WORKING AS A MATE ON DIVE BOATS for the past 22 years has allowed me to be a part of many interesting situations. When teaching scuba classes, I use one particular situation as evidence of the importance of maintaining skills through regular practice.
Being involved in a traumatic event can take a toll on everyone: dive professionals or rescue divers who perform a rescue, lay providers who help with CPR and first aid, and dive buddies or bystanders.
DAN INTRODUCED THE FIRST standardized emergency oxygen course for divers as lay providers in 1991. More people trained in oxygen delivery means that providers in dive locations worldwide need to have emergency oxygen units available. Obtaining oxygen refills, however, is an ongoing problem …
WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS, you make lemonade, as the saying goes. Such was the case for Jen Overturf. She suffered a spinal injury at her sixth thoracic vertebra from a dirt-biking accident in 2003 that left her paralyzed from the waist down. After the accident …
“Pura vida!” our dive guide, Sergio, exclaimed with a relaxed smile. Eight dive buddies, Sergio, and I just had an incredible experience: A 35-foot-long whale shark swam a few feet over our heads at one of the better-known dive sites at Cocos Island, Costa Rica. It silently came and went, seemingly carefree, like a giant spotted apparition sliding out of sight into the deep blue.
MOST PEOPLE KNOW the historical significance of D-Day, the infamous day when Allied forces landed on the shores of western Europe on June 6, 1944.
Few people, however, know the story of the men who went into these enemy waters before them. Armed with nothing but a mask, fins, and a knife …
Just before sunrise I make a cup of strong Indonesian tea and feel the familiar rush of anticipation that always builds when I dive where no one else has. From the liveaboard’s top deck I squint at a string of islands— just green dots from here — that stretch offshore from the Fakfak Regency …
IT IS MAY 1940, AND GERMANY HAS BEEN AT WAR WITH THE UNITED KINGDOM for more than eight months. Tensions are high across western Europe. It appears inevitable that Italy, under the fascist government of Benito Mussolini, will enter the war aligned with Germany. In Naples, Capt. Lorenzo Muiesan of Italy’s SS Umbria, a maritime […]
TRITON BAY, INDONESIA, was one of the last places I visited before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Looking back, part of me wishes I would have been there instead of at home when the world turned upside down and international dive travel became almost impossible. An extended sabbatical in the middle of bustling hordes of fish […]
DEAN HOLLIS, FOUNDER OF SWIM AND DIVE RETAILER DIVENTURES, grew up in Lakeland, Florida, as a third-generation Floridian. “I spent the first 22 years of my life in Florida, where I pretty much lived in the water,” …
