OPENING UP WW1 SUBMARINES
Less than a century has passed since Professor Haldane, assisted by Lt Damant's experimental dives in open water, formulated the stage decompression tables that would bring diving out of the dark ages. Largely unrecognised is that they found an almost immediate application during World War One, which provides the background for the two books reviewed here.
     Highly authoritative and well-referenced, Robert M Grant's U-Boat Hunters offers an excellent introduction, followed by a series of cameos that easily slip us into territory usually reserved for naval historians. It presents the underwater war based on the problems Britain faced from German U-boats, based across the Channel and often equipped to lay mines.
     Many were lost in British waters and located as quickly as possible in the hope of recovering the latest enemy equipment, code-books and minefield charts.
     In the early war years there was recovery work on wrecked Zeppelins and U-boats, seemingly under different commands. Then, in 1917, after Lt-Cmdr Damant as he now was had salvaged gold from the torpedoed Laurentic, he and his team switched to U-boat investigation.
     We follow them around the country, diving to identify new wrecks and trying to get inside those of interest. Forward hatches sometimes allowed access, but conning tower hatches were too small and explosives often had to be used.
     Even where a hull was split, the divers still had to negotiate jagged metal and drag their air-hoses past bodies and equipment, often in very low or zero visibility. And this dangerous work was often carried out amid live torpedoes and mines.
     Yet Damant and his team were reprimanded for spending too much time trying to locate wrecks and never received the credit they deserved.
     U-Boat Hunters, which carries an excellent listing of U-boat wrecks and their locations, does have two minor drawbacks.
     One is the odd clipped statement, highlighting the book's origins in public records. Grant also queries divers being able to work in 45m, apparently unaware that Haldane's work had led the Admiralty to put a 62m limit on deep-diving operations, in line with Damant's world-record dive.
     Amazingly, nothing was officially published about these divers' achievements until a newspaper highlighted the exploits of Diver EC (Dusty) Miller, MBE, DSC in 1926. While U-Boat Hunters questions his stories, I at least am sold on them, as his diving logs form the basis of a smaller book, The Tin Openers by Kendall McDonald.
     Miller, who had trained as a diver before the war, placed Damant in charge of his first descent onto a U-boat wreck in 1915.
     After this we are treated to hands-on stories about the problems and dangers he and his team faced while getting into a sardine can.
     True to style, the author also provides a secondary storyline based on events during the war, together with locations of the wrecks as dive sites. U-Boat Hunters is authoritative but divers will instantly relate to The Tin Openers, packed as it is with information for any potential wreck-hunter.
     These two books complement each other and offer a tribute of sorts, to both the British divers and the German U-boat crews. Brave men all, whose war, the first with a significant underwater involvement, should never be forgotten by divers.
Peter Dick

Half the world away
When you have assembled such a big collection of international dive-guides as has publisher New Holland, you hold a lot of information that begs to be repackaged.
     The Dive Atlas of the World should be a very useful companion to the travelling diver, but because of the way it has been sourced, its sins of omission are glaringly obvious. When I searched this "Illustrated Reference to the Best Sites" for some of my favourites, many were nowhere to be found.
     For instance, I expected the section devoted to the Pacific Ocean to start with the words: "By far the largest of the world's oceans..." but in fact this important third of the world's surface was hardly served at all.
     From Cocos and the Galapagos across to Fiji, this ocean is seen as an unimportant tract of blue water, when in fact islands-groups such as those of Tahiti, Hawaii and Bikini Atoll offer some of the finest diving available.
     This atlas instead positions peninsular Malaysia, the east coast of Australia, the Sulu and Celebes Seas, Indonesia and Kalimantan as part of the Pacific rather than the Far East. Most of the other maps also reveal how few worldwide possibilities have been examined. They look rather sparse.
     This book represents an array of dive locations that New Holland authors happen to have visited. It should have been called An Atlas of the Favourite Dive Sites of Jack Jackson and Others! That aside, this is an attractive and well-designed volume and is easily referred to as long as it covers the area that interests you. With around 300 pages, it is brimful of beautifully reproduced colour photographs and maps.
John Bantin

