Treasures, Shipwrecks And The Dawn Of Red Sea Diving: A Pioneer’s Journey, by Howard Rosenstein
Just over two years ago, Divernet ran an extended feature called Dawning Of Dive Tourism In The Red Sea. This was Hall of Fame diver Howard Rosenstein flexing his writing arm, in preparation for setting out in book-form his recollections of almost single-handedly setting up the recreational scuba-diving scene we know today in the northern Egyptian Red Sea.
It all kicked off more than half a century ago and this hardcover book, built on the bare bones of that article, shows why the description “pioneer” is justified in this author’s case. Having already read the feature a number of times, I can appreciate how well it has now been moulded into this more satisfying literary form.
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The story remains very episodic, but the chapters are properly weighted, balanced and woven together. Importantly, the selection of illustrations has been boosted to some 200, notably by including epic pre-digital underwater photography by the master of the art David Doubilet.
Doubilet’s National Geographic team and others were guided by Rosenstein’s dive-centre when they visited the Red Sea in the 1970s, and they effectively passed on the word about the quality of its diving.
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When I first dived at Na’ama Bay, Sharm el Sheikh in the 1990s it was far less built-up than it is now but I didn’t really stop to think about how Egypt had come to be UK divers’ number one destination – it seemed as if it had always been that way.
New York-born Rosenstein had moved to Israel when that country occupied the Sinai but he had started out by setting up its first Mediterranean scuba centre. Operations were funded from the proceeds of a secret stash of gold coins he had located under water off Caesarea – his own personal bank, left for his use by the Roman emperors.
But a school in the Med was never going to capture the undying devotion of travelling divers. So, with his wife Sharon, he turned his attention to the northern Gulf of Aqaba and worked his way down the coast, overwhelmed by the quality of diving he found on reaching Ras Mohammed and beyond.
As Doubilet says of Rosenstein in the book’s intro, paraphrasing Kevin Costner: “He built and they came.” There was precious little building involved in the early days, with the Sharm dive-centre created in 1973 around a dumped railway boxcar, but Rosenstein and his dive-crew would later develop the site.
Propelled by the proprietor’s charisma and deep belief in the quality of Red Sea reefs and wrecks, the guests were soon coming in droves – again and again.
The rich cast of dive-dazzled visitors is part of the attraction of the book. Amid the touring dive-clubs are the photojournalists like Doubilet, wildlife enthusiasts such as ’Shark Lady’ Eugenie Clark and various diplomats, military officers and politicians with the power to make things happen. And images like that of Leonard “Maestro” Bernstein dancing on a boat in the moonlight with a burly Egyptian fisherman linger in the memory.
Then there are the colourful shipwrecks of the book’s title, familiar names now but not back in the ’70s – the likes of the Dunraven, Carnatic and Jolanda.
This book covers only the early part of Rosenstein’s life-story, before the successful Fantasea liveaboard and photography ventures that led to him becoming familiar to ever more divers.
The pioneering years ground to a halt once Egypt had taken back control of the Sinai and its emerging dive industry, but this happened only after he had devoted several years to shuttle diplomacy with Cairo, trying to ensure that the foundations he and his entourage had laid would remain, and that marine-conservation standards would be maintained in the Red Sea.
These efforts were not wasted – it seems that Howard Rosenstein was always good at selling ideas. This is a fascinating story and one well told.
Dived Up, ISBN: 9781909455535208
Hardback, 24x16cm, 208pp, £30
On Wahoo Reef, by Tim W Jackson
Four years ago I enjoyed reading The Secret of Rosalita Flats, a tale of extraordinary Caribbean diving life by Cayman Islands resident Tim Jackson. It was the second in his series of novels concerning the fictitious Blacktip Islands, about which he also writes a blog.
Now the follow-up novel On Wahoo Reef is out and I found it even more pleasurably difficult to put down. Without the crime-thriller elements of its more far-fetched predecessor, this is a straightforward story about PR man Wally Breight, who decides on impulse to buy a run-down island dive-centre without stopping to think about due diligence – so has only himself to blame as calamities start piling up for him from the off.
Wally has a supremely dodgy business partner, a dive-boat that is constantly springing unwanted surprises and a free-spirited girlfriend who threatens to party him to ruination, but there are also plenty of people looking out for him. The characters are well-drawn and three-dimensional, the writing punchy and spare, and the result is an insightful and entertaining slice of tropical dive-centre life.
There actually isn’t that much underwater action in this book, which didn’t bother me, but what there is is vivid and believable, and it’s refreshing to read the occasional diving novel that doesn’t involve shark attacks, cave-entrapment or Nazi treasure.
