I finished reading Setting the Hook a few days ago. The reviews have been pretty good on this book; after completing it I understand why.
This book is the third that I have read specifically dealing with the Andrea Doria; the other two being Deep Descent and Fatal Depth. Those books told the story of those who dive the Andrea Doria and very accurately discussed the competition between divers, china fever, the challenges of deep diving and so on. Setting the Hook is the book that really personalizes the expereinces of Peter Hunt; first as a twenty something diver in the early 1980s using compressed air and twenty years later as a technical diver preparing to return to the wreck.
Hunt's narratives of his various dives on the wreck take the reader into the hull of the liner with an appreciation of the challenges and rewards of why one would be compelled to do such a thing. The description of the attempt to save anothers diver's life while awaiting the arrival of Coast Guard helicopter shows the price of failure with a sense that despite the best planning a random error could have put any of the divers in a similar position. The black and white photographs from the author's and other's collection give an impression of what we can imagine it is like to be at 200+ feet and diving on compressed air. I did find the description of the collision between the Stockhom and the Doria to be a bit too detailed and at time repetitive (we are told a couple of time in the space of a few pages about the shortcomings of radar as a navigation tool in the 1950s), especially as much of the detail did not relate to what the divers found during their excursions. A few years after Hunt made his excurions into the Doira, I knew of divers making air dives to similar depths on the Triple Crown in the Santa Barbara Channel; the descriptions of their dives are remarkably similar.
In his quest to return to the Doria two decades later, Hunt picks up the story at a time when technical diving using mixed gasses is just coming into popular acceptance. He relates some of the trials and sucesses of getting certified so he could now make dives that he had made 20 years earlier. Just a few years before his attempted return, tech divers were pariahs at sport diving gatherings. One circumstance that stays with me is seeing a NAUI instructor at the Scuba Show on the Queen Mary loudly arguing with people at a tech diving display that the activity would be the worst thing that could happen to sport diving; within a few years the certification alphabet boys were all offering "tech diving" or tech lite courses. Today technical diving, with many of its practices and equipment having entered the diving mainstream, is as much as a fashion statement for many divers as as it is the mark of achievement as one of the most difficult ratings for others. The differences in those 20 years are not lost on reader as Hunt has done a great of relating his experencies.
Bottom line: Setting the Hook is a very thoughtful and insightful examination of the changes that occur in two decades in the activity and in the life of the author. Definitely a book that should be read and is worth reading.
