[Texascavers] book review: cave diving
"The Essentials of Cave Diving." Jill Heinerth. Heinerth Productions, High Springs, Florida; 2010. ISBN 978-0-9798789-4-7. 7 by 10 inches, 200 pages, softbound. $49.95. Jill Heinerth is a cave diver with worldwide experience, known especially for photography and rebreather use and training. This introductory book is heavily illustrated with many of her color photographs. It covers pretty much all the things one would expect, but there's a lot of variation in the depth of coverage. For example, there is quite a bit about oxygen toxicity, with several tables, but relatively little about decompression; perhaps it is assumed that everybody these days uses a dive computer that figures that out for you. There is a lot of rather scattered information about the use of closed-circuit rebreathers in cave diving, but if you don't already know what they are and how they work, it will be mysterious. A special section addresses women's issues, including, to my surprise, how they might use pee valves in dry suits. I didn't notice any errors that might get somebody killed, but then I'm no expert. On the other hand, there are a lot of niggling little things that sap the reader's confidence. For example, kernmantle is a material (page 81). Two views of the same piece of gear are labeled as two different things (page 77). The Cave Diving Group of Great Britain was formed in 1935 (page 21) and 1946 (page 34). The extensive glossary defines a lot of terms that I don't think appear elsewhere in the book, but leaves some things undefined. I still haven't deciphered DSV (page 129). Some jargon may be familiar only to those who don't need the book. What is a guideline placement? Why do cave divers use reference as a verb? There isn't as much text as the size of the book suggests, because there are sidebars and wide margins. Some of the material is quite advanced, but still the overall style of the writing and the graphic design of the book make it look like it's intended for someone younger or dumber than any diver would want for a partner. I recommend it only for someone who has just a casual interest in what cave diving is all about and a high tolerance for bad grammar and punctuation.--Bill Mixon You can live down anything but a good reputation. You may "reply" to the address this message came from, but for long-term use, save: Personal: bmi...@alumni.uchicago.edu AMCS: edi...@amcs-pubs.org or sa...@amcs-pubs.org - Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: texascavers-unsubscr...@texascavers.com For additional commands, e-mail: texascavers-h...@texascavers.com
[Texascavers] book review: cave diving reprint
"The Log of the Wookey Hole Exploration Expedition, 1935." Graham Balcombe and Penelope Powell. Cave Diving Group, Great Britain; reprint 2009. ISBN 978-0-901031-06-8. 6 by 9 inches, xviii+235+xix pages, hardbound. £25 plus postage (about $70 total) from http://www.cavedivinggroup.org.uk . Following a pioneering but unsuccessful attempt at diving a sump in Swilden's Hole, Jack Sheppard visited Siebe, Gorman to find out what sort of light-weight diving equipment might be available. Nothing suitable could be recommended, but the company offered the loan of standard base-fed hard-hat diving gear, along with suitable instruction in its use. Few cave-diving sites in Britain or anywhere else would accommodate such equipment, but the sump at the end of show cave Wookey Hole did, leading to the diving project recounted in this book. The original edition, by "the divers," was essentially hand-made by Graham Balcombe, with the text pages stencil-duplicated in two colors after being typed with flush-right columns on a typewriter, and the photographic plates were reproduced as actual photo prints, faced with tissue. Only the cloth binding was done professionally. The adventure of printing the book was described by Balcombe in an article much later, and I got permission from him to submit it to "Underwater Speleology," where it appeared in volume 21, numbers 5 and 6, and volume 22, number 1 (1993 and 1994). The price of the 1936 edition was 7/6, about a dollar. Needless to say, copies of the original, of which a few over 175 were printed, sell for a lot more than that today, and even more than the high price of this reprint. The text pages, including the dive logs, have been newly typeset for the reprint, and the illustrations are printed in facsimile. Some additional material has been included, including the article about the original printing and a short summary of diving developments at Wookey Hole since. While the technology used by the 1935 expedition was obviously a dead end as far as cave diving was concerned, Wookey has subsequently proved to be the site of a challenging series of sumps, the last known of which was dove to a depth of 90 meters in 2005. As the first cave-diving book, "The Log of the Wookey Hole Exploration Expedition" is an important historical document, and it is good that it has been made available again for less than the hundreds of dollars an original would cost, if you could find one.--Bill Mixon When sharing a dish with the devil, use a long spoon. You may "reply" to the address this message came from, but for long-term use, save: Personal: bmi...@alumni.uchicago.edu AMCS: edi...@amcs-pubs.org or sa...@amcs-pubs.org - Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: texascavers-unsubscr...@texascavers.com For additional commands, e-mail: texascavers-h...@texascavers.com
