Adventure

Sometimes the "true" adventures are not as interesting as the fiction! That is the case here. ( )

This is a non-fiction by Clive Cussler, (the 2nd as the title suggests), that tells us more about his real NUMA organization. It's a fascinating insight into the mind of this man. ( )

The sea is there to defeat us.

Plain and simple and that's what [a:Clive Cussler|18411|Clive Cussler|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1225620641p2/18411.jpg] delivers with this book...simplicity. Each wreck or incident is explained and then Cussler relates his results when he went looking for the missing ships. As the reader, I kept getting involved with the real-life people, folks who stepped on to a boat and never reached their destination. Fast forward to Cussler and his team diving to find the answers and the relics of humans now in the locker of Davy Jones.

Take the S.S. Waratah, known as Australia's Titanic. This ship was on its way to England from Down Under, when she vanished before reaching Capetown. Was it a humongous rogue wave? The kind that took out the ship in The Poseidon Adventure? Referred to as an "ugly spud", the disappearance of this ship was the greatest mystery of the early 20th Century. Scientists will tell you there are no rogue waves. Right. Tell that to the Indian Ocean.

The Mary Celeste. This was the Ghost Ship that was found near Gibraltar, but with no crew or passengers. What happened to them? Did they freak out and take the rowboat because they thought the ship was in trouble? In Portugal, a raft was found on a beach, with a flag and a human skeleton. Was this the last survivor of this ghostly tale?

Perhaps The Flying Dutchman isn't a fairytale after all.

Book Season = Summer (boat rocking, sun beating, water lapping) ( )

Like the first Sea Hunters, it's the story of several shipwrecks. In each chapter, there's first a fictionalized historical account of the ship (or boat or plane or cannon) that demonstrates why it's important and describes how it was lost. Then there's the story of NUMA's search for the wreck. Some of the wrecks are famous: the Mary Celeste, JFK's PT109, and some I'd never heard of before.

The historical sections were just detailed enough to give a layperson (me, in other words) a good background in the wreck's history and significance, and because they were fictional accounts, with the emotional content necessarily absent from straight historical records, it gave me a reason to care about the wreck and about whether they would find it.

Because there are 14 sections, it should be obvious at a glance that there's not going to be enough detail on any one of the wrecks to satisfy a historian or salvage expert, or a serious student of either. Instead, it's meant for people like me, who find the whole thing absolutely fascinating, but who haven't read that extensively or actually done any searching for shipwrecks.

One thing I appreciated about the present-day sections is the lack of pretense. Cussler & co. can apparently be rude or juvenile, and there's no sugar-coating (or maybe there is, and they're actually worse than they sound), no attempt to make them appear all-wise, patient, kind, and infallible. Their failures are included, as is the frustration and discomfort of the time-consuming, often boring searches. ( )