- Narration: Sandsmedia issues this with the author in both chairs, writer and reader, across seven hours and fifty-eight minutes.
- Themes: Diving safety through knowledge, failure points, the psychology of a dive, an industry criticized from the inside.
- Mood: Direct, practical and quietly alarming.
- Verdict: Close to required material for certified divers, and the wrong first book for anybody who has not dived yet.
Where does a diver go once the certification card has stopped teaching anything new? Simon Pridmore has spent a whole series filling that gap, and Scuba Exceptional aims squarely at people who already know how to dive. The audiobook runs seven hours and fifty-eight minutes and organizes itself around questions rather than chapters: what makes somebody a good diver, how to swim against a current without exhausting yourself, how you can be out of air while you still have plenty to breathe, how long you should really wait between diving and flying. The copy lists a dozen such questions and promises answers to all of them, plus a good deal more.
What Simon Pridmore Delivers
Treating divers as adults sets Pridmore apart from the training-manual shelf. The copy describes the same philosophy that ran through the earlier books, safe diving through the acquisition of knowledge and skills, and the delivery arrives as cautionary tales rather than checklists. A five-star of January 2021 puts the value in unusually blunt terms, crediting his knowledge and what it calls hard-hitting non-didactic suggestions on preparing mentally and physically, practicing and executing, with saving lives the world will never hear about. That is a large claim, and the register it describes is accurate: a diver talking to divers about what goes wrong, without the liability-scrubbed vagueness of an agency manual.
Focus this time falls on experienced divers, and the book carries more technical diving content than a general reader might expect. Pridmore heads off the obvious objection inside the copy itself: technical diving sits on the same spectrum as conventional sport diving, just at a different frequency, so the concerns of one reflect the concerns of the other. In practice that holds up. A recreational diver who never intends to go near a rebreather still gains from hearing how people who plan for failure think, because the concept of failure points applies to a shore dive as readily as to a decompression schedule.
What Simon Pridmore Gets Right
Two strands lift this above the usual instructional book. The first is the psychological approach to diving, which Pridmore builds by borrowing techniques and procedures from other fields of human activity rather than recycling received wisdom from inside the sport. The second is the industry critique, and the copy is explicit that the book highlights areas where diving professionals and the industry as a whole are letting divers down. A five-star of February 2019, filed by somebody who bought it for a diving son, singles out precisely that, reporting that the author's take on the industry was what landed hardest. Criticism from inside a small industry is rare enough to justify the price by itself.
Pridmore reads it himself, and the material makes that the right call for reasons beyond authenticity. The book is assembled from cautionary tales, and the person who collected them is the person telling them, which changes the weight of a story about somebody running out of gas at depth. The demands cut the other way too. This is safety-critical procedural content, full of waiting times, thresholds and failure points that a listener cannot flip back to recheck, so the reading has to signal clearly when a number is about to matter. One thing to keep straight: the copy's praise for an easy-to-listen-to style describes the prose, not this recording, and a buyer should read that line accordingly.
Question-led structure suits the format better than most instructional nonfiction manages. Each of the dozen questions the copy lists stands on its own, so the book breaks into segments a listener can absorb between dives without losing a thread. Eight hours delivered as a series of answers travels far more easily than eight hours of continuous argument, and it means you can return to the section you actually need rather than to the point where you stopped.
Where Simon Pridmore Loses Some Ground
Sharpest limitation on this page comes from its only dissenting grade. A four-star of September 2025 calls the book very informative with lots of stories, then explains the missing star: some illustrations would be helpful, because that response was trying to picture what was being described and could not be certain the mental image matched. It comes from somebody describing the act of reading, and it applies with even more force to a listener. Diving is a spatial subject, full of equipment configurations, body positions and gas paths, and an audio file has no diagram to fall back on.
Dates on this record deserve a look. The recording is dated March 18, 2019, and two entries in the column carry dates from before it existed: a five-star of October 2018, describing a book that is well laid out and supplements the author's other titles, and a five-star of January 2019 from an experienced sports diver who valued the safety information even in the technical sections. Both are describing an earlier edition of the text, and the phrase well laid out gives it away, since layout is not a property audio has. Their grades still feed the 4.7 badge across 141 ratings.
The series field contradicts the copy outright, which is the oddest thing here. Metadata numbers this the third book of The Scuba Series, while the description's opening sentence calls it possibly the fifth and the true follow-up to the first book, Scuba Confidential. Both cannot be right, and neither version is much use to a buyer wanting to start at the beginning, since this record links to nothing else in the sequence. The copy also asks when to call DAN without ever expanding the acronym, which is fine for a certified diver and opaque to anybody else.
Who Should Pick Up Scuba Exceptional
Certified divers with hours already logged are the intended audience, and the book is honest about that from its first sentence. If you dive and have begun noticing the questions your courses never answered, this was written for you. Technical divers get the most concentrated value, though the argument that their concerns scale down to every level holds up better than it might sound. Instructors and dive professionals should listen too, since a substantial part of the book concerns what their own industry does badly and how it could be fixed.
Complete beginners should start elsewhere, because this assumes vocabulary, procedure and enough experience to recognize the situations under discussion. Anybody who wants a visual reference will be frustrated by the format, and this is a subject full of things easier to draw than to say. Divers looking for destination writing or underwater travelogue are in the wrong book entirely, since this one concerns itself with not getting hurt. Accumulated judgment from somebody who has watched the sport closely for years sits at the core of this, and for the divers it targets, very little else on the shelf is more useful.
Is this audiobook the third or the fifth book in the Scuba series?
The record disagrees with itself. The series field numbers it third in The Scuba Series, while the description's opening sentence calls it possibly the fifth and the true follow-up to Scuba Confidential. Nothing on this page links the earlier titles, so a buyer wanting to go in order will have to reconstruct the sequence elsewhere.
Does the audiobook lose anything without illustrations?
It does. Diving is a spatial subject: equipment configurations, body position, gas paths, none of which can be drawn in audio. The question-led structure limits the damage, since most of the answers are conceptual rather than mechanical, but plan on checking anything physical against a diagram afterward.
Do you need technical diving experience to get value from it?
No. The copy argues that technical diving sits on the same spectrum as sport diving, just at a different frequency, and that the concerns of one mirror the other. A recreational diver who never intends to touch a rebreather still gains from hearing how people who plan for failure think about risk.
