Book Review -- The Dive, Pipin Ferreras

I picked up The Dive by Francisco "Pipin" Ferreras with great trepidation. The book is the story of how Ferreras, the world-record holder in the extreme sport of no-limits freediving, met and fell in love with his wife Audrey Mestre, how she then became a freediver as well, and how she went on to die during a record-breaking dive attempt under his supervision.

Now, to write effectively about lost love -- one of the most difficult things there is to do -- you need to have a very, very light touch. But when you consider that Ferreras has never really written anything before, that English is not his first language and that he is something of a mystic/romantic, you have the potential for some very purple prose.

But there was no way I could skip the book. A few years ago, I was lucky enough to spend time in Miami with Ferreras and Mestre while working on a magazine profile of them. Watching Ferreras move easily up and down through the water, holding his breath for minutes at a time as if having no need whatsoever to breathe, was a humbling experience. And Mestre was a stunningly beautiful, extremely serious woman who seemed to have made very clear decisions on what was important and what wasn't. She was always polite to me, but as a member of the media, I fell into the category of unimportant. Still, I came away thinking that they were both unique people -- people that you just knew were somehow operating on a different level.

For those of you who aren't up on the sport of competitive freediving, it's a strange one. There are three categories: constant weight, where divers swim down and then back up again completely under their own power, wearing the same amount of weight throughout; variable weight, where divers sit on a weighted sled as it drops through the water, then stop and ascend under their own power; and no-limits -- Ferreras' specialty -- where divers ride the weighted sled down, then inflate a lift bag that rockets them back to the surface. And, of course, they do it all while holding their breath.

Ferreras devotes the beginning of The Dive to his rise to international stardom in Europe as a freediver representing Cuba (freediving is a popular spectator sport in many Mediterranean countries), his chafing under the communist system, his personal dealings with Fidel Castro, and his eventual defection. It's all interesting stuff. When he gets to Mestre, however, sure enough, the prose turns a fairly deep shade of purple. Let's face it, some of the world's great writers have difficulty with this stuff. But once Ferreras moves past the early stages of their relationship, he gets back on track -- their efforts to popularize the sport in the US, his record-breaking dives to depths well in excess of 500 feet, the accidents that take their toll on him physically, and Mestre's emergence as a freediver herself.

The final third of the book is devoted to Mestre's last dive and is as compelling as anything I've ever read. Reacting perhaps to his own temporary inability to dive due to injuries, Ferreras plans with Mestre for her to make a no-limits breath-hold dive that will not only break the women's record, but break his record as well -- a dive to 590 feet. The day of the dive is described in excruciating detail, from the weirdly casual approach made to equipment checks and operating procedures, to the circus-like atmosphere on the surface while Mestre tried to enter into the meditative state necessary for such a dive, to the long minutes on the surface well after she should have ascended but hadn't. This is all very good stuff.

I'm happy to say that The Dive is a good read.

It was published in 2005 by Regan Books.

Book Review -- Sea Salt, Stan Waterman

Stan Waterman is one of the pre-eminent underwater photographers in the world, and has been for decades. With that in mind, there's no way not to get excited about anything that he writes.

As the subtitle of the book says, though, Sea Salt is a collection of memoirs and essays -- not a strict autobiography -- so it doesn't cover every aspect and time period of his life. And it's not all about diving. In fact, while the book follows a linear path through Waterman's life, there's no predicting who or what he'll write about on the next page. If something caught his fancy, he includes it. If it didn't, he doesn't.

As a diver, though, everything you could want is here. Waterman discusses his introduction to the underwater world, his first days diving, his early years on the dive lecture circuit, and the countless adventures, from the story behind the classic Blue Water, White Death to diving ancient wrecks in the Aegean. Naturally, there are a lot of shark stories.

Waterman also doesn't shy away from things he and his companions did in the past that would definitely be frowned upon today. And he does it all in the easy tones of his Old World charm -- so much so that it often feels as if he's sitting there beside you, telling the stories himself.

As much as I enjoyed this book, though, I often found myself skimming past those sections that were not dive-related. That being said, I never had far to go to get to a part I couldn't wait to read.

