Читать книгу Deeper into the Darkness онлайн

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In the intervening years since The Darkness Below was published in 2011, I had spent a lot of time exploring the Pacific War shipwrecks of Truk Lagoon and Palau for my two manuals about diving the wrecks there. Of necessity, my descriptions of the wrecks there had to be regimented, clinical and almost dispassionate. But, as ever with my diving, there had been many adventures along the way as I explored and researched the wrecks – and I had seen so many things that simply couldn’t go in the wreck manuals. In The Darkness Below I wrote a chapter about the SS Creemuir and the subsequent friendship I had developed with Noel Blacklock, the former Royal Navy radio officer on the ship when it was torpedoed off north-east Scotland in 1940. A couple of years after the book was published there was another exciting development to that story which I felt really needed to go into print. Read Chapter 14 to learn what it was – I won’t spoil it here for you!

So gradually, as my head was bursting with all these stories, I decided to write a follow-on to Into the Abyss and The Darkness Below – a third volume in the story of my diving career, which by complete chance, mirrors and charts the development of our sport of technical diving from its origins in the dangerous deep air days of the late 1980s, through concepts such as extended range diving, the use of decompression gases such as nitrox, the use of deep diving trimix gases using helium, through open-circuit trimix diving and on to the present day, when we use amazingly complicated closed-circuit rebreathers that greatly extend the time you can spend on the bottom and the depth you can go to with ease, whilst minimising as far as possible the length of time it takes to ascend safely and decompress.