[Texascavers] book review: cave diving
"Living in Darkness: A Woman's Scientific and Exploratory Adventures into the Underwater Caves of the Bahamas." Stephanie Jutta Schwabe. National Speleological Society, Huntsville, Alabama; 2009. ISBN 978-1-879961-32-6. 7 by 10 inches, 184 pages, softbound. $19.50 ($17.50 for NSS members). Surely a nicer photograph could have been found for the cover of this book. Fortunately you can't tell a book by its cover, and this is a nice collection of autobiographical sketches. It is not a systematic biography, which leaves the reader a bit lost sometimes, as when Schwabe mentions that she is a lawyer without giving a clue as to how or when this happened. But, as promised in the subtitle, it does cover her cave-diving career in the Bahamas, where she founded, along with her husband Rob Palmer, the Blue Holes Foundation to study and attempt to preserve the underwater caves, among them the famous ocean Blue Holes. (If you can lay your hands on one of Palmer's books on the Blue Holes, written before he met Schwabe, read it.) She covers working on a master's degree there under John Mylroie, meeting Palmer there and courting him while working on a PhD at the University of Bristol on Bahamian caves, the non-cave diving death of Rob Palmer and then the cave-diving death of Rob Parker a few months later, and various filming projects, including at a very unusual "black hole" inland on South Andros Island. She winds up with a rant, unbalanced though deserved, against the Bahamian government for not protecting the cave resources there. The author is unsparing in her opinions of various people she dealt with, including her ex-husband, and she is also forthright about her own emotions, which appear to have been volatile. Honest, I wouldn't have added "just like a woman" even without the risk of the author's feminist wrath. The layout of the book is nice, and there are many black-and-white photos that were prepared for printing as well as the originals allowed. The text could have used a good bit of buffing, most conspicuously toward the end. Still, "Living in Darkness" is a fascinating account of significant events, both highs and lows, in cave diving.--Bill Mixon - He who renders warfare fatal to all engaged in it will be the greatest benefactor the world has yet known. - Sir Richard Burton -- You may "reply" to the address this message came from, but for long-term use, save: Personal: bmi...@alumni.uchicago.edu AMCS: edi...@amcs-pubs.org or sa...@amcs-pubs.org - Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: texascavers-unsubscr...@texascavers.com For additional commands, e-mail: texascavers-h...@texascavers.com
[Texascavers] book review: cave diving manual
Cave Diving Articles and Opinions: A Comprehensive Guide to Cave Diving and Exploration. Edited by Jill Heinerth and Bill Oigarden. National Speleological Society Cave Diving Section, Lake City, Florida; 2008. ISBN 978-097987890-9. 8.5 by 11 inches, 320 pages, softbound. $42.95. The Cave Diving Section's earlier NSS Cave Diving Manual was published in 1992 and getting pretty long in the tooth. This new book, with fifty-six chapters by thirty-five authors, goes a long way toward filling the need for an update. As the title suggests, a few of the chapters ramble or are more essays than articles, but it all adds up to something close to the comprehensive guide promised in the subtitle. The area most conspicuously missing is communication by hand or light signals among team members. There is some redundancy; two chapters on biology are very similar, and two chapters cover the same five safety principles resulting from accident analyses. Side-mount diving, mixed-gas diving, rebreathers, and sump diving have all become a lot more common in the last fifteen years, and this new book covers these new developments extensively. Especially notable is a nice article by Joe Kaffl on sump diving, a topic Florida cave divers seldom thought about years ago. (Florida-type cave divers hope the underwater passage is long and deep. Sump divers hope is it short and shallow and leads to more dry cave, but sometimes it is neither short nor shallow, and generally it is unpleasant.) In many places a drawing or purpose-made photograph would have helped to clarify things. With no useful illustration, I'm completely befuddled by Jason Richards's detailed description of his side-mount rig. There are some helpful illustrations in Kaffl's sump-diving article, but most of the black-and-white photos that are present elsewhere appear intended mainly to decorate the pages, and many are too dark. The copyright page contains misleading information about the identity of the publisher. The inadequate margins could have been fixed without adding pages by using slightly less immense type. The index proved useful when I checked back to confirm that helictite was indeed misspelled, but what is one supposed to make of a list of seven pages under woman, followed by a list of nine under women? There are scores of distractingly ungrammatical uses of they and their as singular pronouns. That so many authors did that makes me wonder whether they've been embarrassed by an editor. The author of the geology chapter seems to think that sandstone dissolves less readily than limestone because quartz is physically harder than calcite. But all that fussing is just part of my continuing campaign to encourage excellence in cavers' publications. Most of you will have figured out by now that I'm a lot fussier than you are. I recommend this book, warts and all, as an interesting and informative read, even for someone who has never taken a breath out of a tank in his life and doesn't plan to, like me.—Bill Mixon -- You may "reply" to the address this message came from, but for long-term use, save: Personal: bmi...@alumni.uchicago.edu AMCS: edi...@amcs-pubs.org or sa...@amcs-pubs.org
