GUIDE TO THE GROTESQUE
It won't surprise you that there are at least 10 types of frogfish and that these can change colour to suit their surroundings. So how many different species of cuttlefish can you think of? Well, I found seven listed and illustrated, again with many colour variations, in A Diver's Guide to Underwater Malaysia Macrolife.
     Consider the area bordered to the south by Java, Sumatra and the main chain of Indonesian islands. It encompasses Borneo, Sulawesi, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea and it has the greatest biodiversity in the marine world. It's home to such bizarre creatures as the cockatoo waspfish, two-eyed lionfish, mimic octopus, mandarinfish and the devil scorpionfish.
     Andrea and Antonella Ferrari have photographed and catalogued 600 species specifically found around peninsular Malaysia and Malaysian Borneo, and their work is compiled in a handy-sized directory.
     Its densely packed pages concentrate on the sort of marine life that is grotesque, fanciful, preposterous or just plain odd.
     One picture alone is often insufficient to identify an animal, so the authors give you a full range of possible appearances. For example, I counted eight pictures of ghost pipefish in very different guises.
     The text is well-structured and orderly, listing alongside the photographs details such as scientific name, habitat, distribution, size and behavioural aspects.
     Places such as the oceanic island of Sipadan may be famous for visiting pelagic species but there is no hammerhead in sight in this guidebook, which is for those who dive with macro-lens or magnifying glass. Colour photographs of the highest quality make it easy to identify what you have seen.
     We've always been fascinated by the big, spectacular denizens of the deep but it's the minutiae we used to pass by without a second glance that is the strangest and, in some ways, the most terrifying. This book is an essential tool for anyone venturing under water in this part of the world.
John Bantin

LIGHT ON DARKNESS
Diving in Darkness is a manual of the equipment, procedures and techniques involved in diving environments where there is no clear surface: in caves, inside wrecks, and under ice.
     Coming from one of the world's most accomplished cave-divers, cave-diving photographers and cave-diving instructors, Martyn Farr's book is well-written, clearly presented and very comprehensive. Yet in some chapters it covers many competing techniques without really sticking its neck out and making recommendations.
     You could argue that it's "horses for courses", but what comes across is that the author is too much of a nice guy to want to offend any particular cave-diving clique.
     While many cave-diving techniques are broadly applicable to wreck-penetration and ice- diving, the author's background left me feeling that these topics were something of an add-on. The space would have been better used to expand on the cave-diving part.
     Don't let my pickiness put you off. Diving in Darkness is easily the best cave-diving manual I have read. Martyn Farr's history of cave diving The Darkness Beckons has achieved legendary status, and it is by no means an easy act to follow.
John Liddiard

Man-sized wreck guide
Most of our coastline is now covered by diving guides, to the delight of wreck-divers, but more detailed diving coverage of shipping losses in smaller sections of British waters is being published almost monthly.
     These new books add wrecks that the earlier authors had omitted, or not known about, and are providing more detailed information about the actual wreck dives.
     A good example is Adrian Corkill's Shipwrecks of the Isle of Man. A Manxman diver, Corkill has been researching wrecks around his homeland for more than 15 years and has listed more than 1200 that sank since the 1650s.
     He came to diving via rod-fishing, as the offshore wrecks became a target for his rod. After a while he wanted to see what attracted so many fish, then he dived and then, of course, he was hooked.
     But he has not forgotten his rod-fishing chums. At the end of the reports on the offshore wrecks in the book you will find a small section marked "Angling", with likely size of fish and species to be hooked.
     The book is an excellent, well-pictured guide to 97 wrecks. Adrian Corkill has broken these down into three sections: Wrecks in Open Water (57 ships), Wrecks on the Coast (25) and Wrecks on the Shore (15, reachable on foot at low tide).
     His diving detail is good value. This book should be in the kitbag of anyone diving Manx wrecks.
Kendall McDonald

