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Diving With Sharks by Jack Jackson
Diving With Sharks by Jack Jackson
Diving with Jellyfish - not a very compelling title, is it?
No, the folks at New Holland know how to draw in their audience, which is why this volume is called Diving with Sharks (and Other Adventure Dives) and has the usual photo of a great white approaching a shark-cage on its cover.
Only about a third of this volume concerns sharks. The rest is about other ways of having an adventure under water, including encounters with dolphins, rays, turtles - and jellyfish.
Add sea snakes and the big grouper at the Cod Hole and you can see that this is more a catalogue of someone's diving experiences. It seems short on hard facts, too.
I get the feeling the original idea was Diving with Sharks but that they couldn't come up with enough material, so padded it out with whatever else Jack Jackson had in his cupboard, augmented with sections written by Al Hornsby of Skin Diver magazine in the USA. They make an unlikely duo.
There is a limited section on wreck-diving, one on strong currents, extended-range diving is touched on, and finally there's a section on overhead environments - caves and ice.
However, if these topics interest you, many good volumes deal with each in detail and better than the few superficial ideas laid down here. Wreck-diving earns 20 pages, cave-diving 13. Diving in currents mentions only four locations: Blue Corner (Palau), Puerto Galera in the Philippines, Cocos Island and Cozumel.
The book purports to be aimed at intrepid divers but some of the advice on technique seems rather basic. It is beautifully designed, but the picture selection seems to have come from the bottom of the drawer. Never mind the photography, admire the reproduction.
I think this book is intended for divers who want to impress new or even non-divers. It's very glossy, but its subject has been glossed over.
John Bantin
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Diving With Sharks by Jack Jackson, New Holland (0207 724 7773). Hardback, 160pp, £17.99
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