BOOK REVIEW: Dive Scapa Flow

by Rod Macdonald

Scapa Flow is a cold, bleak stretch of water among the Orkney Islands located just north of Scotland. Why anyone would want to dive there is unimaginable to this reviewer. However, he knows that some do because he has read this book and has seen people doing it.

This, being the sixth edition of this increasingly refined work, tends to indicate that there are plenty of people who are much braver, or more foolhardy, than your reviewer. It has been especially updated and published in time to mark the centenary of the scuttling of the German High Seas Fleet on June 21, 1919.

That is very appropriate because it is those German wrecks plus some World War II British ships and numerous fishing and other vessels that are what the divers brave the cold to see. Good luck to them.

The book is replete with some excellent photographs and drawings. It also incorporates fascinating, if brief, histories of all the ships described. They are first rate and, being serious, enable the reader to understand what it is that attracts all those divers – and there are many of them – to Scapa Flow.

Available from Whittles Publishing, Caithness, Scotland

Web: www.whittlespublishing.com