
Sea Anemones and Corals of Britain and Ireland is a worthy addition to the MCS portfolio. It includes about 70 species of anemones and corals, all of which can be seen by divers.
Next time a non-UK diver or non-diving friend questions what there is to see beneath our home seas, you can show them the evidence.
With this book on numerous divers' bookshelves, I'll have to work harder to make sure I get my anemones right, but at least I'll have the right book to help me.
John Liddiard

A DIVE ON THE WILD SIDE
The very title of ultra-deep diver Mark Ellyatt's memoirs, Ocean Gladiator, will raise the hackles of some potential readers. Still, Ellyatt's exploits and the scars that go with them would seem to entitle him as much as any diver to make that claim.
Besides, he doesn't seem to care much what others think, and the book shows that he is willing to expose his failings alongside his qualities, of which false modesty is not one.
divEr readers will remember many of his tales, told here with much additional detail, from early deep air-diving experiences to the farcical Baden deep wreck expedition in the Channel Islands, when Ellyatt as cameraman completed the dive while the would-be record-breakers barely made the starting gate.
He recalls scary experiences in an abandoned Lake District mine; the 260m dive that left him thinking he would never dive again; and the 313m dive a year later on which he proved to himself that he could break a world record without needing to be rescued.
Ellyatt is like some character in a cartoon world in which everything that can go wrong does. He keeps getting battered but always comes back for more. He suffers many bends in the course of this book, for example, but a dose of self-administered oxygen and a pint are often all that's needed to get him back on his feet.
His physical and mental reserves clearly run deep. "A lifetime of pain for a moment of glory," he thinks to himself on one deep dive, muddling up the saying, but he isn't far wrong.
We know that many tekkie divers suffer bends regularly and keep very quiet about them, but Mark Ellyatt believes in sharing his misfortunes. Even when you know the outcome of certain adventures, his harrowing accounts are always exciting to read.
Ocean Gladiator also gives the writer the chance to lash out at all those who have crossed him - inept chamber operatives, venal skippers, rival deep divers, armchair chatline experts, doped-up instructors and, especially, the designers of barely tested decompression software who, he feels, have used him as a guinea pig. He rarely names names but they know who they are, as will many of you.
Everywhere Ellyatt dives, he records with relish the wild, unsavoury side of life. I can't see the tourist boards of Barbados, the Bahamas, Thailand, the Philippines or Dubai among others rushing to use quotes from this book for publicity purposes.
It would have helped if Ocean Gladiator had been better paragraphed and proof-read, but Ellyatt has such a colourful turn of phrase and natural style that after a while you forget about such niceties and just enjoy the ride. Most divers will learn something from this book. Whether you swallow it whole is up to you.
Steve Weinman

FEEDING ON WHALE FACTS
The ideal book to review is one that can be described with a single word. In the case of Whales and Dolphins of the World, that word is "accessibility".
There are numerous publications on the subject of whales and dolphins, reflecting our fascination with animals that we view as kindred spirits, but this book has plainly been crafted to make the science surrounding cetaceans accessible to all.
This is achieved by a canny progression of chapters throughout the book, creating a narrative that has the structure of a thumping story and yet is based on solid science. As such, we are introduced to whales and dolphins in the early stages of the book, learn more about their remarkable adaptations in the next few chapters, then discover why our own relationship with them is so complicated, and finally learn about the story today - modern populations, conservation issues and the future.
For those such as myself who are habitual skip-readers, each chapter has a neat bullet-point summary covering the essential points. This is a splendid idea, as it leaves ample time to view photographs that are consistently excellent,
with each page seeming to sport a once-in-a-lifetime shot.
Like a feeding orca I raced through this book, feasting on juicy facts, and then returned to ingest huge chunks that I filtered through the baleen of my brain at leisure.
The fact that all royalties go to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society made the whole experience all the more pleasurable. This is a wonderful book!
Monty Halls

THE HIGH PRICE OF DCI
As divers we all receive some basic training in the avoidance of, recognition and treatment of decompression illness and other pressure-related diving problems. As we progress through our diving grades we learn a bit more here and a bit more there, and perhaps a whole load in one go from a more specialised course such as oxygen administration.
Some of us pick up additional details from a book or two. Most books about diving and decompression include a few chapters on DCI.
Yet after all that, none of the information is available all in one place, and details are probably still missing from our knowledge.
A Simple Guide to Decompression Illness sorts it all out in one short booklet. It offers everything we need to know and more, in terms any diver can understand.
I read the book and wasn't surprised to read many things I already knew, but I was pleased to learn a few things I didn't know.
When I read it again, I'm sure I will learn other things that I initially missed.
Then I turned to the back cover and saw the price. It's a good booklet, but £15.99 seems a bit steep for 86 pages of black and white.
For this price I would expect a bit more. Not in the text, which covers the subject well, but in higher-quality production, with colour for the illustrations and photographs, and larger reproduction where necessary to illustrate important medical points.
Buy it if you think it's worth the price, but I reckon it would sell twice as well for £5 less.
John Liddiard

