The Advanced Wreck Diving Handbook

About This Book

The Advanced Wreck Diving Guide was the seminal work that first introduced the fine art of wreck-diving to an entire generation of divers. For many years it was the only book of its kind. No other book had the temerity to discuss such esoteric topics as wreck penetration, deep diving procedures, decompression methods, or artifact recovery, preservation, and restoration. Such subjects were forbidden by the certifying agencies.

I could afford to write such a book because I was not affiliated with any of those agencies. I owed allegiance to none of them. I was a maverick, a nonconformist, existing on the fringe and exploring beyond the accepted norm: diving deeper, staying longer, and penetrating farther. I belonged to a small coterie of divers who made dives every weekend that the certifying agencies disavowed. Before the phrase “technical diving” was invented and became respected, we were known as “gorilla divers.”

Up and coming divers who wanted to learn the techniques that were used to dive safely on shipwrecks were left on their own. They had to either learn by their own mistakes – a time-consuming and sometimes costly enterprise – or they could read my book or attend my workshops. By the time the certifying agencies jumped onto the bandwagon of wreck-diving, and accepted the fact that the activity was here to stay – I had long since moved ahead and published the Ultimate Wreck Diving Guide: the first book on another topic that the certifying agencies proscribed: nitrox and mixed gas helium diving – what came to be known as technical diving.

Because I was never involved in the politics of diving, I could afford to write anything I wanted without any form of censure. Divers were eager to learn what their certifying agencies kept from them.

This was how the Advanced Wreck Diving Guide came into being, in 1988. Tens of thousands of copies of this outlawed title were sold around the world during the next decade and a half, until Cornell Maritime Press let it go out of print.

The marketplace is now full of wreck-diving books that are somewhat less than authoritative. That is why I saw a need to reproduce material from the Advanced Wreck Diving Guide. Rather than simply reprint the book in its original form, I have taken this opportunity to expand, revise, and update the text to reflect advances in equipment and refinements in technique that have been made over time.

Although The Wreck Diving Handbook is an outgrowth of Advanced Wreck Diving Guide, it is a brand new title that can stand on its own. This new volume is more than twice the length of the original on which it is based. Sprinkled throughout the text are odds and ends of historical interest, to place present wreck-diving practices in context with the past, and to show the reader how wreck-diving evolved to the way it is today. There is no predicting where wreck-diving will go tomorrow.

The present volume bridges the gap between Primary Wreck Diving Guide and The Technical Diving Handbook, both of which are still in print. The former book is an introductory guide for divers who have little or no understanding of shipwreck environments and dynamics. The latter is for skilled divers who wish to extend their range of exploration by breathing alternative gasses such as nitrox and helium mixes.