Chronicle of diving initiative
Reg Vallintine deserves special recognition from the British Sub-Aqua Club for writing its 50-year history, The Club. This is a detailed, if at times selective, account of the club's past, its triumphs and trials, largely culled painstakingly from the pages of Diver and its predecessor Triton.
     What the book reveals is the extraordinary vitality of BSAC branches and their members, particularly in the early and middle years, as demonstrated by the level of enterprise devoted to launching and participating in diving projects. This energy was a major factor in the BSAC's development.
     For example, Imperial College Branch and Enfield College of Technology erected an underwater house off Malta in which five divers spent more than 200 hours. A task force made up of 25 branches took part in a David Bellamy investigation into marine pollution off the North-east coast, harvesting 7052 kelp plants weighing 1.5 "wet, slimy tons".
     North Essex Branch searched for the remains of the port of Dunwich, which had slipped beneath the sea in the 14th century. Harrogate Branch trained a fell rescue association to rescue and recover injured potholers through flooded sumps.
     Aldershot Dolphins recovered nine 19th century clay pipes from the River Wey and presented them to Guildford Museum. Southsea Branch, led by Alexander McKee, helped to find and excavate the site of the Tudor warship Mary Rose. And Folkestone Branch battled for nine hours to save homes from floodwater in Kent.
     These and many other stories can be found in The Club. As branches formed regional federations, the BSAC organised two World Underwater Congresses and ran annual chairmen's conferences and diving officers' conferences. Branches also staged the club's annual AGMs around the country.
     So much for the glory years. But don't look to The Club to find out the real story of what has gone on in the BSAC in more recent times. The events surrounding its financial crisis in 1999, for example, are dealt with summarily in the final chapter to leave the impression that it was all just a bad dream. Everyone but the hapless Financial Controller concerned is exonerated, and it's soon back to business as usual.
     Also, because the book is heavily based on nuggets culled from decades of magazines (the introduction reveals that the BSAC itself has no historical archives), it does read like a chronicle, leaping relentlessly from event to event. It might have been more interesting to martial the material thematically, had the author had the time to do so.
     All that said, there is much here to inform BSAC members curious about how the club came to become the force it did in diving.
Bernard Eaton

DISASTER PREQUEL
A hundred years ago - on 28 June, 1904 - the Danish ship Norge, the oldest and most reliable steamer of the Scandinavian-American line, ripped her bottom open on the reefs of Rockall, that tiny uninhabited rock 200 miles west of Scotland.
     Of the 795 people aboard, mostly Scandinavian and Russian-Jewish emigrants bound from Copenhagen and Oslo for New York, 635 were lost.
     The rest survived in open lifeboats, some for up to eight days, before being rescued. Of the 240 children aboard, only 30 were saved.
     Though licensed to carry 800, the 3318 ton Norge had sufficient lifeboats for only 251 people. This terrible underestimate would be repeated eight years later, when the Titanic lifeboats also proved too small to cope with the number of passengers and crew aboard.
     The similarity between the sinkings of the Norge and Titanic accounts for the title of Per Kristian Sebak's book Titanic's Predecessor. Sebak is a Norwegian historian specialising in transatlantic maritime shipping and emigration to the USA.
     No doubt this heavily researched, well-illustrated and detailed book will be in the dive bags of the diving team of Project SS Norge, a British-Danish-American expedition headed by Kevin Heath, the Orkneys wreck-diver and researcher. This expedition is planned to coincide with the anniversary.
     The divers will make a video record of the wreck for Danish TV and for showing to descendants of those passengers who reached the States. The survivors were offered free passage by the ship-owners and, amazingly, many took it almost at once!
     Kevin Heath has researched this expedition for five years and last year was one of the first to find and dive the wreck. He found it not on Rockall but to the north of nearby Helen's Reef. Norge is in 48m and well broken. The divers were surprised to have to abort dives because of aggressive porbeagle sharks!
     The Norge could not have struck another wreck, as her captain was later to claim, but hit the reef with her bow and stayed pinioned for 20 minutes before sinking stern-first. Hideous scenes ensued.
     Some who managed to get into a boat fought off other swimmers as they threatened to swamp the boats. Captain Valdemar Gundel was threatened with having his fingers smashed by an oar as he clung to the side of Lifeboat No 1, and it was only when he shouted that they needed him as captain that he was hauled aboard. That lifeboat made it to Stornaway.
     Captain Gundel had somehow steered the Norge some 20 miles off course since passing St Kilda, but was acquitted of major blame. He never commanded a ship at sea again.
Kendall McDonald

Instructing the instructors
Sometimes, it seems, the bleedin' obvious still needs to be stated. The Health & Safety Executive has issued a new DVD which it wants all diving instructors to see. It no longer wants to hear anyone claiming not to have understood their responsibilities after a serious incident has occurred.
     None of the information here should come as news to any qualified instructor yet, as the tally of HSE prosecutions mounts, it seems that the message is still not always getting through.
     Perhaps one problem is that the steps that need to be taken in planning dives and assessing the risks do seem so straightforward. Once an instructor starts doing these things on autopilot, there is always a danger of being overtaken by unexpected events.
     This is well-illustrated by one of the computer-simulated scenarios here, involving an instructor who planned and briefed for a sheltered-water dive and then took his inexperienced charges on a tiring swim out into the open sea, only to lose one of them. How could it have happened? All too easily, as this shows.
     The DVD includes another graphic simulation of a fatal incident you may remember, and also uses to good effect mini-dramatisations, live-action reconstructions and examples of genuine briefings on hardboats and at inland sites to make its points.
     But it's the linking thread, the sober reflections of the mother of young diver-victim Julia Brandrith, which rams home the message. Whatever you think of the HSE's emphasis on paperwork, the only effective response for an instructor is to do whatever is required: identify the hazards, consider the risks and take suitable precautions.
     And, although this DVD does not stress the point, take care to prove that you have done all these things - for your own protection.
Steve Weinman