WELCOME TO THE AMAZEMENT PARK
My dad asked me to read this book and tell you how good I thought it was. I am only six-and-half years old but I am the second best reader in my class after Christopher Thompson.
     It's a big book with lots of colour pictures of the animals you might see under the sea. It is a story about someone going to an island a long way from England, and what they saw. It's called Journey Under the Sea by Linda Pitkin and it's like a visit to an underwater amazement park.
     My dad had to help me with lots of the words. The ones I couldn't read. He said he was disappointed that there were so many long ones. I think those words are too difficult for someone my age. My dad says it's probably better for someone who is 13.
     The first pages tell about the stuff you need to use to go diving. I know all about that. My dad's always going diving somewhere. The pictures of the divers are very bright and clear.
     Then it's all animals and fishes. My dad says all the close-up pictures of small animals and things are very good but I noticed he sort of turned his nose up at the photos of turtles and sharks and manta rays. They looked all right to me. He says they have no colour.
     I like the book and its pictures. I think it's got colour. I think it's fantabulous. Some of the fish are scary for my little sister. She likes the starfish. I like the sting rays and reptiles best. I don't really like the words. I think the lady who wrote it should spend more time with children. My dad said she wrote it for Brian. I'm not sure what sort of fish Brian is.
Bibi Bantin

STARING INTO SPACE
Is the Editor having a laugh? After my abortive attempt to photograph humpback whales earlier this year, he has asked me to review Mark Carwardine's Guide to Whale Watching - Britain and Europe. Well, I know a lot about staring at empty horizons, so why not?
     This little volume follows a tested format, with a quick guide to cetacean anatomy followed by a catalogue of species with illustrations, maps of likely distribution and a dive sequence in silhouettes of what you might see. Then comes the section "Where to Watch Whales in Europe".
     There is little chance of a sighting in Hungary but it seems that any country with a coastline, apart from the Baltic states, is a contender. Surprised?
     This book is filled with pictures of those glimpses one gets of these great creatures at the surface - a bit of back and a dorsal fin.
     Apart from dolphins, only the humpback seems to give at least a momentary show, by breaching clear of the water.
     Every country listed can field someone with a boat who will take you out. I took some friends out one evening in my boat, off Mallorca, and a pod of dolphins buzzed us, one actually jumping over the bow. It was wonderful, but every evening afterwards other people would ask me to take them to see the dolphins. We never saw another at that spot, but at least I didn't charge my passengers.
     Whales don't need passports. They swim where they want. So where is the best place in Europe to go? After close study of this guide I deduced that Iceland, Greenland and the Azores would top the list. Hardly Europe!
     Better to travel hopefully than to arrive - this is a book for those who love the idea of whale-watching rather than those who want to know how cold, sun-burned/glassy-eyed/bored you can get waiting for the action. But buy it for auntie.
John Bantin

GIANT STEPS
I was organising the Brighton Conference of 1965, and groaned when someone suggested as a speaker some botanist chap called David Bellamy from Durham University, whose subject would be marine pollution.
     Marine pollution? At a diving conference? All I could think of doing was to put him on first thing Sunday morning, when hung-over divers would still be drifting in.
     That was the first time I met a long-standing friend and probably the world's most travelled and eloquent conservationist, David Bellamy. As he recalls in his autobiography Jolly Green Giant, his opening words at the conference were: "Men who go down to the sea for whatever purpose are likely to see their own business in the great waters..."
     There was rapturous applause by the end of his talk, and David became a fixture at Brighton Conferences thereafter.
     He would go on to become hugely popular on TV and radio, and a "must-have" speaker at national and international events. But he wasn't all talk.
     Given a grant of £3000 in the 1960s to produce a report on pollution along the North-east coast, he and some enthusiasts from Durham BSAC dreamed up Operation Kelp. It required hundreds of divers to survey kelp beds, checking depth range, age, length and dry weight.
     Through Diver (then Triton) hundreds of divers did volunteer, and the operation was a great success, providing a baseline picture of the clarity of British waters. Another similar study, Operation Starfish, again highlighted the value amateur divers can offer in scientific and academic fields.
     Bellamy's book is a fascinating memoir of a remarkable man, revealing an adventurous and amusing life. It includes such anecdotes as his proposal of marriage to his wife, Rosemary, in the middle of a bog; their adoption of five children; his impromptu appeal to the Queen in the Royal Box when compering a charity show at the Albert Hall; his arrest in Tasmania for attempting to stop a dam being built, and many other stories. A great read.
Bernard Eaton

