Below Freezing: The Antarctic Dive Guide
Ready, set, freeze by Lisa Trotter
You expect dive guides to regions of the UK, Red Sea, Caribbean etc, but Antarctica? This book has been updated from the excellent 2006 edition, with the same diving advice but more sites, text and images.
While it lacks the 3D dive-site sketches we have come to expect, it scores as a guide to animals you are likely to see.
Twenty-seven sites are described, from the Antarctic Peninsula, the islands north of the peninsula and South Georgia.
This gives you a feel for what to expect and will perhaps enable you to suggest locations when you are on that expedition.
You are bound to encounter leopard seals if you do go, and Göran Ehlmé is practical but reassuring about their behaviour.
He also rewrites the section on underwater photography and videography, providing advice on how to use a camera successfully in water at around 0°C.
The section on common benthic [seabed] life, edited by Dennis Cornejo, is a welcome addition. It demonstrates, together with all the plates, that there is a great and colourful variety of life in Antarctica. The book doesn't tell you that you often have to rummage about under a blanket of seaweed to find the animals within the depths in which diving is considered safe, but why spoil a good story?
Think about buying this book if you are curious about extremes in diving or about Antarctic marine life - but definitely buy it if you are really going to go.
Keith Hiscock
Wild Guides
ISBN 9781903657287
Softback, 128pp, £19.95
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