Welcome to EagleRayVideo.com
My personal web site were I post my scuba photos and videos
A little about myself
I started dreaming about becoming a scuba diver as
a small child after watching a TV series
called Sea
Hunt with Lloyd
Bridges. Most of you will not recognize that name because the TV program
was first seen in black and white on a round TV screen in the middle and
late 50s (that 1950s). Take a look at the equipment. That was state of
the art for the time. I tried to get my parents to allow me to take up
scuba but they were against it. After all I was just a kid and back then scuba diving was
considered a very dangerous sport. It was not until I was 16 that my
dad, believing that I was to lazy to work for it, told me that if I got a job
and earned my own money to pay for the certification and buy all the
equipment, I could take up scuba diving. In 1966 I determined that I would need
$750 to pay for everything. Keep in mind that you could buy a top of the
line car for $3,000- $4,000 so $750 was a lot of money to a 16 year old
teen. My dad then made the mistake of getting me a very hard labor
intensive job that paid very will thinking that I would give up. Three months later I
quit and started my certification class. I had purchased all the equipment,
including a tank and there was no stopping me from there. I made my
first open water
certification dive (first dive ever) in
Lake Tahoe,
Nevada in the middle of February 1967 with two feet of snow on the
ground. My first several years were spent exploring Lake Tahoe which is
the clearest and one of the deepest lakes in the USA. It is 11 miles
wide and about 22 miles long. It's bottom is around 268 feet. There were no BS's or
Dive computers back then. Lake Tahoe is up around 6,000 feet in altitude. Great
care had to be take in watching your dive time. The closest
decompression chamber was several hours away in California. To make
maters worse you had to go up and over a 9,500 foot summit and then down
to sea level to get there. The consensus was that if you got the bends, you wouldn't make it.
They now have a decompression chamber in the area.
I have always wanted to just enjoy diving and for many years remained just an open water certification. I learned that when you go on a dive trip and the operators find out how much experience you have, they may ask you to help out in looking after the novice divers. Once I held the hand of a diver, who had just completed one of those 2 hour death special training classes in a swimming pool, for the whole dive. The only thing that made the death grip she had on me tolerable was that she was really cute. Then Nytrox came along and I updated my certification to Advance with Nytrox. Divers have ask me how many dives I've made and I just look at them and say it's probably over 500 (I would really guess it's a whole lot more than that). I just never kept track. On one trip in 2007 I made 40 dives in 12 days. In my early years I use to make an average of about 117 dives a year. I've made a lot of dives. Now my dive computer keeps track for me and I just download the dive data logs after each trip.
I have grown very fond of live aboard dive boats and consider that to be the ultimate. Not the small sail boats were you are cramped for space, but the larger ones where you have room to store your gear. You wake up, have coffee, gear up and fall into the water (you are already on site). Get out, shower, eat, rest a little, gear up and fall into the water. During the shower and breakfast the boat moved to a new site. Repeat this 4-5 time a day for however many days your out and that's a live aboard dive trip. Get a boat with unlimited fresh hot and cold water (they make their own fresh water), bathroom with shower in each cabin and I ask you, what more could a diver possibly ask for.
Back in 1973 I started taking underwater photos with a simple cartridge film camera and housing system. I had been into photography sense 1967 and had my own darkroom. I am however, not a professional. Photography is just another hobby of mine. It used small flash bulbs (no strobe). Yes, I said flash bulbs. Next I purchased a 35mm dive camera with strobe, wide angle lens, micro lens and used it for many years. Now, I am into Video and I love it. To take good video you need a true video camera with a housing and not a still camera that can take video.
In diving I have two key things that I believe. The first one is in two parts and concerns a dive buddy. A good dive buddy always knows where their dive buddy is, that's a given. Even more importantly, a good dive buddy always knows, that their dive buddy knows where they are. I can't count the times I have had a dive buddy tap me on the shoulder and point to a cropping, then head over in the direction of that cropping. Then they see something else off in another direction and without letting their dive buddy know, they take off in that other direction. I hate turning around and not knowing were my dive buddy is. That puts both of us at risk. The second thing is when we come up from a dive and someone says "well I didn't see anything, that was a bad dive". I believe that there is only one bad dive. The one you don't come up from. Nothing much else to say about that.
Places I've Been Diving
Lake Tahoe - Nevada/California, Monterey - California, Ft. Lauderdale - Florida, Jamaica, Grand Cayman, Cozumel, Cancun, Bahama Islands, Great Barrier Reef off Cairns Australia, Osprey Reef off Cairns Australia, and many fresh water lakes that I refer to as mud diving.