Class act for the classroom
The latest handbook from the British Sub-Aqua Club aims to teach divers how to teach divers.
There can be no doubt that the BSAC produces the best training material for amateur divers. The newest addition, a "how to teach" manual for instructors, follows the same format as the best-selling handbooks Sport Diving, Seamanship for Divers, Safety and Rescue for Divers, Advanced Sport Diving and Snorkelling for All.
Teaching Scuba Diving is beautifully illustrated, with colour on every page. The photographs and diagrams are clear and easy to understand and the drawings by Rico a pleasure in themselves.
The book, although based on BSAC methods and training, will be a valuable aid to any diving instructor, whether BSAC or not. It deals with general principles, from the qualities of a scuba instructor through descriptions of the learning process to advice on practical and classroom teaching.
It is particularly strong on visual aids and there are chapters on "Teaching Basic Skills" and "Teaching in Open Water". Even those of us who have been teaching for more years than we care to remember can learn something, if only the latest techniques for presentation of material.
Reservations, then, are few. Some of the concepts that have been trotted out since time immemorial might bear looking at again. Whose research showed that "we receive 75 per cent of our information through the sense of sight and only 15 per cent through hearing"? The Royal Navy's?
I would like to have seen more practical advice on teaching specific basic skills like mask- clearing, especially techniques for dealing with regression. Why does the drawing of mask-clearing show the diver with eyes tightly shut?
I have never liked the mnemonic "SEEDS". While I have no quarrel with the points it eventually recalls, I feel there should be a more specific word to remind one of the potential hazards, to use as a check between the dive plan/briefing and the practical "pre-dive check". This might remind of the dangers of burst lung, mask squeeze and eardrum rupture, and, of course, signals.
One final point. Please try to get the instructor who is illustrated to smile more often in the next edition!
Editors Mike Busuttili and Mike Holbrook deserve congratulations, together with the other contributors. As National Diving Officer Bob Boler writes in his foreword: "The (BSAC's) programme (of diver training) continues to be held in worldwide regard and has often been emulated, but never bettered."
Teaching Scuba Diving, BSAC Mailshop (0151 357 1951). Softback, £14.99.
Reg Vallintine
Sinai briefing in the bag
Pete Harrison's Sinai Dive Guide represents what any diligent diver could achieve in his own log-book - if only he or she dived the sites often enough.
This book covers the popular sites of the Sinai and eschews any pretensions to covering the whole of the Red Sea. The acknowledgements reveal that the author is well-connected in the Sharm el Sheikh diving community. He was a dive guide on mv Poseidon's Quest, which regularly visited sites between Sharm and Kenya.
Although the book covers sites from Dahab to Big Brother, Pete concentrates on those from the reefs at Tiran to Abu Nuhas, plus the regularly dived shipwrecks in between.
This is fair enough, because at the time of writing these are the sites you are likely to be able to visit on a liveaboard from Sharm. If you use day boats your range will be even more restricted.
The Sinai Dive Guide takes the form of the sort of briefing any good dive guide would wish to give on-site. But the author has more time than most dive guides.
Much of the information is conveyed by three-dimensional pen-and-ink sketches that show the dive site above and below the water. The accompanying description explains what it has to offer and provides advice on how best to tackle the dive.
The sketches are excellent, if somewhat primitive in execution. They tell the visiting diver exactly what he needs to know before entering the water, nothing more. Their simplicity is their strength.
This is not a book bought to look good on the shelf but a tool to be used. And refreshingly, it was not written by someone armed with only a little experience and a lot of hearsay.
It would be a grand idea if every diver who took a trip to Sharm el Sheikh had this volume included with the flight ticket!
Sinai Dive Guide by Pete Harrison, Sea Level Productions (01225 317929). Softback £9.95.
John Bantin
Putting Papua on paper
As a diver who has visited various parts of the world, I consider the diving in Papua New Guinea to be among the best. However, because of the remoteness of this destination, information is sparse.
This book makes a startling visual impact. Using a combination of excellent underwater shots and coloured illustrations, the author Franco Banfi has produced an interesting dive guide to PNG, with a format similar to the same publisher's Red Sea Diving Guide.
It covers the key diving locations in four provinces: New Ireland, New Britain, Madang and Milne Bay. Illustrations, in the form of coloured sketches of dive locations and their underwater topography, are combined with photographs showing features likely to be encountered. I was impressed by the way the book enabled me to visualise each dive.
A short narrative provides background information on depths, currents, wrecks and other information essential for dive-planning. And Franco goes further, with practical photographic tips and choices of lens for each dive site. As a keen underwater photographer I found this invaluable.
