The Diveblog

First Frogman Review

First Frogman is a truly inspiring story of a man who overcame his physical limitation (poor eyesight) and fought WWII from the moment Germany invaded France to the Japanese surrender.  This book is the reason why there wasn't any blogging yesterday.  I couldn't put it down last night. 

Draper Kauffman was denied a commission in the U.S. Navy upon his graduation from the Naval Academy in 1933 due to poor eyesight.  After witnessing the rise of Hitler in Germany, he volunteered as an ambulance driver along the Maginot Line in France.  Then after repatriation from a German prison camp, he made his way to Britain and volunteered with the Royal Navy, where he spent the blitz defusing bombs and mines.  As the U.S. was drawn closer to war, he finally received a commission in the U.S. Navy, for whom he founded the first U.S. bomb disposal school.  In the lead up to the Normandy invasion, he was then tasked with forming what were to become the UDT teams (later to become the SEALs) in order to clear the waterline defenses of the beaches.  He and his men were considered "half fish and half nuts" by the troops they supported in the Pacific. 

This tale is told by Elizabeth Kauffman Bush, Draper's sister.  She is also the sister-in-law to George H.W. Bush, our 41st president.  Her narrative reveals the great love and admiration she holds for her older brother and provides testimony to the power of perseverance.  I found her third person narrative about events in her own life to be a little wierd, but the author's connection to the story is undeniable.  The book is well researched and documented.

Open Water - My Review

Open Water is a factually based movie inspired by the disappearance of Tom and Eileen Lonergan in Australia in 1998 when a dive crew failed to notice the couple missing for two days (the article from Undercurrent which supposedly inspired the movie is here in .pdf).  They were never found.

As an avid diver, I couldn't help but watch Open Water through the prism of my own experiences.  For divers, the movie hits on two of the most basic primal fears: abandonment and sharks.  Despite knowing where the movie is going from the very beginning, the moment the boat motor started sent chills up my spine.  Unfortunately, I had to sit through 45 minutes of "character development" to get to the dive boat (kind of like having to endure air travel on the way to your favorite resort).  I found the general dive "cattle" boat anarchy to be pretty realistic, even if the crew was relatively unattentive.

The shark scenes were impressive (two actors in the water at Stuart Cove's in the Bahamas surrounded by real sharks being chummed and fed by wranglers from the boat), but I felt they were ineffective in generating the type of fear that was intended.  Interestingly, the most frightening scene occurred at night, where the sharks were not shown.  Maybe its just that sharks tend to fascinate, not frighten me.

Overall, it was a pretty good amateur production, so I'll cut it some slack on a relatively uninspiring screenplay and dull protagonists.  It shines a light on a rare but nevertheless troubling possibility when diving: getting left behind.

Unfortunately, the dive industry's reaction to the movie was disappointing and shameful.  I could go on with a long and well deserved fisking of the press release, but I really can't improve on this one.  The amazing thing about that press release from the San Diego-based DEMA is that it was sent out August 4, 2004, less than four months after Dan Carlock was left behind by a dive boat off Catalina!  He survived, but this was in the southern California backyard of half of the diving industry!

Coming up: How do I keep this from happening to me?