Chatting by email with Tim Ecott recently. Tim’s the author of Neutral Buoyancy, a widely acclaimed book that manages to capture the joy of scuba diving for divers and non-divers alike. Neutral Buoyancy intersperses personal anecdotes of memorable dives with fascinating excursions into diving’s weird and wonderful history, producing a unique mix of memoir and research that gives an inspiring overview of what lies beneath the water and how learning to dive opens up whole new worlds.
I interviewed Tim in early 2004 about Neutral Buoyancy; now the book’s gone into its 10th impression, having sold over 50,000 copies in the UK alone alongside translations in several other languages and still steadily moving off the shelves. It’s a gratifying success for a supposedly “niche” topic, but a lot of that is down to its sheer readability and the intelligence of its prose. In the same way that I’ve read every book of Jon Krakauer’s but never intend to even think about attempting mountain climbing, so Neutral Buoyancy divulges the fascination of the underwater world without readers having to get their feet wet. Even so, it’s loved by hardcore divers too. As Tim said in his email, “numerous people say they re-read NB when they are depressed about not being able to dive in the near future and that’s a big complement, after all, how many books get re-read? And quite a few people come up to me at dive shows and say how NB inspired them to take up diving – often in a blokey way they’ll say ‘you’re to blame for this expensive habit’ or some such expression to hide their embarassment.”
Since publishing Neutral Buoyancy, Tim also turned his hand to scriptwriting for the BBC ocean film Deep Blue, which was essentially a movie remix of the BBC’s spectacular Blue Planet documentary series but contained a fair bit of new footage and a new music score to boot.
He currently has tentative research into a new project about sharks and dolphins on the go, but it could be a while before it sees the light of day due to his other ongoing commitments. Here’s hoping Tim gets to share his passion about being underwater in another book before too long.
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