SLOW, SMELLY AND IRRESISTIBLE
Seals, that is. If you have enjoyed diving with them, and want to learn more, the video/DVD Marine Team is a good way to do it. It's a year in the life of people such as the volunteers of British Divers Marine Life Rescue, which now numbers an amazing 2000 divers on its books; and the Animal Care Team, which helps retrieve injured creatures for rehab at the National Seal Sanctuary at Gweek in Cornwall.
     Seabirds and dolphins get a look in, and we follow the rescuers around the UK and abroad, but it's Britain's seals which steal the show. Don't expect any diving, but there's plenty of drysuit action.
     The work of recovering, cleaning, force-feeding, transporting and rehabilitating such cumbersome creatures as seals (designed by nature to become self-sustaining tubs of lard within weeks of birth) is clearly physically demanding, and the teams come over as enthusiastic and dedicated. You'd have to be.
     A year in the life of these rescuers and repairers involves some repetition and a little more editing wouldn't hurt, but this is a professionally shot film with narration by Jenny Agutter, and by the end you'll feel you want to be out there helping with the release pontoons.
     You'll also be left with your dislike of indiscriminate fishing methods and abandoned line and nets grimly confirmed.
Steve Weinman

WHAT SHARKS HAVE FOR DINNER
Don't be fooled by the title of the updated book Shark Attacks. Overall, writer Alex MacCormick takes a fiercely protectionist line, scathingly condemning shark-fin overfishing for rich gourmet diners and praising prohibitions and shark fisheries.
     But the other contents of her book are not inclined to bring much comfort to readers. For although she points out that since 1990 there have been few more than 350 shark attacks worldwide, only 80 of them fatal, she gives more than 250 terrifying accounts of them.
     Take the case of a shark-boat skipper who slits open the belly of a 360kg tiger shark and out rolls a human head, pelvis and arm. Or the 69-year-old man who jumped off his backyard dock for an evening swim straight into the mouth of a bull shark!
     Courtesy of Britain's Shark Trust, MacCormick gives simple guidelines to reduce the chances of unwelcome encounters with sharks, more than half of which take place in less than 1.5m of water. Of 430 known shark species, she says only 30 have been identified as having attacked human beings.
     If you want to be gruesomely enlightened, this is for you.
Bernard Eaton

AND NOW FOR THE TOP 10
One of the hardest things about writing a book on wrecks is deciding which wrecks to put in it. Rod Macdonald has made the seabed selection even more difficult for himself by entitling his latest book Dive England's Greatest Wrecks.
     This is a sequel to his 1993 book about diving Scotland's greatest wrecks - easier, because the 10 he chose almost named themselves. They were close together in Sounds, Firths and Flow. England's greatest were less obliging and were miles apart.
     Macdonald writes in his introduction: "Rashly I gave myself only one year to research and dive 10 of the greatest shipwrecks in English waters and to complete the manuscript..."
     His chosen year of 2002 was a bad one for diving weather, too, but he pulled his project off in style. The book is first class and the wreck stories well told. In particular it benefits, as did the Scotland book, from the work of Rob Ward, a non-diver but a fine artist who has turned MacDonald's diving observations into stunning paintings of the wrecks on the seabed today.
     These, together with many photographs and line-drawings and maps, and much diving detail, will urge many divers into visiting or revisiting the wrecks.
     England's Greatest, according to Rod Macdonald, are: the Salsette (Lyme Bay); HMS Hood (Portland Harbour); HMS M2 (Lyme Bay); Kyarra (Swanage); Maine (Bolt Head); Bretagne (Babbacombe Bay); James Eagan Layne (Whitsand Bay); Moldavia (Littlehampton); Alaunia (Hastings); and Mongolian (Filey Bay).
Kendall McDonald (no relation!)

