Covediver's Underwater World

Asking divers over a certain age, say about 45 years old, what inspired them to take up scuba will elicit a variety of responses—“an abiding love of the ocean,” “a call to adventure”, “something I always wanted to try”, and my favorite, “my husband wanted to learn and I didn’t want him having fun without me.” These answers probably won’t be any different when posed to any other age group. Probe a little further about their earliest desire to learn, when they first thought they would like to try scuba, and the answer will inevitably come back as “oh yeah, there was this show on T.V., Sea Hunt….” Ask that question of divers just a few years younger and the answer will be “Flipper” or “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.” In the space of a decade, these three shows, actually, two shows and a series of “specials” motivated a generation to go out and get certified.

I have vague, early recollections of the Sea Hunt series. My most vivid recollection is of the episode where Mike Nelson enters an old Spanish fortress to rescue a prisoner. Yet, I probably did not see the series in its original prime-time airing. I would have been around six or seven years old when the series went off the air. My parents were pretty strict with an early bed time for the youngest kids in the family. For me, Sea Hunt would have been part of that time period between finishing homework after school and eating dinner, an hour or so when, if I wasn’t playing with friends, I would watch weekday afternoon television. Sea Hunt transformed those dreary Midwestern winter afternoons into a magic, much warmer place, where guys could submerge in the ocean wearing a bathing suit and scuba rigs. Mike Nelson came to symbolize “guy cool” to pre-teen boys.

Flash forward to 2004. Outdoor Life Network is showing reruns of the series as a summer fill-in for its weeknight line up. The first time I tune it in, I hear the theme song and the memories of my childhood come flooding back when I would drive my parents and older brothers nuts by running around the family room and basement going “blub, blub” mimicking the sound of the double hose aqualung. At the end of the summer, DVDs of all the episodes are offered on EBay. I look at the video of those shows nearly 50 years later and the first thought that comes to mind is “my, how cheesy can a show get?” Then I watch the complete episode with the same fascination that I did as a ten year old kid. It is still pretty exciting stuff when one suspends incredulity at the story line.

My first course helping as an assistant instructor more than 20 years ago was taught by an instructor who, while a few years younger, was part of the same Sea-Hunt-in-afternoon-reruns era as I. To make the point about a diver doing something out of the ordinary or totally unexpected, he would often remark, “the guy was a real Mike Nelson.” At a party after certification (these were college students we were teaching, so a party was not only expected but inevitable) one of the divers came up to me and asked “Jim, who is guy Mike Nelson? Was he a student who really screwed up a lot?” At that point, I felt very old despite less than a decade separating me from the most of the students. I explained the iconic stature of Mike Nelson (aka Lloyd Bridges) and the effect that the show Sea Hunt had on a generation of divers. I am not sure he got the point. I should probably send him a copy of the DVD so he can see what I was talking about.

Just the other day, I was talking to another diver my age about what to do in the event of a situation. I related that in addition to the strategy of “stop, think, act” I asked myself “WWMD—what would Mike do? And after cutting someone’s air hose I would correct the problem.” That elicited a laugh from the diver and a few minutes of reminiscing about some of the story lines from the show. Nice to know that some icons never fade.