Saturday, June 03, 2006
Prelude to Waterman
Pursuing information on the steamer John Duncan and other vessels associated with my great-grandfather got me to thinking how I got involved in this on and off again obsession with shipwreck research over the last quarter of a century and how I became a waterman.
Nothing in my background, other than always watching Sea Hunt reruns or never missing an Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau special on TV, would have forecast my interest in this area. As a kid, like most a my friends in the 60’s, I was fascinated by space flight and aviation and any interest I had in ships was strictly as a means of recovering space capsules or launching combat aircraft. As a young teen, aviation cadet activities consumed most of my free time, what little was left after school and work. But during my 15th year, on Saturday mornings after the weekly ritual of paying the bill for the evening newspapers I delivered I would ride my bike out to the nearby airport. For the next few hours, the owner of a B-25 undergoing restoration would allow me to remove the access panels and other grunt work that none of the adults wanted to do like gunking the fuselage to remove the streaks of oil that seemed to stream from the exhaust of the airplane’s radial engines. I was in heaven until I had to return home to deliver the papers paid for that morning.
A move to California a year later brought me into constant contact with the ocean. At first the relationship was tentative. I would go snorkeling with high school friends at a nearby beach using cheap masks and fins purchased from the sporting goods section of Two Guys department store. Most of the time, we ended up wrestling in the surf until we were tired and cold. Our other activities were not especially ocean-oriented. I don’t recall any of us being surfers and boogie boards were still a novelty from Australia. We were all airplane nuts and members of the teen aviation cadet program organized by the Air Force. Our beach activities were just part of the normal adventures that then rural coastal California offered action-oriented boys which included hiking, target shooting, bike riding, swimming, beach volleyball and other sports. Years of occasional contact with the water led to windsurfing, sailing and eventually scuba diving. All this time a tug of war for my soul was waged between the sea and the sky, and the sea eventually prevailed.
While I continued to snorkel, scuba was something I wanted to try just so I could say I had done it. Once certified, I did not anticipate doing it again. I signed up for lessons at the local university immediately following a mid-spring ascent of Mount Whitney. I figured after standing on the highest point in the lower 48, it was time to go under the water and really see what I could beyond the limits of my breath-hold diving. My initial training did not go as smoothly as I would have liked. I was really out of my element underwater, which 1,000 dives later seems quite laughable. But, I had real concerns as to whether or not my instructor, Dave Rowell, would certify me at the end of the class. To my relief, on a fine July day in 1984 at Anacapa Island I earned my basic “I’m a diver” card. At this point in my life, I was at the intersection of Aviation and Ocean and turned right onto Ocean.
Nothing in my background, other than always watching Sea Hunt reruns or never missing an Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau special on TV, would have forecast my interest in this area. As a kid, like most a my friends in the 60’s, I was fascinated by space flight and aviation and any interest I had in ships was strictly as a means of recovering space capsules or launching combat aircraft. As a young teen, aviation cadet activities consumed most of my free time, what little was left after school and work. But during my 15th year, on Saturday mornings after the weekly ritual of paying the bill for the evening newspapers I delivered I would ride my bike out to the nearby airport. For the next few hours, the owner of a B-25 undergoing restoration would allow me to remove the access panels and other grunt work that none of the adults wanted to do like gunking the fuselage to remove the streaks of oil that seemed to stream from the exhaust of the airplane’s radial engines. I was in heaven until I had to return home to deliver the papers paid for that morning.
A move to California a year later brought me into constant contact with the ocean. At first the relationship was tentative. I would go snorkeling with high school friends at a nearby beach using cheap masks and fins purchased from the sporting goods section of Two Guys department store. Most of the time, we ended up wrestling in the surf until we were tired and cold. Our other activities were not especially ocean-oriented. I don’t recall any of us being surfers and boogie boards were still a novelty from Australia. We were all airplane nuts and members of the teen aviation cadet program organized by the Air Force. Our beach activities were just part of the normal adventures that then rural coastal California offered action-oriented boys which included hiking, target shooting, bike riding, swimming, beach volleyball and other sports. Years of occasional contact with the water led to windsurfing, sailing and eventually scuba diving. All this time a tug of war for my soul was waged between the sea and the sky, and the sea eventually prevailed.
While I continued to snorkel, scuba was something I wanted to try just so I could say I had done it. Once certified, I did not anticipate doing it again. I signed up for lessons at the local university immediately following a mid-spring ascent of Mount Whitney. I figured after standing on the highest point in the lower 48, it was time to go under the water and really see what I could beyond the limits of my breath-hold diving. My initial training did not go as smoothly as I would have liked. I was really out of my element underwater, which 1,000 dives later seems quite laughable. But, I had real concerns as to whether or not my instructor, Dave Rowell, would certify me at the end of the class. To my relief, on a fine July day in 1984 at Anacapa Island I earned my basic “I’m a diver” card. At this point in my life, I was at the intersection of Aviation and Ocean and turned right onto Ocean.
# posted by covediver @ 12:02 AM 
