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Diveguide Dorset Multimedial by Stefan Baehr
Diveguide Dorset Multimedial by Stefan Baehr
No one in the UK bothered, so it took a German to produce a CD-Rom covering Britain's diving capital, Dorset. But did he do a good job?
The author, Stefan Baehr, is an accomplished wreck-diver and photographer, as this information-packed CD demonstrates. It gives basic, and not-so-basic, details of Dorset's main dive towns and 19 of the county's most popular wreck dives, including the Kyarra, Hood, Countess of Erne, Royal Adelaide, M2 and Salsette.
Each wreck has a good supply of accompanying images, several even have a diagram, and for all of them we are given historical details, difficulty evaluations and the expected diving conditions.
The last point is where this sort of guide often falls over, and this is one no exception. Factors such as visibility vary so much that accurate forecasts are hard to provide, and this is a mistake that many occasional divers in UK waters make.
Sadly, although factual errors are rare, which is good, mistakes are quite a feature of this CD-Rom. Grammatically the text is often wincingly painful, putting you in mind of nothing so much as a German talking to you in pidgin-English.
It's a shame, because this is a commendable attempt to produce a worthwhile guide. I'm sure the CD-Rom will do very well among divers from overseas planning a visit to our shores, but for Brits the text could be just too much.
Within the description of the Aeolian Sky, for instance, you find the sentence: 'This is probably the spot where you will run out of air. I recommend to simply go on diving and then rise to the surface along the SMB and reel.' Not great advice, and probably not really what the author meant.
The layout is ruled by the text but the words appear crammed in. Instead of using a shoehorn, a smaller, more modern typeface would have helped.
It sounds as if I hated this CD-Rom, but I did find the information accurate, the pictures are brilliant and the maps and diagrams are useful.
Gavin Parsons
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| Diveguide Dorset Multimedial by Stefan Baehr (Pixelvalue, www.pixelvalue.com). CD-Rom for Windows 95 or higher, £22.60 |
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