Sea Salt was published in 2005 by New World Publications.

Eqp Review -- DUI Crushed Neoprene Gloves with kevlar

When it comes to cold water diving, gloves are definitely one of the weak points in a drysuit. It's just so hard to keep your hands warm.

Ok, time for the full-disclosure disclaimer: I’m not a fan of DUI.  I think the quality of their products has declined over the years, while their prices have climbed and their customer service sunk to new lows.  Not a good combination.

Nevertheless, I want my hands to be as warm as possible in cold water, and so I tried these gloves with high hopes.  To test them, I wore them on four separate dives, all in 36-/37-degree water, and all with dive times in the 60-minute range. On several of the dives, I wore a crushed neoprene glove on one hand, and a heavy duty (blue) DUI dry glove on the other to better compare.

The results were not great – mixed at best. On all of the dives that I wore the two different gloves, the the crushed neoprene glove was warmer for the first 30 minutes or so.  Over the last 30 minutes of the dives, however, the difference between them was negligible.  Both hands were pretty cold.

As for durability, there's no doubt that the crushed neoprene is a tough glove.  At the same time, though, it takes away an awful lot of dexterity and tactile sense. Initially, part of the problem was sizing. The first pair that I tried were size large -- I always wear large gloves. When they arrived and I tried them on, they seemed to fit. It was only at the dive site that I noticed a problem. Normally simple tasks, such as putting on my wrist computer and compass, or attaching my drysuit inflator hose, were no longer simple. And the problems continued underwater.

It turned out that the glove fingers were all about a half-inch longer than my fingers. Because of this, and the stiffness of the material, I had a hard time grabbing anything. DUI has apparently made the fingers of the large-size glove intentionally longer than usual after getting feedback from test divers. That wasn’t the case with me. After a couple of dives, I switched to a pair of mediums. I found those to be a little tight and my dexterity and tactile sense was still terrible.

Would I recommend these gloves for cold-water diving?  Nope.  You just lose too much sense of feeling without the benefit of being significantly warmer.  There are better options out there.

These gloves sell for approximately $200.

Book Review -- The Remarkable Life of William Beebe, Carol Grant Gould

The Remarkable Life of William Beebe sat on my shelf for more than a year before I picked it up. The truth is I wasn't that interested. While Beebe was a childhood hero of mine, that status was based solely on his exploits as the first deep-sea explorer. But his life had been much more than that and unlike the other recent Beebe book, Descent, The Remarkable Life takes it all into account -- his career as a world-renowned ornithologist, a naturalist extraordinaire, prolific best-selling author and mentor to countless young scientists eager to follow in his footsteps. Despite my lack of interest in any of these subject areas, though, I gave it a shot.

I'm glad I did. The picture that emerges of Beebe is indeed a remarkable one. He starts life as a young boy obsessed with collecting, categorizing and understanding the wildlife around him, and then carries that obsession with him straight through the next eighty-plus years in a single-minded pursuit of knowledge that sharpens, but never varies. And all that stuff I was wasn't interested in ... well, it's pretty interesting.

The key point for me, though, and for anyone principally interested in Beebe as an ocean explorer, is that The Remarkable Life puts it all into context. We see that Beebe didn't just wake up one morning and decide to switch fields from ornithology to marine biology. Of the many expeditions he had made to study tropical birds, each began and ended with a long ocean voyage. During those voyages, Beebe's boundless curiousity had no where to turn but the water around him. He was constantly trawling for fish, observing invertebrates, collecting saragassum. It was only a matter of time before too many questions had been raised, too much curiousity piqued.

We also see how his study of wildlife evolved from the Victorian model of a naturalist looking at each animal species in a vaccuum, removed from its environment, to a wholistic approach taking it all into account -- the weather, the seasons, its competitors for food and mates, its predators and prey, etc. Rather than making a simple study of birds in a rainforest, he mapped out a quarter-mile square in that forest to study the inter-relationships of everything in it from the ground up to the tree canopy. At a time when the rest of the scientific world was beginning to prize specialization, Beebe was, of neccessity, casting his own observational net wider and wider. It's only natural that he found no barriers preventing him from moving his field of study from that of birds, to marine life, and then back again.