Tim Jackson doesn’t look old enough from his picture but he was certified as a diver in 1982 and is not only a Master Scuba Diver Trainer and boat captain with decades of experience working at Little Cayman Divers but was a journalist in Florida for 10 years before that, and has a masters in creative writing. You’re in good hands – he knows his stuff and how to put it over.
I said in my last review that I’d be happy to read the sequel and I’m glad I did. By the way, a portion of all sales of Blacktip Island novels goes to the Coral Reef Alliance.
Devonshire House Press, ISBN: 978-1735113654
Softback, 240pp, 14x21cm, £14.95, also on Kindle
Ready To Dive: Five Decades Of Adventure In The Abyss, by Curt Newport
The news today happened to be full of stories of a daredevil billionaire who had asked manufacturer Triton to build him a submersible that could take him down to see the Titanic – apparently “to prove that it could be done safely” following last year’s Titan submersible disaster.
Ludicrous, I thought. Triton and other manufacturers before it have been helping dive-crews descend to the greatest depths of the oceans for six decades and more, and their safety record had been pretty impressive until it was decided that a carbon fibre body separating titanium ends would be an improvement on what had gone before.
So I picked this book up thinking that US deep-sea pilot Curt Newport would underline this point, but it turns out that most of his adventures were undertaken remotely from the decks of a succession of uncomfortable motherships, as he navigated a variety of ROVs and other unmanned undersea craft on all sorts of exciting missions.
I didn’t know a lot about this world of remote piloting at depths way beyond scuba, but now I know more. This book surprised me in a number of ways.
Firstly, if I had pictured an ROV pilot making the occasional adjustment to his craft on a computer from a plush control-room, I was way out. Newport’s 47 years in the business – he retired a couple of years ago after 4,000 hours of piloting and some 150 undersea operations logged – turns out to have been highly physical, enough to leave him with life-long injuries, and both his working and living conditions were often harsh, unpleasant and anti-social.
Secondly, in contrast to what I wrote earlier about the integrity of manned subs, there seemed to be so many ways Newport’s expensive remotely operated charges could go wrong, break down, get entangled, become lost and generally let him down.
He clearly had a gift for workarounds, improvisations and emergency repairs that made him a valued team-member, and he became a dab-hand at deep wreck research too. Most of his descriptions are quite technical but the gist isn’t too hard to follow.
After his interesting early life as a military brat, teenage runaway, hippie, musician and general disappointment to his parents, Newport settled down to his new-found speciality.
He supported projects such as the salvage of Air India Flight 182, the Space Shuttle Challenger, the recovery of the Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft (deepest commercial salvage in history at the time), TWA 800, the broadcast of live images from the Titanic, the search for USS Indianapolis that revealed the deepest timber shipwreck ever found, and classified missions to find lost military aircraft.
This interesting book left me with the sense of a man who was proud of his work achievements, yet at the same time not particularly happy about the cards life had dealt him.
Purdue University Press, ISBN 9781612499666,
Hardback, 302pp, 16x24cm, £25.95, also on Kindle
Life On The Reef: Corals, Sea Squirts, Sponges, Bryozoa, Comb Jellies, Marine Plants, Indo-Pacific Field Guide, by Andrey Ryanskiy
OK, I know Andrey Ryanskiy seems to have a new offering in every set of Divernet book reviews, but he tells me he thinks this will be his last one. By now he has produced an impressive set of eight Reef ID Books covering no fewer than 8,500 species, having personally undertaken vast amounts of the research and underwater photography over the years.
The reef inhabitants listed in the book’s title represent most of its diversity, says the author, who reckons the taxonomy of the benthic community has undergone significant changes over the past 15 years, while we divers have continued to use outdated guides.
“It is impossible to be an expert on nudibranchs, shrimps or fish without knowing their habitats,” says Ryanskiy, and Life On The Reef features more than 1,430 species – but their variants get a good look-in too, so there are more than 2,100 photographs altogether.
And he says that the volume is being particularly well-received by marine biologists. “Live photographs of most species have not appeared in field guides or popular books in recent decades,” he claims – take out the corals, anemones and their relatives that account for more than half the book, and many of the reef inhabitants that remain have been forgotten, with some “simply unknown to most divers and underwater photographers today”.
The entire Travel Set of Reef ID Books was available in ebook form at a special price of US $99 (£78) last time I checked – if interested, ask whether this offer still applies.
Reef ID Books, ISBN: 9798986828732
Paperback, 16x23cm, 226pp, £38.58, also in hardback and on Kindle
Other book reviews on Divernet: November 2023, August 2023, April 2023, February 2023, December 2022, August 2022, April 2022
