by Gary GentileThe collision and sinking of the Andrea Doria on July 25, 1956 has been the subject of debate since that fateful night. Fifty-two people lost their lives, the Italian Line lost its finest ship and the sea rescue made banner headlines around the world. Today she rests on her starboard side in 240 feet of cold Atlantic water 50 miles south of Nantucket and since that time numerous schemes of hull salvage have been discussed and salvors have penetrated seeking treasure and photographers have captured her slow disintegration.This book chronicles her story after she sank to the authors's first twenty-two expeditions to the wreck from the recovery of the bronze Admiral Andrea Doria to the recovery of the ship's bell. Colour illustrations of the ships interiors prior to sinking and numerous underwater photographs.150 pages. Hardback

Andrea Doria: Dive to an Era

Gentile, Gary

Sports & Outdoors

Gary Gentile Productions

A shipwreck is a time capsule: a fragment of history buried in the sea, a temporary repository of the remnants of a bygone age. The wood or steel hull is a transient abode that precariously extends the life of man's handiwork only slightly beyond the date of disaster and human suffering. This does not mean that the objects contained within are granted eternal life, for the sea is ever changing, ever destroying; it means only that oft sought relics have been granted a slight reprieve from obliteration. 
 To preserve a flag one does not hang it on a pole during a full gale: it is folded and packed a way safely. One does not store precious china on an exposed mountain ridge where it is subject to rock falls, summer sun, and winter snow: it is kept in a glass case under controlled conditions. An artifact must be preserved from the elements of nature, not consigned to its capriciousness; the longer it is constrained to these wild forces the less likely it is to survive intact, to be found and appreciated by future generations. 
 On July 19, 1918 such a time capsule was born. When the San Diego sank within sight of American shores, after striking a mine laid by the German U-boat U-156, she relinquished all claims to the title of warship and became instead a vast storehouse of marine equipment, naval stores, munitions, and the personal effects of over a thousand distressed sailors. She was a museum in the making; items then not worth the cost of salvage have slowly evolved into nautical antiques precious to the present-day generation. 
 The San Diego is a time machine: a shortcut to 1918, a slice of Americana. Once at war with the forces of man, she now fights a never ending battle against gradual but inevitable erosion by the chemical soup in which she is immersed. 
 To fully understand the San Diego we must travel back through the years not just to the moment of her birth, when she was christened the California, but to the time of her conception, for, although she lived in the twentieth century, she was a product of nineteenth century naval strategy. Thus begins the history of Armored Cruiser Number 6. 
 This book is copiously illustrated with a wealth of black and white historical photographs andwith numerous color underwater photographs taken by the author during his many explorations ofthe vast interior.

U.S.S. San Diego: The Last Armored Cruiser

Shipwrecks of Delaware and Maryland (Gary Gentile's Popular Dive Guide Series)

Water Sports

High tech diving is not just a passing fashion, it is here to stay. Space-age spin-off underwater hardware, coupled with developing techniques and their utilization in lakes and the open ocean, is forever changing the realm of wreck diving.Shipwrecks once considered inaccessible are now visited regularly.... from inside cover.

Ultimate Wreck-Diving Guide

The Peking Papers/Novel

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

GARY GENTILE'S POPULAR DIVE GUIDE SERIES As suggested by the title and series name, this volume covers the most well-known wrecks sunk off the geographical coast of North Carolina from the Diamond Shoals north to the Virginia border. 
 For each of the wrecks covered, a statistical sidebar provides basic information such as the dates of construction and loss, previous names (if any), tonnage and dimensions, buil der and owner (at time of loss), port of registry, type of vessel and how propelled, cause of sinking, location (loran coordinates if known), and depth. In most cases, an historical photograph or illustration of the ship leads the text. Throughout the book is scattered a selection of color underwater photographs, some of the wrecks, more often of typical marine life found in the area. 
 Each volume is full of fascinating narratives of triumph and tragedy, of heroism and disgrace, of human nature at its best and its basest. These books are not about wood and steel, but about flesh and blood, for every shipwreck saga is a human story. Ships may founder, run aground, burn, collide with other vessels, or be torpedoed by a German U-boat. In every case, however, what is emphatically important is what happened to the people who became victims of casualty: how they survived, how they died. 
 Also included are descriptions of the wrecks as they appear on the bottom. At the end of each volume is a bibliography of suggested reading, and a list of more than 400 loran numbers of wrecks in and adjacent to the area covered. Wrecks covered in Shipwrecks of North Carolina: from the Diamond Shoals North are: Australia, Bedloe/Jackson, Brewster, Buarque, Byron D. Benson, Carl Gerhard, Carroll A. Deering, Chenango, Ciltvaira, City of Atlanta, Consols, Diamond Shoals, Empire Gem, Empire Thrush, Equipoise, Glanayron, Harpathian, Hesperides, Huron, Kassandra Louloudis, Kyzickes, Lancing, Liberator, Magnolia, Marore, Merak, Metropolis, Mirlo, Mormackite, New Jersey, Virginia, Norlavore, Northeastern, Norvana, Oriental, Palestro, Pocahontas, San Delfino, Strathairly, U-85, U-701, Venore, Veturia, Virginia, Wetherby, William Rockefellar, and YP-389.

