Dive Master

When & How did you start diving:

When I was about 10 years old I remember watching the amazing underwater world of Jacques Cousteau and snorkeling off the coast of Corsica in the Mediterranean.  I had a borrowed rubber facemask, a snorkel with a ping pong ball in one end and perished full heel fins.

I’d stay in the water until my skin looked like a prune and drift over the most amazing scenery in a bay festooned with wrecks and archeology.  My mother would be frantic looking for me and eventually send someone out to ‘rescue’ me. I never wanted to go back to shore and longed for the time that I could breathe underwater with an aqualung.

Alas my swimming skills were not strong enough to be accepted into training by the BSAC back in my home town in England.  In the early 1970s you needed to be a very strong swimmer indeed to enter into the dizzy heights of SCUBA diving. How things have changed! Now SCUBA is practically for everyone and so long as you can swim a little, with the right attitude and teacher of course you are sure to get through. Given my early knock back it was over 10 years before I would realize my dream and I did that on a resort dive on the great barrier reef. I was so smitten that having paid for one dive, I immediately signed up to do another. I even saw a shark! So beautiful.

When did you Go Pro:

I eventually bit the bullet and took my Dive Master Certification at Perth SCUBA in 2008. Coming to the profession as a mature student gave me a different perspective on the business and the growing importance of the baby boomer market. Being older, I really appreciate first class service and don’t accept second best. I don’t expect my divers to either.

Diving locations outside of Australia:

I have been fortunate to dive in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean (Rottnest several hundred times – that’s overseas isn’t it?), Christmas Island, Vanuatu (Effate and Espirito Santo), the Philippines and will soon be diving in the Solomon’s, Borneo and the Galapagos Islands.

Favourite Dive sites in WA:

You can’t go past Rottnest and the Blue Caves off the West End. It’s a beautiful dive in the right conditions and if you are lucky, you’ll find a school of Grey Nurse sharks, lobsters, turtles and in October 2010 we even encountered a sunfish – extremely rare.

Best Ever Dive:

That’s a really hard one. I think that the best ever dive was a toss-up between Ras Mohamed National Park in the Red Sea and Marjorie Cave at Rottnest which was a father’s day dive with my son Jack in September 2010.

Worst Ever Dive:

The worst dive was actually a fantastic dive but being swept away in a strong surface current was a poor finale. Fortunately we did everything right from a safety perspective and are still here to tell the tale.

Why You Love Diving:

I am an ephemeral weightless visitor in a world where there are aliens and creatures beyond your imagination.  I capture glimpses of the amazing underwater world first shown to me by Jacques Cousteau and as a PADI Divemaster I get to share that passion with Divers young and old. Come and join me one day soon!