MY WATERBIOGRAPHY: Ocean Planet Revisited

Divers world-wide will recognise Wade Doak’s diving autobiography as universal story of the first generation of people to fly beneath the sea breathing from tanks on their backs and propelled by fins on their feet. Like first footers on the moon but more bedazzled, the first scuba divers entered a blue planet teeming with life. Freed from gravity they could soar and plunge a vertical wall of mouths in a liquid world hitherto unseen by humans. They glided through undersea archways and plumbed the darkness of submerged grottoes. The first finners found something rich and strange with every venture. They were exploring unknown life forms on a new planet. They would never be the same. OCEAN PLANETHere, Wade Doak looks back over his life to assemble a fascinating account of the influences and passions which have guided him. As readers of his previous books would expect, this autobiography is the story of one man’s relationship with the sea and its creatures.The pattern is set for the first pages – the most important time in his childhood was not really the moment when Wade learnt to walk, but the decisive day on which he began, inadvertently, to swim: ‘I put my head under to scrutinise a crab more closely and began drifting down a tide channel towards Golden Bay.’From this point the sea seems to have taken Wade in tow, and the rest of his life has been dominated, in the most felicitous way, by a vision of the earth as the Ocean Planet, where all the world shares one great sea.The first part of this book describes the early days of youthful adventure on and beneath the waves.Then he relives treasure-seeking with Kelly Tarlton, and the further development of shipwreck exploration. He charts this meetings with ‘living treasures’ in the waters of the Poor Knights Islands Marine Reserve, and includes pen portraits of favourite reef fishes. We then follow Wade and Jan Doak out in to the wider Pacific, aboard the underwater research vessel El Torito. It was his observation of life on and around the Pacific atoll of Luaniua that confirmed Wade Doak in the conviction he has held ever since – that patterns of survival in the sea and those on land are inextricably linked, so that man the land animal is also the denizen of an ocean planet.Predictably, the next phase in Wade’s life was another sea change – the return to New Zealand and the beginning of Project Interlock, a personal communication with dolphins which continues to this day.For this autobiography, the author has selected from his earlier writings, long out of print, and has linked these together to provide a comprehensive account of his career as diver, conservationist, internationally renowned marine researcher and underwater explorer.Wade Doak’s remarkable affinity with the underwater world and his well-known talent for drawing the reader into its depths have once more combined to make this book an utterly enthralling life history.Wade Doak was born in Canterbury in 1940. His first diving experiences prompted him to write The Elingamite and its Treasure in 1969. Nineteen more followed. Since South Pacific wanderings with his wife Jan and family, all divers, he has concentrated on exploring beneath New Zealand waters, observing marine life and recording it in photographs and movie. His passion extends from ocean abyss to tidal estuary and mangrove. These activities have resulted in major books: The Cliff Dwellers on marine invertebrates, Wade Doak’s World of N.Z. Fishes and four works about cetaceans.Interest in exploring the capacities of dolphins and whales has taken him around the world several times, in particular to France, Hawaii, America and Australia. Read more