Great Ocean Adventures
Buckling his swash
Monty Halls is well known to DIVER readers, and to a wider audience as the host of Channel 5's Great Ocean Adventures. Visitors to the Dive Shows will also be familiar with his lectures, filled with tall tales and self-deprecating humour. This book is essentially Monty's diary of his travels from Mexico to Norway, Tonga to Canada, and Philippines to Bali. This gruelling itinerary eventually produced the material for the eight episodes of his latest TV series.
As always with underwater series or books that have to conform to the tyranny of the 'list format', readers may wonder why Halls chose some of the creatures for which he searches.
Diving with beluga whales in Newfoundland and orcas off Vancouver Island sit happily enough with the theme of a 'great' adventure for many divers. It's questionable whether spinner dolphins or oceanic sunfish have quite the same dramatic potential.
The drama of Halls's narrative comes from his attempts to record and interact with these creatures on a perilously tight schedule with a minimal film crew. Humpback whales, thresher sharks, basking sharks and Humboldt squids complete the line-up and, as with all such quests, the magic of the story lies in the telling.
Monty Halls writes as he speaks. He is able to indulge his penchant for a certain brand of rugby-club humour without giving offence, to stray perilously close to the knuckles of political correctness without quite getting his fingers burnt, and to drag the reader along on what he calls a 'harum-scarum, dashing, swash-buckling circle of the globe'.
The biological information imparted is relatively thin - we learn that beluga whales are grey at birth and become white after about 10 years. They are extremely vocal and have bulbous heads. Halls tells us more about the Humboldt squid, the burgeoning population of which has filled the ecological niche once occupied by the over-fished shark. We also learn that the squid has '2000 suckers, each ringed with 72,000 teeth'.
Many of the adventures described by Monty Halls are accessible to sport divers, providing they have enough cash.
Usefully, he lists the addresses and phone numbers of the dive operators and skippers who provided the logistics for his crew, as he says, 'on an absolute shoe-string'.
Monty Halls writes engagingly, but the photographs in Great Ocean Adventures are too often less than memorable.
Befittingly, as a former officer in the Royal Marines, Halls is best when he is encouraging. As an inspirational source for many divers to go in search of their own ocean adventures, this book will provide tremendous motivation.
Tim Ecott
Great Ocean Adventures by Monty Halls, Broadcast Books, ISBN 9781974092544. Hardback, 183pp, £15
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