Beyond that, we see Beebe's own extraordinary social life, in which he counted among his friends and acquaintances Teddy Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling, Katherine Hepburn, and A.A. Milne, to name just a few. He was also among the first of his generation to encourage the women around him to pursue their own scientific studies and both of his wives had successful writing careers of their own. He was truly a man ahead of his time.

The Remarkable Life captures all of this and more. It doesn't examine his adventures in the bathysphere to the same degree of detail that Descent does, and nor should it. But it's no exageration to say that it does put everything in Descent into a whole new prespective. The Remarkable Life of William Beebe is a wonderful book.

The Remarkable Life of William Beebe was published by Island Press in 2004.

Book Review -- Dragon Sea, Frank Pope

Dragon Sea is the story of an underwater archaeological dig that took place off the coast of Vietnam. For those of you not up on archaeology and its hierarchies, marine archaeology is typically held in low regard by its land-based brothers -- the provenance of adventurers and Indiana Jones-type wannabees, one step above treasure hunting.

Understanding this is crucial to understanding the main conflict of Dragon Sea. When the leader of Oxford's underwater archaeology department, Mensun Bound (you might remember him as the host of the old Discovery Channel show, Lost Ships), is approached by a known treasure hunter, Ong Soo Hin, and asked to to help him raise precious porcelain cargo from a sunken 15th Century junk to sell at auction, the obvious answer for him is to say no and avoid further castigation from colleagues. The problem is that the wreck lies in deep water, beyond the range of the volunteer scuba divers he typically uses. This wreck can only be worked by saturation divers, earning big bucks and with a world of expensive technology above them, all of which Ong is willing to pay for -- along with the promise that Bound will be allowed carry out his archaeological investigations at the same time.

Bound puts his reputation on the line and accepts Ong's offer, realizing there's no other way that this historically significant ship could ever be excavated. As much as Bound is reliant on Ong, though, so is Ong reliant to him -- unless Bound reports that he was allowed to carry out a full-scale investigation of the ship, the government of Vietnam won't allow Ong to remove the cargo for sale outside the country. The fortunes of the archaeologist and the treasure hunter are intertwined in the first such collaboration ever.

The potential problems are obvious from the start: the operation costs Ong tens of thousands of dollars a day  and he wants it completed as quickly as possible. Every day that Bound spends studying the wreck, is another day that the tab goes up. And, course, unexpected problems pop up all along the way.

It's a great story with a great premise. The author does have some annoying habits, such as ending each mini-chapter on some kind of cliff-hanging note, most of which turn out to be red herrings. He also has some strange ideas about diving, such as how the air in a scuba tank is compressed as the diver goes deeper. But these are relatively minor affairs. All in all, Dragon Sea is an excellent read.

Book Review -- The Devil's Teeth, Susan Casey

The Devil's Teeth is the story of two marine biologists, Peter Pyle and Scot Anderson, who spent a decade studying great white sharks off the Farallon Islands, which lie just 30 miles west of San Francisco.

The title, The Devil's Teeth, doesn't refer to the sharks but rather to the islands themselves, a nickname they were given by sailors back in the1800s. It's an apt one. The islands rise up from the sea, canine-like, to form one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet. Fierce winds regularly whip them. The sea constantly pounds them. Hundreds of thousands of sea birds congregate to mate on them, cawing and screeching in a deafening cacophony like something straight out of the ninth circle of hell. Kelp flies swarm -- having already spent time lodged in the anuses of the local seal population. Death and destruction lie all around, from the countless birds pecked to death by other birds, to the seals and sea lions ripped apart in bloody spectacles by the sharks circling just offshore. There are only two houses on the islands and the revolving team of biologists who live in them swear they're haunted. But as the author, Susan Casey, points out, ghosts on the Farallons would simply be overkill. Their wild desolation -- how they repel the vast majority of people who set foot on them but suck in a tiny percentage who learn to love them -- is described beautifully throughout.

