PUT TO THE RED SEA ACID TEST
I get cross when I see a dive guide-book written by someone who has barely experienced the destination in question. Too often authors do their research by studying existing guide-books before paying a short visit for some local flavour. That's how mistakes are compounded. After all, it is guide-books that are usually used to settle arguments.
     So the first thing I did on opening the new Lonely Planet guide to the Red Sea was to look up the wreck site at Shag Rock. This wreck has become known as the Sarah H because one notable guide-book writer got it wrong (the victim of a cruel joke) and every other writer has simply cribbed this information since.
     Lonely Planet passed the acid test. The guide correctly calls the wreck the Kingston, with Sarah H in brackets to save confusion. Full marks!
    Good dive guides need to be authoritative with divers who will be in a position to test their knowledge under water. Pete Harrison was subjected to this discipline, and as he is one of the joint authors I trust his accuracy. Gavin Anderson, too, is a much-travelled writer and a familiar name to Diver readers. He is an accomplished underwater photographer and most of the photographs in the guide were taken by him.
     I don't know Jean-Bernard Carillet but he is a full-time Lonely Planet author and a qualified diving instructor. So for once I dived into a guide-book without feeling that my blood pressure was inevitably going to soar.
     There were no surprises. The Red Sea has 3000 miles of coastline but most of the guide is devoted to a mere 500 miles' worth, which is perhaps enough. That includes Israel, Jordan, the Sinai, the Hurghada and Safaga areas and the vast, recently opened area between Qesir and Fury Shoal.
     Naturally the Egyptian coastline is the most heavily covered as it is where most of us go (thank goodness, too, that the authors know the difference between southern Egypt and the southern Red Sea).
     Once off the well-beaten path the guide gets a little thin, though the section on Sudan mentions all my favourite places and I found it difficult to recall many others. I was however surprised that Pfeiffer Reef was absent, as it was discovered and named by a skipper of the very boat on which Harrison worked!
     I agree that the only reefs worth diving in Eritrean waters are Saunders and Fawn, and if you asked me to tell you everything you need to know about diving in the Yemen I'd say "Quoin Rock", though there are certainly many more sites than that and the four others mentioned here.
     There is precious little on Saudi Arabia, either, but that is a whole area of coastline yet to open up to divers.
     I was unable to discover any howlers in the text. What more can you ask? The format is very workable, as you would expect from Lonely Planet. If you want the definitive guide book to diving in the Red Sea, this could be it.

John Bantin

Swede and the Squalus
There are some true stories that read like the kind of novel you just can't put down, and one such is The Terrible Hours by Peter Maas.
     It's the story of the greatest undersea rescue and, at that time, the deepest salvage operation in history, and of the extraordinary man behind it.
     In May 1939 the US Navy's newest submarine Squalus left Portsmouth, New Hampshire. When the time came for her to submerge for a test dive, every light on her control board showed green, signifying that all was watertight.
     It wasn't! At 15m, tons of seawater roared into the engine rooms through the main air induction valve, which should have been closed, and the submarine went straight to the bottom of the freezing North Atlantic, more than 70m down.
     That 33 of the 59 men on board survived was down to Charles Bowers Momsen, a 43-year-old Lieutenant-Commander, popularly known as "Swede", and his team of divers.
     For 20 months Momsen had headed an experimental deep-sea diving unit testing breathing mixtures of oxygen and helium. He had also been working on apparatus to rescue submariners from sunken submarines.
     His initial invention, later known as the Momsen Lung, was constructed out of car inner tubes. The approximate size of human lungs, it was designed to be worn by submariners to escape from depth, breathing pure oxygen.
     Momsen's other major breakthrough was to construct a diving bell that could be locked on to a hatch on a submarine's hull to enable crew to exit and be brought to the surface. The early tests to establish its feasibility were conducted with a pickle barrel cut in half.
     The first time Momsen's diving bell system was used for real was when the Squalus sank, and the story of the heroic rescues from the sub is astounding and enthralling.