The glossary of marine fauna likely to be encountered I found less useful. It was rather light, and I did not feel it depicted fully the wealth and diversity of marine life in PNG.
So far as I can tell from my own experiences, the detail provided for each dive location in this book is comprehensive and accurate. In particular, the descriptions and illustrations of Echuca Patch with the Taiwanese wreck Der Yang and the electrifying dive at Planet Channel are spot on.
The author has omitted some of my favourite sites in New Ireland, such as the awesome Chapman's Reef and the wreck of the Tiasyo Maru with the mini-submarine. But with so many outstanding dives in PNG, it would probably take three volumes to cover them!
I did think it unfortunate that the location of Silvertip Reef, where silvertip sharks can be observed and photographed at very close quarters, was identified in this book. This is one of the key locations that has put PNG on the diving map, and I feel it should have been withheld to protect these magnificent creatures.
It might also have helped if Franco Banfi could have included information on dive operators in the area. But overall, without being weighed down by excessive text, his book manages to capture the colour and splendour of PNG while at the same time providing a user-friendly reference tool.
Papua New Guinea Diving Guide by Franco Banfi, Swan Hill Press (01743 235651). Softback £16.95.
Colin Chen
Day of the dolphins
Given the huge popularity of dolphins, the market for dolphin books is already crowded. Any new one must stand out in the crowd - and this one does.
The first impression when flitting through is of the spaciousness of the design: the large format allows both text and photographs to breathe. Martin Camm's artwork is outstanding, though the drawing of a dolphin by Jessica (aged five and a half) steals the show.
Mark Carwadine, the author, is a zoologist and cetacean conservationist and clearly knows his stuff. The major biological themes are lucidly dealt with: what dolphins are, their sensory equipment, social behaviour, the latest research and so on.
We are told that researchers have recently discovered tiny magnetic crystals in the soft tissue that covers the brain of dolphins. If these crystals orientate themselves according to the earth's magnetic fields, and the dolphin can sense that orientation, it has an instant navigational system.
This suggestion is heightened by the fact that when dolphins are stranded it is often in areas with anomalous magnetic contours.
When you dip into a section of text you invariably find yourself reading on into the next topic. In the best tradition of popular natural- history writing you are entertained as you are informed.
When the author considers dolphin conservation you are fired by his sense of outrage that these elegant creatures face so many man-made threats that could be tackled if only we had the collective will to act. Little wonder this volume is endorsed by The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.
There is a tension between what we might think of as the biological reality of dolphins and their sentimentalised, or even transcendentalised, portrayal. Carwadine's text is firmly grounded in biology but it does not shy away from the problem, not of why dolphins are so popular (that's easy - they are cute), but of why they affect so many people in the joyous way they do. For Carwadine, "we see them as we would like to see ourselves".
At Monkey Mia in Western Australia, an entire tourist industry exists because wild dolphins swim up to the beach and associate with humans. Carwadine also considers how dolphins appear to be able to help chronically depressed or anxious humans. He will doubtless raise a few dusty academic eyebrows with his metaphysical speculations.
But how many academics have ever swum with dolphins and therefore had their self-importance and rationality majestically teased?
The Book of Dolphins by Mark Carwardine, Dragon's World (01403 710851). Hardback, £18.99.
Jeremy Stafford-Deitsch
Scuba and parts of Cuba
Cuba separates the warm Caribbean from the colder Atlantic. It is an island-nation nearly as big as Britain, and the biggest in the Caribbean, with a population of around 15 million people.
Diane Williams has been selling diving holidays to Cuba for many years and has obviously become something of an expert on the location. She is the author of this new Pisces Guide.
Although Cuba has 1500km of Caribbean coastline, I was surprised to find that this book covers more or less the same places I visited the single time I went there. I must have been lucky.
If you buy a diving package to Cuba, you are likely to visit Maria la Gorda (Fat Mary), the Isle of Youth, Cienfuegos in the Bay of Pigs, Trinidad or Santiago de Cuba. This last site is close to the giant Guantanamo USAAF airbase.
Then there are Varadero, Santa Lucia and Guadalavaca on the northern, Atlantic, coast, which is more suitable for summer visitors.
Diane Williams has relied on others to supply her with photographs, and clearly her choice was more limited than if she could have chosen from her own library of material. However, the text is comprehensive and gives a lot of information on a country about which we, living in a country dominated by the US view of things, tend to know very little.
Reliable information on Cuba is hard to find. The 90 pages of this guide will prove useful to any diver thinking of going there.
Diving and Snorkelling Guide to Cuba by Diane Williams, Pisces. Softback £7.99
John Bantin
Appeared in DIVER - June 1997
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