Shipwrecks of North Carolina from the Diamond Shoals North (The Popular Dive Guide Series)

Travel

IRONCLAD LEGACY: BATTLES OF THE USS MONITOR ISBN 0-9621453-8-6 hardcover with color dust jacket 6 x 9 vertical, 280 pages, 43 color photos, 66 black &amp; white photos When John Ericsson conceived his "impregnable battery" he had no idea that it would still be fighting battles a hundred years after his death. In the mid nineteenth century he struggled to have his concepts approved by distinguished industrialists mired in the past. But then came the War between the States, and the battle that forever changed the way naval strategists viewed warship design and ship-to-ship engagement. The Monitor and the Virginia fought to a standstill, neither ship inflicting significant damage upon the other. By the end of that year (1862) both ironclads were gone: the Virginia was blown up by her crew to prevent capture, the Monitor foundered in a gale off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. All was quiescent for more than a century, until the Monitor's badly deteriorated remains were positively identified in 1974. Within months an impregnable barrier was placed around the wreck site: a political artifice called a National Marine Sanctuary. The Monitor's next battle became a legal contest: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) wanted the ironclad as its own private research domain, the author wanted it open to the public for whom it had been established as a sanctuary. The controversy raged for six years, until the author won vindication in a court of law. He then led an expedition to the site and took dramatic underwater photographs that captured the Monitor the way it was in 1990--the way it will never be again. The book is amply illustrated with black and white historical photographs, as well as color photographs of the wreck as it appears on the bottom.

Ironclad Legacy: Battles of the Uss Monitor

History

Americas

Wreck-diving is a discipline as different from open-water scuba as college is from kindergarten. The basic certification course introduces a non-diver to the subsurface world, and provides him with the essential knowledge and skills necessary to enable him to immerse his body in water and discover that, with artificial devices, he can still breathe. However, a check-out dive and a C-card do not prepare a person for the rigors of wreck-diving. 
 Most certifying agencies offer specialty courses designed to present the entry level diver with new challenges, encouraging him to improve his proficiency under controlled supervision. This step-by-step approach is good because it ensures that a diver does not get in over his head, so to speak, by taking on more than he can handle. What the beginner sometimes fails to realize is that dives conducted in different environments and under a variety of conditions require an intimate understanding of himself and his limitations, and of the water into which he is about to plunge: the ocean is more than a pool with a larger circumference. By increasing his skills incrementally and by gaining a gradual appreciation for the deep, a diver can achieve his full potential safer and more rapidly. 
 This book is a primer for one particular and very captivating activity: diving on shipwrecks. It proposes to offer practical information, as opposed to theoretical or mathematical; that is, how to conduct dives on sunken ships, not what happens to the body under pressure. Furthermore, it intends to address the grimmer realities that are often overlooked: entanglement, equipment flooding, seasickness, and getting lost at sea, to name a few. To a certain extent, these unfortunate events are overemphasized in order to make up for the fact that they are se ldom addressed in class or in popular publications: they make uncomfortable enlightenment at best. My intention is not to scare anyone off, but to acquaint people with worst case scenarios that may never occur, and to impart information that is otherwise unobtainable. 
 The topics covered include equipment modification, thermal protection, access to sites, current and surge, wreck orientation and navigation, night diving, photography, pharmacology, and a riveting rivet by rivet account of how shipwrecks got the way they are and why they look the way they do. 
 The text is extensively illustrated with color photographs from the author's collection; eight illustrations demonstrate the evolution of shipwreck collapse, from an intact hull to a field of debris.

Primary Wreck-Diving Guide

Wreck Diving Adventures

THE TECHNICAL DIVING HANDBOOK ISBN 1-883056-05-5 color softcover with lay-flat binding, large format 8 1/2 x 11 192 pages, 125 color photos, 12 tables, 12 equations, fully indexed. The Ultimate Wreck-Diving Guide was the seminal book on technical diving: the primogenitor of its kind. It was written at a time when nitrox, accelerated decompression, helium mixes, rebreathers, and other emerging techniques and technologies were yet in their infancy. The publication of the original volume propelled deep diving into far deeper realms of the dark abyss. Evolution became revolution. Almost overnight the concepts of "high tech" and "extended range" diving entered the forefront of human consciousness. The rite of passage is over. Technical diving has come of age. Underwater explorers can now share the benefits of space-age spin-off hardware and developing decompression methodologies. The Technical Diving Handbook is a practical guide for extended range divers: a soup to nuts volume that discusses in detail every facet of this exciting and challenging underwater activity. The current edition incorporates recent innovations that were unobtainable until only a few years ago, and in some cases were nonexistent when its predecessor first saw print. Acquaint yourself now with such new and exciting devices as the programmable nitrox wrist decompression computer, the personal computer interface, the hoseless pressure gauge, the heads-up display, the full-face mask which permits regulator switching, decompression software for laptops, the submersible electric heating pad, and more. Also included in this handbook are tips for blending nitrox, heliair, heliox, and trimix; instructions on how to build in-water oxygen decompression stations; the procedures and the chemicals needed to clean tanks, valves, and regulators for oxygen service; and a complete chapter on how to plan and execute expedition style mixed-gas diving operations.

The Technical Diving Handbook

Science & Math

Technology

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Books by Gary Gentile Productions