GREAT WHITE U-TURN
One day in the Bahamas, the famous Peter Benchley was finning slowly along a pile of cannons, hoping to find some telltale sign of a wreck - an emerald ring, perhaps, or a gold chain!
     Benchley looked up when he heard a sound from above, and saw that a friend snorkelling on the surface was slapping the water and pointing down at him - or so it appeared. He waved back.
     The slapping stopped and he saw the snorkeller racing towards the boat. Benchley kept going. It was not until later than he learned that his friend had been trying to save his life.
     Benchley reached the end of the pile of cannons. As did a great white shark, which had come along from the other side. Their eyes locked. Benchley was paralysed.
     Fortunately the shark wasn't. It braked with its pectoral fins, spun round and vanished in a cloud of brown that had exploded from its bowels.
     "I was alone," writes Benchley,"kneeling on the bottom, stunned and breathless... and covered by a cloud of great white shark sh..."
     This is just one of the gripping true stories in Shark!, from the author of Jaws.
     "I have spent more than three decades studying, diving with, and writing about sharks, making documentary films about them, being involved in feature films and television movies..." Benchley writes.
     "I have been threatened but never attacked, bumped and shoved but never bitten, and - many times - frightened out of my flippers."
     Some of his most dangerous encounters, and those of others, are related, yet this book is written in defence of sharks and the need to conserve them. Shark fatalities are rare, he writes. For every human death some 10 million sharks are killed by overfishing, for such items as shark-fin soup.
     Others chapters deal with swimming safely in the sea, how to avoid shark attack, what to do when good dives go bad, and which sharks are dangerous. Definitely one for my bookshelf
Bernard Eaton

Classic rediscovered
Subs loom large in this set of reviews, and Raiders of the Deep is an almost forgotten classic, published in 1928. It's the story of the World War One U-boat campaign, as told by the captains and crews who survived the war. A series of interviews are entertainingly written and skillfully tied together by Lowell Thomas.
     You don't have to be a diver, wreck enthusiast or U-boat nut to enjoy reading this book. All the way through it is primarily about people: the crews, their victims and captives.
     A goldmine of historical and technical information comes across. Many wrecks visited by divers are mentioned, from U-boats themselves to cruisers and battleships of the Royal Navy, and tragedies such as the Lusitania and Britannic.
     And the words of the German officers bring a fresh point of view to many lingering historical stereotypes that persist from all the British propaganda of the time.
John Liddiard

Here's one you can dive
Popular history would have it that U-boats were deadly efficient fighting machines, yet here is the story of a U-boat and crew that in eight patrols managed to damage only one ship. It goes to show that when U309 entered service in 1943, the Allies' anti-submarine warfare was much better sorted out than earlier in the war.
     Richard W Skinner's The Saint and the Sparrow is a booklet which contains a history of U309 and of HMCS St John, the Canadian frigate that over several days depth-charged her until the wreckage showed as two separate bits on the echo-sounder.
     There is plenty of information, but the text doesn't really bring the people and events to life as some accounts of shipwrecks do.
     It's an interesting hour's read. The wreck is now diveable in the Moray Firth and a particular treat for divers is the section of underwater photographs, with annotations overlaid to show exactly what's what.
John Liddiard

Turtle dreams
Pollution in the water, hunters on the ground, the large and gentle turtle is nowhere to be found. Those lines by Nichole James come from a nicely produced little book based on a poetry competition for 4-11-year-olds organised by the Marine Conservation Society and the Cheltenham & Gloucester.
     The subject is marine turtles and other sea creatures and, inevitably, their plight. It's heartening to know that the children are so concerned, and rather depressing that they have to be.
Steve Weinman