FROGMEN IN WARTIME
Apart from the fact that it appears to have been translated directly into English by a Frenchman from the original French, bringing about some confused explanations of the role played by frogmen in recent wars, I found Warriors from the Deep a compelling page-turner.
Not only does this cocktail-table-sized book have more photographs of frogmen in action than most of us have seen before, but author Eric Micheletti has collected material from the archives of the Italian Arditi Incursori, who gave us a lot of trouble by sinking British warships in Alexandria and Gibraltar.
Also included are the German Kampfschwimmer with their Neger human torpedo attacks during D-Day operations; and the French combat swimmer activities in Indochina and Algeria before they went on to operations later in the Balkans, Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan.
There is little mention of the exploits of the British and Dutch SBS, the SAS, the US Navy Seals or Russian and Norwegian frogmen. The author claims that this is because "the British and American combat swimmers have been and still are much more land-orientated than the counterparts from the Mediterranean rim."
I am not sure that we should accept this explanation for the dearth of Yanks and Brits in a book sub-titled The Extraordinary History of the Combat Swimmers.
I suspect that the SBS, SAS and Seals - heavily involved today in counter-terrorism - were not prepared to give information as generously as the units that make up the core of this book.
However, despite these shortcomings, this is a book that many divers will want to read, led into diving as many of us were by gripping tales about frogmen. Here is a chance to see pictures of these pioneers in action.
Kendall McDonald

ENJOY YOUR TRIP
Marine Passions (Planula, www.marinepassions.com).
51min + extras, Au $29.95 (about £12.75)
Recently DIVER was invited to run a sort of public information article on the dangers of taking recreational drugs and diving, though there seemed to be little hard evidence that this is a widespread problem.
In the end, we didn't run the article, but here's the warning anyway: hey, kids, don't do drugs and dive - if you want a hallucinogenic underwater experience, buy Marine Passions instead!
You will need home cinema to get the full "immersive Dolby Digital surround sound" effect, but you'll enjoy some 50 minutes of footage of marine life from Byron Bay in eastern Australia, filmed by locally based director Tim Hochgrebe and filtered through the vivid imagination of Osvaldo Alfaro.
Byron Bay has a lot of life worth seeing, and though I sometimes object to underwater footage being messed about with, in this case it has been very skilfully - and selectively - psychedelised. It has also been married to a specially composed electronic soundtrack with a pronounced Eastern influence.
Watching on a Sunday morning, I entered a sort of happy trance-like state, but it's all perfectly legal!
The DVD also contains a couple of virtual aquariums, one straight and one acid-fried.

LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS
Wookey Exposed
(Wookey Film, www.wookeyfilm.com).
55min + extras, £17.63
A DVD extreme cave-divers will want to own but that also illuminates for others the dark places they penetrate - Gavin Newman has done a great job in producing Wookey Exposed.
This is a living history of cave-diving, starting with the 1930s explorations of Wookey Hole in Somerset, in home-made gear and then standard dress, by Graham Balcombe and pioneering woman cave-diver Penelope Pell.
We note the amazing achievements of Martyn Farr and then Rob Parker in the '80s, and end up with the recent feats of men at the top of their game, Rick Stanton and John Volanthen.
Presenter Roger Whitehead accompanies cameraman Gavin to Chamber 24 and isn't afraid to expose his own insecurities as he traipses through the dry sections between the underwater passages, ending up exhausted.
Gavin then films himself trying to dive further beneath a low overhang by scraping the gravel out from under him - not easy with a camera.
Just watching this is a claustrophobic experience, but Rick and John made their record-breaking advance (to a depth of 90m) after watching this film in 2003 and glimpsing an opportunity. They just "popped through", says Rick modestly, intimating that further progress may still be possible.
More men have stood on the moon than have reached the end of Wookey Hole, but no huge public recognition awaited them, only the thrill of discovery. This DVD goes a long way to explaining why they do it.
It's great value too, as it also contains Nosey Parker, the 50-minute Leo Dickinson film of Rob Parker's 1985 expedition that inspired Gavin.

