It's been a long time coming. Mind you, this latest Diver Guide - Dive the Isles of Scilly and North Cornwall - has been worth the wait. Putting North Cornwall and the Scilly Isles together in one book is a good idea. They fit together well, particularly as the few boats wreck-diving North Cornwall are often the same as those in Scilly waters.
If you listen to Richard Larn and David McBride, both former Royal Navy divers, you will realise that it was the North Cornwall half of the book, listing 234 dive sites from Sennen Cove to the Devon border at Morwenstow, which took up most of their time, even though launch places are few and far between.
Walking the territory to discover launch coves in valleys running down through the huge cliffs was often the only way to produce a complete diving guide. The Scilly Isles was easier, as both men live there and are vastly experienced wreck-divers in their home waters.
Larn told me with enthusiasm that you could regard North Cornwall as virgin wreck diving territory. Indeed, it is only recently that there has been an upsurge in diving services, much of it centred on Newquay.
The authors give freely of their expertise, particularly in such areas as 'treasure' ships and 'salvor in possessions', listing three such Scilly wrecks. These are the Association; the Colossus, which, strangely, is not only a protected wreck but has a salvor in possession (the Receiver is busy sorting that one out); and the Schiller, of which Larn and McBride are salvors in possession.
Most wreck-divers will want to get their hands on the book for the North Cornwall chapters alone. There are more than 2300 wrecks off that coast. Not all, of course, are in the book, but many are. These include sailing victims of that hard coast, the losses from the Bristol Channel trade in Welsh coal and Cornish tin, dozens of steamer war losses in both world wars, the 8825 ton liner Armenian, the destroyer HMS Warwick, the Navy submarine L1, and intact U-boats, mostly deep.
This is not the only long-awaited diving guide. Shipwrecks off North Norfolk, author Stephen Holt assures me, covers the coast from Hunstanton to Cromer. He tells me that diving is booming in that area, and lists 150 wrecks with diving detail and pictures or silhouettes of each.
Surprisingly, Holt is not a diver, although he crewed for his son James, who ran a boat for divers out of Wells. In his introduction, he admits his total reliance on divers and charterboat skippers regarding the current state of the wrecks, and says that he owes them all his thanks. They have done him well. This book fills a big gap in wreck-diving literature.
Buy this book and you may gain the impression that it has been written by one 'Ayer Tikus'. This is in fact Malay for 'water rat' - a nickname Holt picked up while living in Singapore.
Third of the new guides for divers is Bob Baird's Shipwrecks of the North of Scotland. A keen diver for 25 years, Baird has made this one a big, thick, carefully researched guide to losses off the coast of Scotland from Stonehaven north to Duncansby Head, then west to Cape Wrath and the Minch.
It covers the Scottish areas not included in his first two volumes - Shipwrecks of the Forth and Shipwrecks of the West of Scotland.
Though Orkney and Shetland fall into this latest guide, he does not write about the wrecks of Scapa Flow - 'there seemed little point in me regurgitating what others have done so well... preferring to concentrate on wrecks which others have not written about'. And then, generously, he lists all the major Scapa books for his readers.
Wreck-divers will be interested to note that, of the 422 wrecks in the book, some 181 are due to war, of which 102 were 'submarined' by torpedo, gunfire or scuttling charges.
They will find a lot of detail about convoys, and the German Navy grid square code system with tables of long and lat positions worked out by Baird for the grid squares around Scotland. It is this sort of attention to detail that makes this not only a hefty tome but an extremely valuable one.
Kendall McDonald