Neutral Buoyancy: Adventures in a Liquid World by Tim Ecott

[koozemani]

Neutral Buoyancy takes you through the history of man's conquest to conquer the sea. This history lesson is interspersed with his personal stories. Not extolling his exploits underwater, but poetic tales that have shaped his life and communion with the undersea world.

The history lessons begin with earliest recorded history of diving through it's use for salvage, science and warfare, up to the time where diving had it's earliest roots as a sport for pleasure. Included are chapters on sponge diving, both in Greece and Tarpon Springs, saturation divers, free diving, and frogmen. He includes enough info to be educational, but doesn't drone on long enough to be tedious.

In it's chapters, he includes interviews with such pioneers as Hans Haas and his wife, Umberto Pelizzari, Dottie Frazier-May, Bob Croft, some of the Navy divers involved with the SeaLab habitats, and others who, at the moment have slipped my mind.

To date, this is my new favorite book on the subject. It was both educational and a pleasure to read. It's always a breath of fresh air to read a diving book that doesn't focus on death. Granted those books, of which I have read several, have lessons to teach and have their place, but can be such downers.

 

[TSandM]

I think the thing that stuck with me most from that book was the essay where he was talking about the sadness of being fundamentally irrelevant underwater -- we are neither predator nor prey to much of anything, so except for nonspecific fear responses, we are pure observers. I know that two of the finest dives I've had have been where marine mammals actually chose to interact with us, and include us for a brief moment in time as part of their world.

 

[minnesnowta]

I know I am kind of reviving a zombie thread here, but I am reading this book right now and it is so amazing!

My favorite part is when he was describing a dive in England (I believe) and there was a wall of mud to one side and just infinite nothingness to the other side of him...and he talked about feelings of isolation. Like @koozemani said, he is really poetic and not at all self-satisfied.

Also another part I found interesting were his remarks on deep diving, and how there is a strange pull to want to go deeper and see animals/coral that hardly anyone has seen before. I had never thought about it like that before.

So yeah it's really philosophical. I also really, really enjoy the history of all this stuff and now have a great appreciation for natural sponges.