Product Description

This comprehensive guide is for both beginning and advanced divers. It tells how to find wrecks, details the equipment and techniques needed, explains safety concerns, and teaches how to recover artifacts and preserve them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #236100 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-25
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Clive Cussler, author
Keatts and Skerry brilliantly cover the spectrum of wreck diving with fascinating data and background material.

About the Author
Henry Keatts is a professor of biology and oceanography at Suffolk Community College on Long Island, New York. In addition to being widely published in his field, he is the author of New England's Legacy of Shipwrecks, Field Guide to Sunken U-Boats, and Guide to Shipwreck Diving: New York and New Jersey, and the co-author of the Dive Into History series (U-boats, warships and U.S. submarines). Keatts is a fellow of the Explorers Club, an associate member of the Boston Sea Rovers, and an honorary member of the Gillmen Club and the Adirondack Underwater Explorers. He is president of the American Society of Oceanographers. His photographs have been published in numerous books and magazine articles.

Brian Skerry is an assignment photographer for National Geographic Magazine specializing in elusive underwater subject matter. Working in diverse environments, including the open ocean, beneath ice, inside caves and in saturation, Brian has photographed a wide variety of subjects. One of his primary subjects has been shipwrecks having explored and photographed hundreds of wrecks, such as the Andrea Doria, USS Monitor, the pirate ship Whydah and the wrecks of the D-Day invasion off Normandy. His images have appeared in numerous magazines including People, Sports Illustrated, US News and World Report, Smithsonian, Esquire, Audubon, Outdoor Life, Wildlife Conservation, Yankee, Maxim, and Men's Journal. He lives in Massachusetts.

Excerpted from Complete Wreck Diving: A Guide to Diving Wrecks by Henry Keatts, Brian Skerry. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From the wooden timbers of a Basque whaling ship off Labrador, to an intact United States aircraft carrier in the lagoon at Bikini, or a Swedish warship's cannon-strewn debris field in Stockholm Harbor, the maritime history of mankind rests not only in dusty volumes of forgotten text, but in the sea itself.

Since the time that man first ventured forth upon the sea, he has left in his wake a tangible history, a history in the form of shipwrecks. It is a history that tells how our predecessors lived, worked and thought. It depicts the struggles, battles and conflict of bygone eras that today with the luxury of hindsight often seem so unimportant. It is a history of people who had epic courage and a thirst for adventure and knowledge. It is a history of ourselves.

As occupants of the second half of the twentieth century, we possess a unique opportunity to explore this tangible history firsthand. With the advent of scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), we have the freedom to visit our maritime legacy in the field and are not relegated to merely reading about it or viewing it behind glass in a museum. Unlike those before us who set sail upon the sea to learn more about their world, we set forth beneath it to learn more about them. To dive on shipwrecks is to embark on a multi-faceted journey, a journey that begins with an innate human catalyst - curiosity.

Since the earliest days of mankind's evolution, the human species has demonstrated an undying curiosity of the world in which it lives. It could well be that curiousity was the impetus for man's evolutionary ancestors leaving the primordial sea in search of a new life on land. It is without question the driving force that returns man to the sea in search of his heritage.

Diving shipwrecks, perhaps more so than most undersea pursuits, provides an outlet for this inquisitive nature we possess. New divers and seasoned veterans alike share a sense of wonder when visiting a wreck for the first time. We swim over the rusting hulls or rotting timbers anxiously shining our dive lights under fallen beams or into dark open hatchways, always searching, always hoping. During these submerged sojourns we seek souvenirs, images, or knowledge with which we can return home richer than we left, richer by fuflfillment of accomplishment, not monetary gain.

Customer Reviews

Before taking the training
A good book. It answered several of my questions and answered questions that I didn't know to ask. NOT a substitute for training but a good addition. It actually increased my interest in wreck diving. Also an easy read and suggests many places to find wreck to dive on.

Complete Wreck Diving: A Guide to Diving Wrecks
Although not complete from a technical diving aspect, this is a great primer on how to start a research project. There are ample examples of historical resources, of what to do if one finds a wreck, how to lay claim, etc. Overall alot of good information on wreck diving.

Surprisingly Good
When I first leafed through this book, I mistakenly thought that it would be a dry read. I was wrong. This book provides a wealth of information: particularly on finding and identifying wrecks. It gave great insight into where to find information about wrecks; right down to the places and addresses where maritime archives are stored and how to perform research. Informative descriptions of equipment give the reader a good foothold of knowledge to start planning dives & searches.
I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in wreck diving, especially if you've dreamed of finding that virgin wreck site but didn't know where to start or what resources are available.