BOOK REVIEW
DRIVEN, BUT BY WHOM?
The Third Dive: An Investigation into the Death of Rob Stewart
by Robert Osborne
The buddy: Peter Sotis.
The victim: Rob Stewart.
I DON’T USUALLY HAVE much time for reading over Christmas but last year’s was a bit different for many of us, and one new book proved so compelling that I read it almost at one sitting.
The Third Dive by Robert Osborne wasn’t exactly festive fare. It concerns the 2017 death on a rebreather dive off the Florida Keys of shark campaigner Rob Stewart.
Stewart was one of the select few scuba-divers whose name had reached people outside the diving community.
The Canadian’s 2001 cinemareleased documentary Sharkwater was widely credited as a gamechanger in bringing the scandal of shark-finning to popular attention, winning him an almost saintly reputation in environmental circles.
I think that view can underplay the role played by thousands of lessexalted campaigners before and after Sharkwater, the success of which film Stewart had been unable to replicate, but that’s not the point. A question that is raised in this book is that while he was driven and fearless in the way he went about his work, when does “fearless” become “reckless”?