[Texascavers] book review: Cave diving
The Cave Diving Group Manual. Edited by A. M. Ward and C. P. Hayward. Cave Diving Group, [United Kingdom]; 2008. ISBN 978-0-901031-04-4. 7 by 10 inches, xi+171+xxxvii pages, softbound. £27.50. The Cave Diving Group's previous manual was published in 1990, so it was definitely due for an update. In Britain, cave diving means solo side-mount sump diving, and that is the main subject of the manual. In the US, sump diving is considered a specialty to be tackled only after one has received full cave-diving training and certification, although, inevitably, some cavers far from Florida will undertake sump diving without having gone through all that expense. For them, this book will be especially important, although of course the ritual caution that one shouldn't try it based only on book-learning is rightly made. In Britain, cave-diving is a specialized form of caving, not diving, and a potential cave-diver must have dry-caving experience to even be accepted as a CDG trainee. In noteworthy contrast to US practice, CDG members never charge for training. The various (unidentified) authors vary conspicuously in literacy, but everything is clear enough. The sump-diving stuff will be helpful to a US cave-diver wanting to "advance" to sump diving. But there are also chapters on advanced topics more useful in places with longer or deeper sumps or underwater caves, including mixed-gas diving, scooters, and rebreathers. These sections focus mainly on hazards peculiar to using those in caves, rather than basic training, which you are assumed to have gotten elsewhere. One covered British specialty has, so far as I know, not been done over here because we are not yet that desperate: underwater digging. Some British divers pursue underwater digs in a way that can only be called fanatical. I read in the Cave Diving Group Newsletter of one caver who has made 180 dives to the same dig so far. Little effort has been made to make the book inexpensive, unfortunately. There are enough color photos that one pays color laser- printing prices for the entire book, and this, coupled with the mandatory airmail shipping to the US, makes the total cost something over $80, depending on the currency conversion at the time you order. The hard-core or rich American cave-diver with ten tanks and regulators and two scooters may not cringe at the price, but it is not for him that this book was written. Order using PayPal at http://cavedivinggroup.org.uk . --Bill Mixon -- You may "reply" to the address this message came from, but for long-term use, save: Personal: bmi...@alumni.uchicago.edu AMCS: edi...@amcs-pubs.org or sa...@amcs-pubs.org - Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: texascavers-unsubscr...@texascavers.com For additional commands, e-mail: texascavers-h...@texascavers.com
[Texascavers] book review: cave diving
"Raising the Dead: A True Story of Death and Survival." Phillip Finch. Harper Sport, London; 2008. ISBN 978-0-00-726524-4. 5 by 8 inches, 310 pages plus color plates, hardbound. £16.99. In January 2005, David Shaw attempted to recover from the floor of Bushmansgat, or Bushman's Hole, the body of a diver who had died there in December 1994. The depth was 270 meters, 886 feet. Sheck Exley had reached a higher point on the bottom of this cave in South Africa in 1993 at –263 meters, the first person to do so. He suffered greatly from HPNS during the deeper part of that dive. Shaw died in the recovery attempt, and his deepest support diver, Don Shirley, suffered a rebreather control-system failure and a serious inner-ear-bends event. All this was heavily publicized at the time, and most cave- divers are probably vaguely aware of it. This thoroughly researched book covers the dive in detail, as well as topics like previous diving in Bushmansgat and Shaw's and Shirley's prior diving careers. It is non-technical, written for a popular audience, and there are brief but clear explanations about things like the need for trimix and the hazards of decompression sickness during such dives. The text is well crafted, if not particularly wonderful, and reads smoothly. There are eight pages of color photos. The book is not nearly as long as the number of pages implies, because the type is large and widely spaced within generous margins. There are a good index and a few appendixes, including a eulogy by Shaw's daughter Lisa. I know of no convenient US source for the London edition. What is obviously the same book is scheduled to be published in the United States at the end of September under the title "Diving into Darkness." It will be a good bit cheaper, and it can be preordered from Amazon now for about half the British list price.—Bill Mixon -- You may "reply" to the address this message came from, but for long-term use, save: Personal: bmi...@alumni.uchicago.edu AMCS: edi...@amcs-pubs.org or sa...@amcs-pubs.org - Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: texascavers-unsubscr...@texascavers.com For additional commands, e-mail: texascavers-h...@texascavers.com