Bernard Eaton

CHANNELLED ENTHUSIASM
It was a good thing author Ray Dafter went on holiday to Guernsey. Even better that he asked at its Fort Grey Shipwreck Museum if they had any reference books on Guernsey shipwrecks. "We're always being asked that,"was the reply, "and the answer is no. Someone ought to write one."
     Which is how Dafter came to fill a big gap on shipwreck enthusiasts' bookshelves. Until now we have used David Couling's Wrecked on the Channel Islands which, though excellent, covers all the islands.
     Guernsey Wrecks takes in Alderney and Sark and records a whopping 814 shipwrecks. It is aimed at general readers as well as wreck and diving enthusiasts, so divers might find their favourite sites insufficiently covered for their taste, but the book does offer plenty of undived wrecks to investigate.
     Some diving details are given about the "Elizabethan Wreck"; unsuccessful searches for HMS Victory (the fourth "Victory" - Nelson's was the fifth); Havre and Waverley, paddle-steamers in the same grave; Stella; the Gallo-Roman trading vessel in St Peter Port Harbour; and Oost Vlaanderen.
     With 30 wreck pictures and five guidance maps, the book is brought up to date with a report and colour photos of the foundering of the Ievoli Sun, a 4189 ton Italian chemical tanker, off Alderney last October.

Kendall McDonald

Fever Pitch with fish
You know the sort of dive on which it seems anything might happen?
     You go down to visit an intact wreck, are investigated by some giant grouper, get caught in line and have to be cut free, stop on your way back to watch mantas at a cleaning station, find some amphorae, are engulfed by a huge shoal of barracuda, watch a passing storm at the surface and spend your decompression stop eyeballing rare nudibranchs.
     OK, I should be so lucky, but that's the feeling I got with this book. Dive in and you're never quite sure what's coming next, but it's usually rewarding.
     The history of diving has been recounted many times - many, many times - but Tim Ecott is a good, BBC-trained journalist and knows how to bring his subject to life.
     Neutral Buoyancy is based around the historic development of our sport, but instead of indulging in a big chronological yawn, he has cut and shuffled his deck to include personal anecdotes, interviews with diving luminaries, pocket observations, horror stories and all sorts of goodies to keep you turning the pages.
     I had no choice but to read Neutral Buoyancy after seeing the lines on the cover from bigshot critic Tony Parsons, who calls it "the Fever Pitch of Scuba Diving... a modern classic... vivid, lyrical and quite brilliantly written." Those are quotes any author would die for.
     It didn't quite live up to that hard sell. Fever Pitch appealed to football virgins as much as fans, and though Neutral Buoyancy is a book any non-diver could enjoy, the big question is how many non-divers can the publisher persuade to pick it up in the first place?
     And while I learnt a fair bit about Tim Ecott, who started diving days after his mother's funeral to take his mind off her death, he reveals considerably less about himself than Nick Hornby did.
     However, anyone who reads both books would understand why real football fans support Arsenal and why divers dive. Take it on your next diving trip and enjoy an unforgettable pick 'n' mix dip into diving whenever the mood takes you.

Steve Weinman

ROLL OUT THE BARREL
It's tempting to say that Diving Engine, the first book to be published by the Historical Diving Society, has justified the society's foundation in 1990, but that would be unfair and take no account of the excellent newsletters it has published.
     However, the HDS has done divers a good turn by publishing for the first time the original manuscript of salvage diver Jacob Rowe's treatise on diving, written in about 1730.
     Rowe's beautiful diagrams and illustrations alone are worth the £18 price, though the monograph, together with an introduction and life of the author (by Michael Fardell and Nigel Phillips) runs to a mere 40 pages.
     Rowe's manuscript is the earliest-known English work about diving and concentrates on the diving barrel first used in 1720. He used what he calls this "diving engine" to great effect in his salvage attempts, even though the seals around the diver's arms, which emerged from holes in the casing, caused "excruciating pain" and at times "the Circulation of his Blood was so far stopp'd... that he was forced to keep his Bed for six Weeks".
     Rowe raised more than 33 tons of silver from the wreck of the East India Company's Vansittart in the Cape Verde Islands, lifted more gold and silver from the Dutch East India company's Adelaar wrecked on the Isle of Barra, but failed with the Tobermory galleon, in common with the many other salvors who followed him in that Scottish treasure-hunt.
     Wreck-divers of today who read this delightful volume can thank their lucky stars that they no longer have to descend in barrels!

