THE LIVEABOARD CRITICS SAY YES!
I am not an ichthyologist, but I have friends who are. One recently told me that the fish ID book I had been using as a bible was full of mistakes. How was I to know?
     The latest Collins Coral Reef Guide to The Red Sea is probably not full of mistakes. I took it on a Red Sea trip and placed it in the saloon of the liveaboard. It soon became the reference of choice for divers.
     Unlike previous such Collins guides, this one is illustrated with photographs and as such reflects what we actually see. There are still the scientific illustrations where they are deemed appropriate, but we all thought it was easy to spot our intended quarry within its 384 pages.
     The book is all-encompassing in that it attempts to include every aspect of life from the most magnificent mammal to the humblest algae.
     Its photographs are accompanied by a suitably terse commentary that covers such things as the Latin name, a description for those still unsure after looking at the photograph, and the biology and habitat of the subject.
     There are also more complex general descriptions at the start of each section, which are categorised in the way of tilefishes, snappers, sweetlips and grunts and the like. I even found the elusive (in ID books) cobia lurking next to remoras. If you've ever been harassed by one, you'd want to know what it was, too!
     During that week we found everything we sought, including a description of what I now know to be called a Sailor's Eyeball, an algae that forms a silvery bubble that looks like a blob of mercury on the seabed, and the correct spelling of "anthiases". I even found a charming picture of a dugong, though I failed to locate the real thing.
     The only apparent failure of the book was the absence of those fish we call flagtails, a huge close-knit school of which can be found at the southern end of Daedelus Reef. They could be a juvenile form of something else - perhaps a passing ichthyologist can enlighten me.
     This book is likely to become standard issue on Red Sea liveaboards and in dive centres. It even comes with a waterproof plastic cover, so the publishers must know what a messy lot divers are.

THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES
Deep Sea Odyssey contains remarkable images from most of the planet's conceivable diving destinations - from Patagonian shrimps to Bahamian dolphins, from nudibranchs in Seychelles to decorator crabs in Tonga.
     Unusually, the scientific descriptions and identities are also meticulous, homage to the remarkable diving career of Sophie de Wilde.
     De Wilde spent almost 25 years as an underwater photographer, but died in a scuba accident in 1999. This book, pulling together much of her most stunning work, is written by veteran French writer Yves Paccalet, who worked extensively with Jacques Cousteau.
     There is a certain poesy to the writing style which English readers might find a little trying. Even so, the book is very well translated and in any case it is one to dip into, reading the passages relevant to these alluring images.
     Rather than concentrate on the well-known Indian Ocean, Indo-Pacific and Caribbean or Red Sea hotspots, De Wilde has also produced outstanding shots from Ireland, the Falkland Islands and Madagascar.
     The favourites are here too, portraits of lionfish with their graceful filamentous spines, or a moray showing its teeth against a dark backdrop. Perhaps most appealing are the unexpected shots: dogfish egg-cases clinging to a gorgonian, or the vaguely erotic close-up of a giant clam's mantle in the Maldives.
     Some of the large-format colour photos are less sharp than they might be, though I suspect this is a repro problem. But these are rare slips, and the layout and typography are attractive. It's a great shame that we have been deprived of further poetic vision from Sophie de Wilde.
Tim Ecott

OUT OF THE SHADOWS
One of the things that brings us into diving is a desire for exploration and adventure, to make new discoveries, both personal and communal.
     While we all achieve the first of these objectives, few of us get the chance to discover genuinely "new" history.
     Shadow Divers is about the "U-Who?", a mystery U-boat wreck off America's East Coast that, according to all official records, just shouldn't have been there. It's also about the quest of a group of divers to identify it. Theirs is a persistent struggle involving some hair-raising diving and endless sifting through wartime records, discovering that many such records were wrong and that history needed to be re-written.
     It is also a biography of the divers involved. The usual trouble with biographies is that the subjects are turned into either gods or demons. Shadow Divers, which has apparently been optioned by Hollywood, certainly brings out the heroes and villains, but is realistic in that the principal divers, John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, are painted as heroes with warts and all.
     I can admire the diving involved back in the early '90s, spanning the last few years of deep air and the dawn of technical diving and trimix, yet nowadays diving of this sort is relatively common.
     What I really admire is the time, resources and determination that the divers put into sifting through historical records.
     Without the mystery of the historical research, it could have been just another deep wreck dive. That's what makes these men real heroes.
John Liddiard

