Dive into History is a series of American wreck diving books covering warships, US submarines, U-boats, passenger ships and shipwrecks of the Civil War. Other titles cover wrecks nearer home.
Reviewed by Kendall McDonald
The number of books about wrecks grows all the time, nowhere more so than in Britain. Wreck diving around our coasts has always been the top interest of British divers. Few diving areas have so many wrecks as our offshore waters. In other parts of the world, warm water diving groups have been reduced to sinking ships specially to cater for tourist divers. I can only think of one such wreck in British waters and that was a failure because it was in waters where there were so many more "real" wrecks to explore. Somehow the idea of diving on a wreck which has been stripped before being sunk makes the whole thing rather tacky, and hardly worth an entry in a wreck diver's logbook.
But that doesn't mean that there aren't good wreck dives in waters overseas - or books to guide you to them. For example, a series of Dive Into History American wreck diving books is now available over here. So far I have seen three of them.
Volume One is Warships , in which some of the ships listed date back to the American Revolution; Volume Two is US Submarines ; Volume Three is U-Boats , both WW1 and WW11. I gather Volume Four is to be Passenger Ships and Volume Five will be Civil War Shipwrecks . These books are excellently produced with underwater colour pictures, surface shots of recoveries and good diving and historical detail. Worth studying before making that American dive trip.
Closer to home, just across the Channel in fact, one of the best wreck books I have seen for some time covers just 11 Brittany wrecks, all sunk since 1917, mostly off Finistere. It is notable for the detailed diving material about each wreck. The authors are Bruno Jonin and Paul Marec of the A.S.E.B. (Archeologie Sous-Marine En Bretagne). Entitled Memoires Englouties , the book is in French - but nothing that a small dictionary can't cure. Each shipwreck has the history of the sinking with plans and surface photographs. The ship is described as divers will find it, with excellent drawings and underwater photographs. Positions are shown with maps, transits and landmarks, as well as the addresses and phone numbers of the French diving clubs which organise diving on the wreck
Wreck divers should note that French laws about raising artefacts are very strict and that inspections of dive boats at sea are frequent, as some British dive boats have already found out. You'll find a section on French law as it applies to wrecks in the book too. It's a thorough job.
Finally, back home to an up-dated and revised edition of Goodwin Sands Shipwrecks , first published in 1977, now renamed Shipwrecks of the Goodwin Sands by Richard and Bridget Larn (Meresborough Books; £9.99). The book lists over 1000 wrecks, and is well illustrated with wreck charts and many first-class photographs.