Kendall McDonald

What happened on Friday the 13th
HMS Royal Oak is a video constructed from 60 years of footage, and its release is probably timely while war graves remain such a topical issue.
     On Friday, 13 October 1939, at the start of World War Two, 833 men lost their lives when a U-boat penetrated the Royal Navy's Home Fleet anchorage in Scapa Flow and sank the Royal Oak, the only capital ship still at anchor.
     This is a haunting tale of the ingenuity and bravery of the German submariners, and of inadequacy and lethargy as well as heroism on the British side, not forgetting the rescue skills of local seamen.
     It is told chronologically, using archive footage and material shot by Peter Rowlands, one of the few civilian divers to have visited the wreck. And it is clearly aimed at a wider audience than divers alone.
     We see how the Royal Oak came to be isolated in the first place, and hear haunting accounts from survivors of what it was like to be aboard the doomed vessel, along with unnerving recollections from the local diver who was first in the water the next morning.
     There is underwater footage of the wreck but it is obviously neither a difficult nor a deep dive so there is no need to dwell on the diving procedures.
     One of the most moving scenes is left until the end of the video, when the ashes of the 100-year-old widow of one of the dead are deposited in the wreck at 20m by her grandson.
     She could be close to the remains of the man to whom she had stayed faithful for the remaining 60 years of her life.
     The final credits list the names of the dead, drawing parallels with the more recent sinking of the Belgrano, another great vessel packed to the gunwales with young men, and which fell easy prey to a solitary submarine.
     This video is a workmanlike, professional production, and worth viewing especially by anyone who might still be inclined to think it's justifiable to take "a bit of non-ferrous" from ships that have gone down in disastrous circumstances.

John Bantin

REEF VALUE
Linda Pitkin is an award-winning underwater photographer, but she's also a biologist with a real interest in marine life. Her latest book takes a comprehensive look at the varied lifestyles of the huge and colourful diversity of fish that inhabit coral reefs, and their complex interactions with one another.
     It covers all the major families and investigates some of the specialisations which enable these species to live in every part of the marine environment. It also includes some of the predators in and around reefs - sharks, schooling snappers and jacks.
     Illustrated by more than 100 of Linda Pitkin's own colour photographs of great beauty, Coral Fish represents real value for money.

Bernard Eaton

Almost fully comp
You have to admire an author who badges his work a "comprehensive guide", but studying both volumes of The Comprehensive Guide to Shipwrecks of The North East Coast, I could forgive veteran diver-author Ron Young for such audacity. He has almost justified his title, and his work will be studied eagerly by wreck-divers.
     He tells me he has dived about 25 of the wrecks he has written about - a good average for writers of shipwreck books - but has collected much more material over the past 10 years from a large number of sources, including, of course, many North-east divers.
     The first volume concerns 165 wrecks from 1740-1917, volume two 207 wrecks from 1918-2000. Young covers sinkings from Whitby to Berwick, with photographs and diagrams of marks and a handy star-rating for the wreck and nearby underwater scenery.
     Five stars is the maximum and largely depends on a wreck's condition, which in turn is generally controlled by depth. So examples such as the 2025 ton steamer Maystone, sunk in 1949 after colliding with an aircraft-carrier off the Outer Farnes and lying upright and intact in 88m, gets a five-star rating, while the dull seabed of sand and stones on which it sits merits only one.

Kendall McDonald