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Neutral Buoyancy, Adventures in a Liquid World by Tim Ecott
Neutral Buoyancy, Adventures in a Liquid World by Tim Ecott
You know the sort of dive on which it seems anything might happen?
You go down to visit an intact wreck, are investigated by some giant grouper, get caught in line and have to be cut free, stop on your way back to watch mantas at a cleaning station, find some amphorae, are engulfed by a huge shoal of barracuda, watch a passing storm at the surface and spend your decompression stop eyeballing rare nudibranchs.
OK, I should be so lucky, but that's the feeling I got with this book. Dive in and you're never quite sure what's coming next, but it's usually rewarding.
The history of diving has been recounted many times - many, many times - but Tim Ecott is a good, BBC-trained journalist and knows how to bring his subject to life.
Neutral Buoyancy is based around the historic development of our sport, but instead of indulging in a big chronological yawn, he has cut and shuffled his deck to include personal anecdotes, interviews with diving luminaries, pocket observations, horror stories and all sorts of goodies to keep you turning the pages.
I had no choice but to read Neutral Buoyancy after seeing the lines on the cover from bigshot critic Tony Parsons, who calls it 'the Fever Pitch of Scuba Diving... a modern classic... vivid, lyrical and quite brilliantly written.' Those are quotes any author would die for.
It didn't quite live up to that hard sell. Fever Pitch appealed to football virgins as much as fans, and though Neutral Buoyancy is a book any non-diver could enjoy, the big question is how many non-divers can the publisher persuade to pick it up in the first place?
And while I learnt a fair bit about Tim Ecott, who started diving days after his mother's funeral to take his mind off her death, he reveals considerably less about himself than Nick Hornby did.
However, anyone who reads both books would understand why real football fans support Arsenal and why divers dive. Take it on your next diving trip and enjoy an unforgettable pick 'n' mix dip into diving whenever the mood takes you. Steve Weinman |
Neutral Buoyancy, Adventures in a Liquid World by Tim Ecott (Michael Joseph, 020 7416 3000). Hardback, 346pp, £12.99
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