As with so much in life, it's about being in the right place at the right time, and the right place is rarely sitting at home, wishing. When Ben Thompson way a boy, be was swept out to sea by a freak wave. From such inauspicious beginnings was born a lifelong fascination with the deep. At fourteen he spotted a poster for a dive club in a Yorkshire chip shop. By the age of twenty-five, he was getting paid to dive the world's most exquisite coral reefs. But Ben's love affair with the sea was always fuelled by a need to escape. As much tor armchair adventurers as experienced divers, this colourful memoir traces not only the author's years as a diving professional, seeking out remote and undamaged marine ecosystems in Asia, the Caribbean and Africa, but also his journey from restlessness to a place of peace. From diving one of the world's only vertical shipwrecks to exploring Indonesia in a pirate boat, from encountering great white sharks to bonding with America's largest naked diving group, Tanked Up reveals the wonders of the underwater world and the dramas of a dive instructor's life.

Through it all, he and Vic (Ben's dive buddy and life partner) keep searching - for the perfect place to build their own dive centre, and perhaps, finally, to lay down roots. A book about diving and dreaming, serendipity and vocation, Tanked Up is the story of what happens when you let fate guide the way. Book jacket.