Back to the sharks, though. For several months a year, the Farallons are home to the one of the densest congregations of large great whites in the world. Thirteen-footers are considered runts. Pyle and Anderson spent years studying these animals as a neighborhood and can identify dozens of them on sight. They've managed to document their natural feeding habits, their hunting strategies, the tidal states in which they're most likely to strike and their behavior around other sharks. They've learned that their vision is probably better than we give them credit for and that while they don't swim in pods, they do seem to stay in loose aggregations.

The Devil's Teeth has some big flaws, though. First, for all that Pyle and Anderson have learned, little of it has made its way into the book. The information listed above is pretty much the sum total. Even then we're usually just told that they've learned something, not what they've learned. This lack of information does a great disservice to Pyle and Anderson. Without the results of their research to back them up, when we see them running down a hill at breakneck speed to launch a boat and witness a seal attack, or squaring off with a shark-cage diving operator that wants to observe the sharks as well, or just competing against each other to see who'll be the first to surf in the sharky waters, they come off as little more than adrenalin junkies who don't want to let anyone else in on the fun. This isn't the case, of course. At least I don't think it is.

The second problem is that the most interesting character in the book, an urchin diver named Ron Elliot who regularly scours the bottom here for urchins while massive great whites circle around, plays a minor role at best. We're told little of how he's managed to stay alive beyond his having some vague sense that a shark is nearby or when it means business. Sorry, that's just not enough.

These weaknesses notwithstanding, The Devil's Teeth is an interesting read, particularly if you're into adventure in desolate places.

The Devil's Teeth was published in 2005 by Henry Holt & Company.

Book Review -- Descent, Brad Matsen

Descent is the story of William Beebe's and Otis Barton's revolutionary exploration of the deep sea in the 1930s. I picked it up with memories of Beebe's exploits still locked in my mind from 4th grade history class. After studying about them, I ran home from school, picking up the largest cardboard box I could find and dragging it along. I then spent hours sitting inside, pretending to re-live Beebe's exploits. But even at the height of my hero worship, I didn't quite get what Beebe and Barton had done. They had a great adventure, yes, but was it really much of an achievement? I mean, all they did was sit inside a steel ball while it was raised and lowered on a cable. Obviously, there were a few gaps in my understanding. It's taken several decades but Descent finally filled those gaps in.

Long before Beebe ever heard of the bathysphere, he was a world-renowned ornithologist who made numerous helmet dives in the tropics, fell in love with the ocean and then made an abrupt career change -- with no formal education in marine science. Barton, his all-but-forgotten partner, was a rich kid who idolized him from afar. But he had what Beebe wanted -- a workable plan for a vessel that would take them into the ocean depths. The two men were formally introduced and formed an immediate partnership that would change deep-sea exploration forever.

The author, Brad Matsen, does a great job painting a picture of the life of explorers in the 1930s, trying to raise money and keep funds flowing during the Depression. He does an even better job describing the technical problems Barton and Beebe faced in building and operating the bathysphere. No one had experience with anything like this before. To withstand the water pressure thousands of feet beneath the surface, how large and thick would the portholes have to be? How could a watertight seal be made between the portholes and the sphere? Was there a cable in the world strong enough to raise and lower it? How could the cable be kept from tangling? And was there even a winch that could lift all three tons of it? None of this was known for sure.

When finally ready, Beebe and Barton sat inside the bathysphere on the deck of a ship covering their ears while workers outside spent long minutes hammering the metal hatch shut. Once underwater, they fanned palm leaves over trays of chemicals to remove carbon dioxide from the air. Based on how they felt, they guestimated when and how much oxygen to release into the bathysphere to keep their air breathable. \All the while, pressure was constantly forcing water into the cramped space.

In the end, Beebe and Barton saw and described sea creatures no one before them ever had ever seen. Their  undrewater trips were carried live on radio to a waiting nation, starved for heroes and escape from economic hardship. Unfortunately, though, neither of them attained what they had truly hoped for. Beebe was almost universally scorned in oceanographic circles as little more than a circus showman, while Barton never rose above the status of second banana.

Descent is a wonderful book and I can't wait to read it again. In the meantime, who knows, I might have to go out there and find myself another big old cardboard box.

Descent was published in 2005 by Pantheon Books.