Learn to Dive Today Blog – Page 233 – Everything ocean related, with a special focus on scuba diving the rich coastal waters of Cape Town, South Africa.

Bookshelf: Fish identification books

Your diving experiences will be immeasurably enhanced by the addition of one or two fish identification books to your library. Choose books that are appropriate to the region(s) you tend to dive in the most. There’s a lot to choose from here.

Cape Town

Southern Africa

Two Oceans
Coastal Fishes of Southern Africa
A Guide to the Common Sea Fishes of Southern Africa
Reef Fishes & Corals
More Reef Fishes & Nudibranchs
The Reef Guide – supersedes Reef Fishes & Corals and More Reef Fishes & Nudibranchs
A Complete Guide to the Freshwater Fishes of Southern Africa
Southern Africa Sea Life – aimed at children, but with great material for grown ups too
The Coastal Guide of South Africa
Watching Whales and Dolphins in Southern Africa

Warm seas

A Diver’s Guide to Reef Life

Worldwide

Sharks of the World
Sharks and Rays

Also check out Eye of the Shoal, not strictly about fish identification, but all about fish!

Bookshelf: Books about ships and shipwrecks

Who can resist a good shipwreck story? There’s a lot of choice in this selection of books about maritime catastrophes, discovery of lost wrecks, and efforts to prevent ships from coming to grief. Read on…

Shipping

The Box – shipping containers
The Outlaw Sea – everything about earth’s wildest frontier
The Docks
Deep Sea and Foreign Going (90 Percent of Everything)

South African shipwrecks

Shipwreck exploration

Ancient and pre-industrial shipwrecks

RMS Titanic

Modern shipwrecks

Deep Descent – diving the Andrea Doria
Shadow Divers – diving a WWII submarine in the North Atlantic
The Terrible Hours – the sinking and recovery of the Squalus, a US submarine
Graveyards of the Pacific
The Death of the USS Thresher – loss of a US nuclear submarine
Cry from the Deep – the loss of the Kursk submarine
Blind Man’s Bluff – submarines in the Cold War
Shipwrecks from the Egyptian Red Sea
The Perfect Storm
Dark Descent
Into the Raging Sea – the containership El Faro

Those who prevent shipwrecks

Into a Raging Sea – the NSRI’s historic and recent rescues around South Africa
Rescue Warriors – the US Coastguard

Bookshelf: Books about sharks

Sharks! All about sharks! Get some actual, scientific facts here. You can dive as deep as you want into the subject – here’s a wide selection of shark books for you to choose from.

Living with sharks

Start here!

South African special interest

Shark biology

Shark research

Shark attacks

Shark photography

Shark

Bookshelf: Marine biology books

So many animals, so little time! Find a book about your special interest in this reading list.

Books on multiple species and ocean biodiversity

Books about cephalopods

Books about seabirds

Books dealing with specific species

Books about sharks (more shark books here):

Books about fish:

Tuna
Cod
To Sea and Back (about Atlantic salmon)
Four Fish – salmon, tuna, sea bass, cod
Shrimp
Poseidon’s Steed (about seahorses)
The Secret Life of Lobsters
People of the Sturgeon
The Most Important Fish in the Sea
Eye of the Shoal

Books about turtles:

Voyage of the Turtle

Books about whales and dolphins, captivity issues, and our attempts to study them:

Death at Seaworld
Dolphin Confidential
Thousand Mile Song
Watching Giants
Beautiful Whale
Listening to Whales
The Sounding of the Whale
Whales and Dolphins in Question
52 Blue
Beneath the Surface
Swimming with Orca
Watching Whales and Dolphins in Southern Africa
Voices in the Ocean
Are Dolphins Really Smart?

Also check out the fish identification books!

Bookshelf: Oceanography and ocean history books

Are you interested in the physical processes of the earth’s oceans? Currents, waves, and how the oceans got to be the way they are? Fear not, I have just the reading list for you. Dig in!

