Has anyone met one of the diving greats such as Gary Gentile?

[Walter]

Jim,

There was a kid from Miami in the mid 80's who learned to dive from a friend of mine. He was in a group of students Tom took out on our boat for his check out dives. This kid's name happened to be Mike Nelson. Mike had never heard of Sea Hunt until he started his SCUBA lessons. While misleading, my statement is true.

WWW™

 

[Puchikatt]

Natasha:

You're absolutely right...that's the guy I'm talking about!
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And my favorite Mermaid:

You & Jaaz are always there when we run into him!!! So you know what I mean that he's a cool guy.

 

[svs3]

I have on several occasions met the greatest athlete around these parts - Lance Armstrong. The two things that sets him apart from, well, really everyone I have ever known and may ever know, is his absolute dedication to and focus on being the best in the world and a level of such extreme mental toughness that maybe one percent of people know is within them and can draw upon.

Watch out Eddie.

Viva La Lance (as we say down here),

svs3

 

[Greg G.]

BetterLateThanNever:

I believe Walter is pulling our leg. Mike Nelson is a fictional character in the old Sea Hunt TV series that aired in the late 50s, early 60s. Lloyd Bridges played the part of Mike Nelson.

 

[Natasha]

Here's me with the champ
http://scubaboard.com/pics/natasha/index.html
:sunny:

 

[mr.rongilbert]

Gary Taylor punched a few of my IANTD tickets about ten years ago (mix, cavern, deep wreck...), he is a wealth of knowledge and I am glad that I was able to spend a week with him. I dont know about anyone bieng a diving "great" there are more than a few pioneers that come to mind - Gentile, Sheck, Brett Gilliam, Chatterton, Kohler (yes, Kohler) and Cousteau to name a very few. Hal Watts too - mainly because he gave me one if his first dive computers (a bend-o-matic) that he had actually been bent on!

I think that Carl Brashear is about as close to great as one can get - just because of how much heart it took to do what he did....

 

[Guba]

I met Dr. Sylvia Earle last spring and got to spend (along with quite a few other volunteer science divers) the afternoon with her. I even had her sign my dive log for the day's dives! (Though she didn't dive that day.) A truly gracious lady, and there's no question she's a "living legend". She's been named such by a very prestigous, world-class international entity but I can't remember which one at the moment.

 

[do it easy]

ooops! Wrong thread!

 

[TwoBitTxn]

Another moldy oldy thread with some long gone names in it...

 

[danvolker]

I have been most impressed by diving with Frank Hammet...he is now probably in his late 80's, but he was diving strong into his 70's. Frank was probably the first scuba diver ( or certainly one of the first few divers) in Palm Beach, and Frank is the one who found most of our reefs. He invented our present form of drift diving, by draging a milk jug, and having a boat follow him. Back in the 50's, when he heard about Gagnon and Cousteu inventing the Aqualung, Frank made his own using a CO2 tank and a regulator he created after hearing about cousteu's.
Frank has stories about divng in the 50's and 60's that would blow your mind. Back in the 80's and 90's when I dove on his boat nearly every weekend, I would hear his stories of the old days of diving....stories that would make Ernest Hemingway sit down and listen like a school kid....

....Stories of 18 foot sharks, monster jewfish, constantly diving into the unknown...
...back in a time when men were men, and fear was a lispy companion to the common man.....

....Frank was diving a steel 72 to over 300 feet deep, back in the late 60's on the wall at Grand Cayman, and would do the Hole in the Wall here in Jupiter for 25 to 30 minutes on a 72 cu ft tank, while spearfishing ( no guages back then, just a j valve( you run out--pull a valve lever, and get about 500 psi of reserve)...He would breath the tank dry, free ascend from 140 up to the surface, grab a new tank, and be back down within 15 minutes, only to repeat the whole thing again. He was clearly a rapid offgasser, much like George Irvine, or he would have been dead from DCS long ago. He was also one of the fastest swimmers I have ever dove with....Frank would lead on "Hole in the wall" dives, where he would be heading for the cave maybe 500 yards north of a drop, and even with my extreme cycling fitness, I would be absolutely maxing myself out to keep up with this old guy in his late 60's at the time. Mind blowing.

He had a Palm Beach long rifle ( speargun) he had made himself, and could shoot 30 feet out at where no fish existed, and a big grouper would swim into the spear and be killed stone dead--stuff you would have to see to believe--Frank just knew where the fish would be swimming.

I have met alot of guys who are supposed to be legends, but Frank is the guy I would put at the top of this list.
Dan Volker