VIRTUAL RED SEA
Underwater World - Red Sea
(DiComp, www.divingsoft.com),
DVD-Rom, £24.99
Guides on DVD-Rom, like CD-Rom, are great if you have a computer handy and a certain amount of time to spare. Otherwise a good reference book may prove both more portable and easier to use.
The software developers have obviously put a lot work into Underwater World. The Red Sea edition is intended to be the first of several, with even perhaps a UK version on the horizon, as well as updates for existing products.
You get an impression of just how much data must be contained as you go through the time-consuming process of uploading all 800Mb onto your hard disk.
The heart of the product is the encyclopaedia, where you can zoom in on 130 maps showing 400 dive sites, 20 of the best-known including 3D models on which you can plot profiles, move components around and so on.
The species identifier is also impressive, with 1800 creatures listed. Swap between English and Latin names, check out the pictures and find out through the graphics where sea biscuits are found, the dangers they pose, how big they grow, at what time of day they are active and so on.
There are 22,000 images and 650 videos on the DVD, though I couldn't get the videos to work. I also had trouble escaping from the virtual dives, which are intended to give you a taster of a dive site.
There is a handy logbook that interacts with the other elements, a tide predictor and a star, sky and navigation facility. The software is generally intuitive, though you will probably keep finding new aspects to enjoy if you don't read through the manual first.
This software may prove useful for Red Sea dive centres, but what the market is among individual divers I'm not sure. Using it for planning trips and debriefing yourself on your return as the makers suggest could be frustrating - if you're going to use it, you may be better off loading it onto a laptop and taking it with you. Or take a guide-book, of course.
This product is compatible with Windows 2000/XP and uses 256Mb of operating memory.

BACK TO THE BEGINNING
Caymania
by John Boyle
(Shark Bay Films, www.sharkbayfilms.com)
53min, £15.
John Boyle was visiting an old schoolfriend in Grand Cayman in 1990 when, inspired by the surfing movies his son and his friends watched, he decided to buy a video camera and underwater housing. He wanted to have a go at making something more light-hearted than the usual diving documentary.
His footage turned out to be rather good, although the finished product and his narration is less polished than the films he would produce later.
Subsequent TV sales of Caymania launched Boyle into the film business and he hasn't looked back. Now he has re-released the film that got him started.
Highlights include a dive on an east coast reef where tarpon lead the divers through incredible baitfish shoals.
There is a submarine descent to the Kirk Pride wreck 240m down into the Cayman Trench, and a scuba investigation of the shallower Oro Verde as well as, of course, interaction with the friendly inhabitants of Stingray City. Sixteen years on, you'll still get an intriguing flavour of this Caribbean destination.

LIFE TO BE SHARED
BENEATH THE WAVES
The Sea Life of South East England
(Wildlife Trusts, www.divercol.co.uk)
DVD, 40min + interactive disc, £17
Even divers familiar with the wonderful marine life around our coasts sometimes assume that you need to visit far-flung sites at the northern and western extremities of Britain to fully appreciate it. This two-DVD set presented by the Wildlife Trusts shows such a presumption to be very far from the truth.
The first DVD is a 40-minute film with excellent footage (by Divercol Productions) of the variety of animals living on and over seabeds formed by mud, sand, gravel and rock or shipwrecks. It gives a good picture of the communities each habitat supports and includes many appealing sequences, such as a little cuttle burying itself and spider crabs getting amorous.
The commentary is engaging yet informative, and contains valuable information on the threats to our marine wildlife and what we can all do to help protect it.
The second disc, new to the revised release, comprises an interactive "sea life identification kit". The best features are the video clips that accompany each of the 80 or so species covered. These give a real feel for the animals. Personal favourites are a pulsating moon jelly, battling gobies and bass cruising over an eel-grass meadow.
In addition to the information and pleasure the DVDs will give divers, any product that helps to raise the profile of UK marine habitats and the wealth of life they support is welcome at the moment. A Marine Bill is soon to be introduced and it is vital that this should pave the way for better protection of our marine environment. So don't keep this set to yourself, show your friends!
Paul Naylor

BEAUTIFUL VISITORS UNDER THREAT
The Cuttlefish of Babbacombe Bay
(Marine Vision Studios, www.marinevisionstudios.com).
15min, £10.95
Alan Mildren's The Cuttlefish of Babbacombe Bay is a very short film - about 15 minutes short, in fact, including a number of scene-setting views of Torquay traffic. However, the underwater footage of the big cuttlefish that visit this part of Devon every year to breed is as inspiring as the shots of these beautiful cephalopods trapped in local fishermen's pots are depressing. How long they will keep coming back to be treated like this, we don't know.
I'm not sure what the market is for such a fleeting item as this DVD, but I daresay there are cuttlefish fanatics out there who will want to watch it again and again.