The gripping biography of a man who spent over 10,000 hours underwater, built diving boats and an underwater house, recovered buried treasures from wells and seas, and explored the coelacanth and other fascinating life forms: Hans Fricke's book is an adventurous diving story, a lively research report, an eco-thriller - and a poetic declaration of love to the underwater world.
His whole life, Hans Fricke has been an obsessive marine researcher and diver – undeterred even by the death of a friend while diving. As an 11-year-old in the GDR, he cobbles together his own diving gear out of fire extinguishers and a gas mask. Later, he flees East Germany to go diving in the Red Sea, making his way to Egypt on a bike.
As a student of Konrad Lorenz, the founder of behavioral research, Fricke literally slips into the scaly skin of fish, explores reefs, coelacanths, the mysterious migration of eels and the organisms on Iceland’s underwater volcanoes. But, in the course of his life, Fricke also becomes
• a rescuer, fishing downed airplanes from the water
• a historian, who gets to the bottom of the Nazi’s biggest counterfeiting operation on Lake Toplitz
• a treasure hunter, diving in the world’s deepest well
• and the first person to venture into the perma-dark of the Alpine lakes with a submarine.
Having closely observed many of his areas of research over decades, he has become one of the most important documentarians of marine ecology