LABOUR OF LOVE
Chris Holden, author of The Essential Underwater Guide to North Wales, describes in his preface the 20 years it has taken to put the first volume of this book into print. He touches on how supportive his family were during that time, and thanks all the people who helped him.
     The one thing he doesn't do is give himself a jolly good pat on the back. I believe he deserves it, because this book is an exceptional read.
     All the dive sites from Barmouth to South Stack are described in excellent detail: copies of Admiralty charts; echo-sounder traces and photographs outlining transit points will ensure that divers unfamiliar with the sites manage to find them. The text also contains useful information about the effects of tides and any unusual currents.
     The icing on the cake is the detail behind the descriptions of the sites: archive photographs of wrecks and articles retrieved from them; photos of the grave sites where mariners from wrecks were buried; copies of a newspaper article from 1830; and a 1748 transcript describing the shocking state of local charts.
     This is why it took the author 20 years to put this book together - it's a must for anyone who intends to dive this area.
Brendan O'Brien

SHARKS IN SPACE
Here's something light years from the usual shark book - a science fiction novel that sets out to present the great white in a better light. It's written by British diver Neil Clift, who has published it himself, as one can do nowadays. And as science fiction goes it is more than competent, its plot driven along at an increasingly furious pace.
     OK, there are a few holes in the plot, there's an awful lot of exposition early on (so often the case when creating new worlds on paper) and the dialogue is distinctly stilted, but for fans of the genre this is a book that deserves an audience.
     The great whites form part of mankind's Noah's Ark-like evacuation from an environmentally stricken Earth in a project to colonise two distant planets, one a desert and the other a water world. Several centuries down the line, some of the settlers have found a way of communicating with the apex predators, but public attitudes have not moved on far from the days of Jaws - until a more ruthless alien lifeform puts in an appearance.
     It seems that the sharks may be able to provide a cure for cancer - or rather, a way of eradicating the sinister "Carcinomas" that threaten the planet Coleshia. In a way, it is still the great whites' "killing machine" image that is being sold here, but Clift is a shark enthusiast and generally handles the environmental angles thoughtfully. Give it a try.
Steve Weinman

EAST COAST COMPREHENSIVE
When telling you about Volume 1 of Ron Young's The Comprehensive Guide to Shipwrecks of the East Coast last May, I wrote that Volume 2 of these excellent dictionaries of ships, diveable on the seabed from Whitby to Skegness and out to the Outer Dowsing and Cromer Knoll Shoals, would follow shortly.
     It didn't. But it's here now and the wait has been worthwhile.
     Volume 1 covered ships lost between 1766 and 1917 and the new book takes us to the present with ships lost from 1918 to 2003; some 500 wrecks in the two.
     These books almost deserve Ron's title of "Comprehensive" and it is unlikely that anyone will ever do better as far as the North-east (another of his two-volume works) and East coasts are concerned.
     Volume 2 is heavily illustrated, like its sister-book, with silhouettes of ship type if no photos are available. Each ship has depth, position, what happened to her, details of her final voyage, and a full description of the wreck site, type of seabed and surrounding marine life.
     Add to that the latest diving information about the wreck's state - and even a special chapter on sunken U-boats of both World Wars in the area!
     That U-boat coverage gives us a hefty clue to the next Ron Young book, due, says the publisher, early next year. Ron has nearly completed, with maritime historian Pam Armstrong, a volume with the working title The Silent Warriors, Submarines Lost Around the UK.
     It will contain full details of nearly 200 British, German and French subs. Ron doesn't want to call this work comprehensive, but it sounds very like it!
Kendall McDonald

POETRY OF WAR
I began the beautifully presented book 52 Days 1943 not really knowing what it was all about. I could see that it was a coffee-table book with a mixture of underwater photographs, topside photographs and archive photographs, supported by snippets of text taken from interviews, historical documents and the author's own notes. But what did it all mean?
     I started by skimming through. That's how most of us read coffee-table books, but it didn't help.
     So I began reading more methodically. Halfway through, I was starting to get some idea, but remained unsure. It wasn't until about two-thirds of the way that the story began to come together.
     52 Days 1943 is about the island of Leros, located in the Aegean between Greece and Turkey, but held by Italy as a military base since 1912. In 1943, when Italy came over to the Allied side, German forces attacked, finally capturing the island after 52 days of confused and desperate battle.
     On the opening day the "Free Greek" destroyer Queen Olga was sunk in the harbour. Hence the diving angle.
     At the end I still didn't know the exact story, just many different versions of a story that no one will ever really know. Would I change it? No, not a word, not even the occasionally dubious translation. 52 Days 1943 is like well-crafted poetry. You have to absorb it and think about it. It's as much about emotions as the precise words.
John Liddiard

