Geri Murphy

While motoring into Grand Cayman’s North Sound after a dive on Tarpon Alley in 1986, we noticed a large congregation of stingrays below us. The crystal-clear water was only 12- to 15-feet deep in the shallows, so we stopped and observed them, thinking it was unusual for so many stingrays to be in one area. We returned the next day to see if we could hand-feed the rays and photograph them. In a brief few seconds a large ray ascended from the bottom and dropped its small trap-door mouth to scoop the small baitfish Ron Kipp was holding. I pulled the trigger at that precise second and saw the strobes light the stingray’s underside. With its mouth agape and Ron’s colorful gear, I knew I had the money shot. Naturally, it was the last frame using a Nikonos film camera and 15mm lens. When I got back on the boat, I declared, “It is like Stingray City down there!” That’s what the area came to be known through the pages of Skin Diver magazine and beyond.

I don’t know what it means to be a New Jersey wreck diver, but I know it defined your entry into the dive world. Tell me about those days.

I was passionate about scuba diving before I ever put my head underwater. I watched every episode of Sea Hunt and bought a scuba tank with my first paycheck. We lived outside of Philadelphia, but my grandparents had a house on the beach in Ocean City, New Jersey, where I’d pretend I was Mike Nelson and try unsuccessfully to breathe air underwater through a garden hose. 

I wanted to start diving while in grade school but had to wait because I needed the car keys to get to the YMCA. Once I was old enough to drive, I was all in. By 1968 I was a certified diver and a member of two Pennsylvania dive clubs — scuba was my life. I became a YMCA instructor in 1969 and received NAUI and PADI instructor certifications in 1970. 

There were no dive boats back then. The fishing boat captains knew where the wrecks were, so we chartered their boats to go diving. I spent eight years exploring shipwrecks off the East Coast, logging 250 dives on 35 different wrecks. The water was cold, and in 1968 our gear was rather crude. We’d wear 3/8-inch wetsuits and weight ourselves so that with the suit compression we’d be buoyancy neutral at 90 feet: 15 pounds was the average, which of course meant we’d bob like a cork at the surface. 

To compensate, we all used a deco upreel. We’d tie off to the wreck and pay out line as we ascended, so when we were at our 15-foot decompression stop we were tethered to the bottom to hold us in place long enough to offgas. Without this method, ascents would be out of control. 

The high point of those experiences was when I discovered and raised a bronze engine telegraph by myself from the wreck of the Varanger, resting in 140 feet of water 28 miles off the Jersey Shore.

I’m a warmwater diver, so that sounds pretty extreme.

I guess so. We had to be very self-reliant to survive. When it comes to New Jersey wreck diving, you have three choices: get very good very quickly, quit, or die. Not dying was not making a living, so after high school I went to business school for one year and then went to work for General Electric’s Space Division as an executive secretary. I was very good at what I did, which allowed me some latitude to take time off and go scuba diving. 

By the end of 1970 the Beach Boys were big, and California beckoned. With $100 in my pocket, I drove across the country to San Francisco. When I arrived I went to a phone booth, flipped through the Yellow Pages, and fed dimes into the slot until I had a job. I had office skills and dive skills, so I called Bamboo Reef, a dive shop Al Giddings owned. I got lucky and had a job there for four months while their secretary was out on maternity leave. 

In 1973 I crossed paths with Giddings again in Bonaire. I had heard through the island grapevine that Cornel Wilde was going to shoot a movie there, so I snagged a job as assistant dive coordinator and safety diver for Sharks’ Treasure. Giddings was the underwater cinematographer, and he got to know me then as a diver to a greater extent than as a secretary. 

By 1975 I was in Bonaire full time as the first female scuba instructor and underwater photography professional for Captain Don Stewart. During my first week on the job, Paul Tzimoulis, the publisher of Skin Diver, came to do a story. It was love at first sight for both of us, from the day we met until the day he died. I quickly learned to be his dive model, which was good experience for me as a photographer to later direct dive models. 

In the late 1970s a dive shop in Cairns, Australia, offered a one-day trip to the famous Cod Hole dive site on the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef via seaplane as an alternative to the long liveaboard trips. The 150-mile flight at an altitude of 350 feet allowed us to reach the site in 2.5 hours instead of spending a full day traveling there via liveaboard.