Dive Books

[PinayDiver]

I actually fell asleep last night with my copy of Shadow Divers in hand and woke up this morning (being a Saturday) simply taking up where I left off. I was done before brunch! I just gobbled it up, that’s how riveting I found it (now I understand where you guys are coming from).
Ah, yes, the painstaking research. It is a mystery. It is a protracted investigation. Best of all, every exciting bit really happened and I'm made aware too of the value of these guys’ U-boat obsession beyond, say, personal fame (there’s rewriting historical accounts for example, and informing families...).
Just as astounding I felt is author Kurson’s ability to string it all together so I'm not just bludgeoned with his mountain of data, I'm moved by the characters -- their passion (to see for themselves, to know for sure), and even their strategies (penetrating a wreck) and principles (respecting it as a war grave) drawn up along the way.
The setting-up, man, did the author do a good job, no an artful job -- from character motivation to diving physiology to equipment. With that, I know I can recommend the book to a non-diver and he’ll get it. For example, early on the book when panic proved to be Drozd’s undoing, Kurson writes:
“A great diver learns to stand down his emotions. At the moment he becomes lost or blinded or tangled or trapped, that instant when millions of years of evolution demand flight or fight and narcosis carves order from his brain, he dials down his fear and contracts into the moment until his breathing slows and his narcosis lightens and his reason returns. In this way, he overcomes his humanness and becomes something else. In this way, liberated from his instincts, he becomes a freak of nature.”
Even a purely recreational diver who doesn’t go beyond 130 feet like me appreciates that thought.
Did I say it was a pleasure to read? It's like I’m feeling my way in the dark along with Chatterton too. And I did find myself smiling here and there (the initial one-upmanship between Chatterton/Seeker and Kohler/Bielenda; and when they believed they struck it rich with mercury for a total of 12 hours). But as I got to picture the men, it hurt too -- like when the Rouse father-and-son tandem (all-smiles in their photo in the book) bolted for sunlight and to their doom; when the once great Nagle just had to cap his nth hospital discharge with drinking himself to death; when Chatterton and Kohler’s single-mindedness made casualties of their respective marriages. There’s no mincing on the costs.
The shift in place-and-time towards the end was a surprise bonus, I thought -- bringing to the fore again Kurson’s ability (like Nagle and Chatterton if you think about it) to fit the pieces to reveal a coherent whole.
OK, forcing myself to stop now. I do get carried away

[santelmo]

Happy to share that I finally got my hands on a copy of Shadow Diver..

hehehe... where did u get ur copy?

wer u able to find "The Last Dive" and "Diver Down"?

[PinayDiver]

hehehe... where did u get ur copy?

wer u able to find "The Last Dive" and "Diver Down"?

Found my paperback copy (P359.) at National Book Store (classified under World History), SM Megamall branch in Ortigas. Will ask about the other two titles the next time I find myself in there

[santelmo]

thank u, thank u

[PinayDiver]

Hallooo. No novel titles-trading lately? Sharing instead a short-and-sweet read (from my copy of The Complete New Yorker), published a year ago today...


DEEP
by Adam Green


In the 1953 science-fiction thriller “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” a scientist is lowered into the ocean’s depths in a stylized Hollywood interpretation of a bathysphere—a self-contained diving chamber—to look for a giant prehistoric monster that has been awakened from a hundred-million-year slumber by an atomic explosion. “I feel I’m leaving a world of untold tomorrows for a world of countless yesterdays,” the scientist says, just before he and the bathysphere are devoured by the beast, which goes on to trample its way from Manhattan to Coney Island, where it expires amid the flaming wreckage of the Cyclone. The End.
To oceanography buffs, the real bathysphere, a custom-built steel ball with reinforced portholes, is the Apollo 11 of deep-sea exploration. During the early nineteen-thirties, before which no one had ventured more than a few hundred feet beneath the waves, the famous naturalist William Beebe and his young partner Otis Barton squeezed themselves into it and, attached by a long cable to a ship on the surface, descended thousands of feet to see what they could find.
A few years ago, a writer named Brad Matsen, who was working on a book about Beebe and Barton’s underwater exploits (it is called “Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss”), learned that their bathysphere had gone missing. As far as he knew, it had last been seen on display at the New York Aquarium, in Battery Park. Matsen was in Seattle, so he asked his daughter to investigate. After several phone calls and a subway ride to the end of Brooklyn, she reported back. The aquarium, which had moved to Coney Island in 1957, still had the bathysphere, in a fenced-in scrap yard under the wooden trestles of the same roller coaster where the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms had met its end.
As soon as he could, Matsen made the pilgrimage to Coney Island. “When I first saw it through the chain-link fence, I completely puddled up,” he recalled the other day. “Then I snuck inside the yard and actually ran my hands over it—holy mackerel! I was almost quivering with excitement.” After that, he said, “whenever the writing got rough, and I felt like I needed a little bit of a kick, I’d go and hang out with the thing—it has an aura.”
Matsen, a former commercial fisherman with a weathered face and a gray beard, was back in New York recently, and, on a sunny afternoon, he once again took the F train to Coney Island. Along the way, he vented his frustration with the public’s seeming indifference to an important artifact. “One day, I spent a few hours on the boardwalk watching people to see if anyone would stop to look at the bathysphere,” he said. “They all just walked right by it. I almost wanted to grab them by the shoulders, shake them, and say, ‘Look! Look! It’s like having Magellan’s ship in your back yard!’ ”
When Matsen got to the Cyclone, however, the ship had apparently sailed: the bathysphere was gone. “It was right there,” Matsen said, pointing at a pile of junk in a weedy lot. A call to the aquarium’s curator, Paul Sieswerda, revealed that the bathysphere had been moved indoors, where it was being spruced up for a gala unveiling in early June. A few minutes later, Sieswerda met Matsen in the lobby of the aquarium, in front of a large tank filled with lazily fluttering cownose rays. He led him through a parking lot to a storage room that was cluttered with maintenance equipment and nautical memorabilia. “We have the shark cage from the movie ‘Blue Water, White Death’ kicking around here somewhere,” Sieswerda said.
The bathysphere, resting on two pieces of lumber, was a little bigger than a wrecking ball, with three steel-rimmed portholes. Matsen gasped softly and ran his hand over its peeling, mottled surface. “Oh, man, it gets me every time,” he said. “It’s like some marvellous pentimento.”
As Matsen explained the provenance of each layer of paint, an onlooker decided to climb inside the bathysphere. The hatch was small. Even without the headsets, searchlight, fan, oxygen tanks, and chemical trays with which it would have been equipped during a dive, the interior felt cramped. It also smelled a little unsanitary. Still, there was something soothing—oceanic, even—about sitting alone in the dark.
The reverie was broken by Matsen, who poked his head in the hatch and said, “Mind if I join you?” After some exertion, he managed to work his head and torso inside, but that was as far as he could get. He remained wedged there for a while. “Isn’t this amazing?” he said.

[allisonfinch]

Chatterton never claimed to have found the U-boat. They just spent the time and research to try to identify it (with the help of many).

[PinayDiver]

Agree. That's quite clear too even if one doesn't get past reading the blurbs on the outside front cover and outside back cover "...the attempt to explore and identify the mystery sub..." That's the story right there.

[rmediver]

Give "Decent into Darkness" by RADM Raymer, it is an amazing account of the salvage efforts after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

One of my favorite books on diving.

Jeff

[PinayDiver]

*penning down Descent into Darkness on reading list*

I'll look it up, thanks Jeff!