TWO FOR THE HEALTH-CONSCIOUS
Two new books are aimed at divers who want to do more than simply kit up and jump into the water. Both aim to explain and expose some of the detail behind the risk factors associated with commonly discussed afflictions such as the bends, narcosis, hypothermia and a myriad of diseases which may strike the diver.
     I have great respect for Divers Alert Network (DAN) and the immense service it provides in diving emergencies. Typically, its Guide to Medical FAQs is a thorough and valuable resource for anyone with queries about anything from diving with dental braces or asthma, to the wisdom of diving with a pacemaker or after all sorts of surgery.
     One strength of this work is that it has a comprehensive index, and that each medical condition is presented with a "case history" - "a 35-year-old male, weighing 85kg, returned from a diving holiday complaining of swollen wrists" etc.
     This allows non-medics to follow the scientific and physiological exposition of the symptoms and treatment easily, without dumbing down any of the subsequent explanations.
     It will be useful to any diver who develops a medical condition and wants guidance on where to go for proper advice on fitness to continue with the sport, or for prospective divers with queries about existing conditions.
     Diving Science is also well-intentioned, and is to be recommended for its comprehensive bibliography, index and many of the excellent tables which attempt to simplify questions relating to pressure, anatomy and physiology.
     However, I found the layout, design and even the style in which it is written rather dated, and at times, turgid. Overall, the tone is very scientific and would not appeal to the casual reader who wants to learn more about diving science. There is a great deal of valuable information in this book, but you have to work hard to get at it.
Tim Ecott

DVDS: WATCH AND GO
What makes John Boyle such a good underwater film producer? First, he chooses great subjects. He scripts and shoots them sensitively and assembles the results with care. There are no frills or gimmicks, obtrusive music or ponderous narratives. He tells the story and leaves viewers feeling they have been entertained and expanded their knowledge into the bargain. Would-be underwater film-makers should watch and learn.
     They might well start with a new DVD which combines Boyle's recent E-mail from a Shark with his six-year-old and still very enjoyable The Shark Feeders, in which he tried his own hand with feeding-spear and chainmail suit in the Bahamas.
     E-mail sheds genuine new light on the basking shark as a very British phenomenon and shouldn't be missed. It was favourably received in Diver when it came out on video, and Boyle says of Brendan O'Brien's review: "You commented that it would sell well in the gift shops in Cornwall. Good idea, mate! This DVD is the result." We'll happily take our share of the responsibility.
     The Blue Experience is a 45-minute promotional DVD by Pete & Suzie Millar designed to attract divers to the Maltese island of Gozo, and if we were to judge that destination purely on this footage, we would reckon it a world-beater right on our doorstep.
     Don't expect to see everything shown here on one trip, because this footage has clearly been harvested over time. But permanent features such as the Blue Hole, the Chimney and the Inland Sea, and wrecks in the vicinity such as Stubborn, the Blenheim and the Rozi will always be there to enjoy. And you might be lucky and see those huge shoals of barracuda, amberjacks and sardines, the groupers, morays, flying gurnards and octopuses.
     Catch the rays and the mating seahorses as well and you'll know you've have had one hell of a Mediterranean holiday. A well-shot and edited film to get your fins twitching.
     While The Blue Experience is an unashamed promotional device, Fathom 1 is an odd one.
     Launched as the first of what we are told is a quarterly series of diving DVDs, this one is centred on east Africa. It comes over mainly as a collection of hotel/dive centre promos dressed in objective "magazine" clothing.
     The underwater footage is OK but tells you less than you might want once the dive guides' talk-overs have finished.
     There are a couple of cursory equipment reviews by local dive staff, some free-diving leftovers from an earlier DVD about a competition in Cyprus, a Borneo slideshow and a Dali-esque underwater short. Are divers getting their £20's worth? Not really.

SAILORS OF THE TAYLEUR
Bound For Australia by Edward Bourke is a seriously researched history of the loss three miles from Dublin of the iron clipper ship Tayleur, which set out from Liverpool in January 1854 heading - or so those aboard thought - for Australia.
     There were 581 emigrants aboard on Tayleur's maiden voyage, hoping to make their fortunes in the goldfields at Kalgoorlie. Seventy-one crew were meant to get these eager passengers safely to Melbourne in the largest iron sailing ship built in Britain up to that time, 250ft long with a 40ft beam.
     Their high hopes were dashed on the rocks of Lambay Island two days after she sailed, when more than 360 people, including most of the women and children, died.
     Eddie Bourke has done today's divers and maritime history students a great service by writing and publishing this detailed examination of the wreck. He covers the building of the ship, her fitting-out, the recruitment by Captain John Noble of his crew, their shortcomings, the maiden voyage and the gale-torn wrecking. He names the victims and survivors, tracks down their family histories and lists the immediate salvage.
     He also takes us into the four inquiries into her loss, from which we learn of the causes of the Tayleur's demise - lousy compasses, lousy crew, lousy navigation, lousy steering gear and, above all, lousy weather.
     Yet, despite all this, her captain seems to have been officially exonerated from all blame.
     Irish scuba-divers have been familiar with the Tayleur since the Irish Sub-Aqua Club rediscovered it in 1957 in less than 20m. Today it is much dived, with at least six diving boats over the site on a calm Sunday morning.
     This is masterly historical research. If anyone asks me about the Tayleur, my reply will be: Buy Bourke!
Kendall McDonald