Oceanography

Ocean: An Illustrated Atlas
The Oceans
Ocean
Encyclopaedia of the Sea
Atlas of Oceans
Sea Change – Sylvia Earle
The Wave – freak waves (popular science)
The Power of the Sea
Moby-Duck
Flotsametrics
Surf Science – oceanography for surfers
Mapping the Deep
The Gulf Stream
The Cloudspotter’s Guide
The Wavewatcher’s Companion

Ocean history

Atlantic
Archaeological Oceanography
The Box – history of shipping containers
The Penguin Book of the Ocean – an anthology of ocean-related fiction and non-fiction
The Log from the Sea of Cortez – John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts explore the Gulf of California
The Mortal Sea
The Death and Life of Monterey Bay
The Unnatural History of the Sea – one thousand years of overfishing
The Story of Sushi
The Fluid Envelope of Our Planet – the history of the development of oceanography as a science
Bay Between the Mountains – a history of False Bay
The False Bay Story
Sentinel of the Seas – the story of one of America’s most isolated lighthouses
The Outermost House – Henry Beston’s classic account of a year at Cape Cod
Endurance – Shackleton’s incredible Antarctic voyage
Shorelines, Strandlopers and Shell Middens – a stretch to classify it here, but related to the history of our coast!
Sea monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps

Bookshelf: Extreme diving

Not for everyone, but definitely fun to read about… Here you will find accounts of dives to great depths, to shipwrecks and into caves, and dives pushing the limits of human physiology. Find a book about extreme diving in this lovely list.

Cave diving

Caverns Measureless to Man – Sheck Exley
Blind Descent – spelunking and diving

Deep diving and technical diving

Raising the Dead – cave diving tragedy at Boesmansgat
Fatally Flawed – reminiscences of deep cave diver Verna van Schaik
Deep Descent – diving the Andrea Doria
Shadow Divers – identifying a WWII submarine in the north Atlantic
The Last Dive – living fast and loose as deep technical divers
Submerged – the memoir of Daniel Lenihan, who has worked around the world to preserve underwater heritage sites
Dark Descent – diving the wreck of the Empress of Ireland

Commercial diving

Freediving

Bookshelf: Photography and art

Do you want to look at pictures of marine life, learn how to take underwater photos, or make your coastal garden pretty (I admit, a bit of a leap)? Here’s a reading list to get you started.

Photographs of ocean-related subjects:

Lighthouses of South Africa
Melting Away – the Arctic and Antarctic

Photographs of marine life:

Great White and Eminent Grey – white sharks in False Bay, South Africa
A Diver’s Guide to Reef Life
Wild Seas, Secret Shores of Africa – South Africa’s varied coastline
Lost World – the Seychelles
Currents of Contrast – the coast of South Africa
Polar Obsession – the ice end of our planet
Shoreline – South Africa’s varied coastline
Beautiful Whale – photographs of whales in mind-boggling detail
Blue Hope – with text by Sylvia Earle, and contributions by the world’s best underwater photographers
Shark – beautiful shark photography with sparse text
South African Coasts

General underwater photography:

The Art of Diving

Art (this book is really unclassifiable!):

Big Fish

Making your surroundings beautiful:

Coastal Gardening in South Africa

Bookshelf: Diving adventures

Here’s a reading list of diving adventures, old and new, spanning all kinds of diving. From Arthur C. Clarke’s chronicles of diving the pristine Great Barrier Reef and Sri Lanka several decades ago, to more modern accounts of wreck diving around the world, you’ll be sure to find something that meets your reading requirements here. Get set for an armchair diving adventure of note!

Travelling divers and interesting lives:

The Coast of Coral– Great Barrier Reef
The Reefs of Taprobane – Sri Lanka
Into The Abyss– memoir of diving Scapa Flow and the North Sea
The Darkness Below – finding, identifying and diving virgin wrecks off Scotland
Neutral Buoyancy – a life of recreational diving (cannot recommend this book highly enough!)
Down the Cayman Wall – Cayman Islands
The Face of the Deep – arcane but beautiful musings on the ocean
The Rapture of the Deep – recollections of a wild diving instructor
Pirate Hunters – the search for a pirate ship in the Caribbean

Maniacs (some admirable!):

Deep Descent – diving the Andrea Doria
Caverns Measureless to Man – Sheck Exley, cave diving legend
Raising the Dead – Dave Shaw’s last dive
Fatally Flawed – how Verna van Schaik became the deepest woman on earth
The Last Dive – a history of mixed gas and cave diving, wrapped in the tale of a family tragedy
Submerged – adventures of a diving archaeologist
Dark Descent – diving the Empress of Ireland
Blind Descent – spelunking and diving