MOSSBACK DIVER

I'm on the left.

"Everyone is the hero of his own story" so here goes. I am one of the lucky ones. Far from "living my life in quiet desperation", I have been fortunate to have for the most part had a ball. Here is the short version of my story directed to my water activities, mostly diving, with a few asides that "explain the man". For a view of my other world of fun click on this link.

GROWING OLDER IS MANDATORY.
GROWING UP IS OPTIONAL
LAUGHING AT YOURSELF IS THERAPEUTIC

Born in 42. I was raised in Virginia Beach, Virginia during the end of World War Two. I remember black out curtains to help keep the German U Boats from being able to target our ships. Some they did get became our favorite dive sites later on. It was not the big sprawling Virginia Beach of today but the 8 or so block wide strip of land facing the Atlantic Ocean on the East along Atlantic Avenue, Linkhorn Bay on the west, Chesapeake Bay on the north, and Rudee Inlet on the south. I was surrounded by water. Mom was a beach nut, playing bridge with her friends on the beach at 22nd street, a half block from the house while we little ones played in the surf. My Dad was a compulsive/obsessive surf caster. He could throw a Hopkins #4 over 100 yards with an open faces reel, not a spinning reel. As part of the Virginia Beach Surfcasting Team, they seemed to keep the Ocean City Cup. Those days started an early love of water as I learned to swim before I was four and would not stay out of the water.

After the war, my maternal grandmother married her 4th of 5 husbands. His name was J. T. and he was a character. He had a motorcycle with a side car, was a frogman in the war, and acted as if he was a real grandfather. Mom just cringed when she heard that motorcycle coming down our street. J. T. was not her favorite person. She saw in him things that I missed. I had started using mask and fins by age 7 and JT put me on a 38 cubic foot tank and regulator when I was 9. He finished the creation of a monster. I was hooked for life.

We moved 8 blocks away from the ocean in '46 onto the shores of Linkhorn Bay and I got a boat to pole around the bay in. When I was 11 Dad bought the first fiberglass boat in Tidewater Virginia. It was a blue 14 foot boat that should have been named freedom. A friend of his just got a dealership and we got the first boat. Dad helped me buy a 25 horse power motor on credit. From the age of 12 on, the only boundary was the amount of gas I could buy or scrounge for my new motor.. If my focus had been on water before, it was now almost complete. While other kids thought about cars, I could care less. I also had another diving outlet.

My Grandfather on Dad's side had retired to Buxton on Hatteras Island and I could visit him on an old beach buggy or a long bus ride. He would surfcast and I would free and scubadive around the wrecks in the surf. The only reason I survived I am sure is that the water was not over 35 feet for any of those dives and usually less than 30. I knew not to hold my breath (cause the one page sheet of instructions from US Divers said not to) and I was a damned good swimmer.

The summer I became 13 I had a summer job as a life guard (not assistant...I'm the one on the right sucking it in for all it is worth. Wilmont is on the left...he had the block to the south of me) for a block at the Beach. Mine was one of those stretches of Beach that they had to cover for contract reasons but never made any money renting umbrellas, chairs, and floats. It lost money for Captain Smith. I averaged less than two swimmers a day all summer. The hotel I was in front of catered to golfers and really old ones at that. I swam, surfed, sat, met girls walking down the beach, and collected 15 dollars a week watching the dolphins swim by twice a day on their rounds. I was big stuff.

By the time I was a 15 and could drive, I had been diving 6 years and was one of the two civilian scuba divers in Virginia Beach. Getting compressed air was a problem unless you wanted to drive to Norfolk and pay $5.00 for a download. It was solved by going out to UDT 21 at the Little Creek Amphib Base and bumming fills. As long as there were no officers around, there was no problem. I would go out with a trunk full of tanks made from fire extinguishers and CO2 bottles and the guys would fill them up. I guess I was a novelty being a kid who dove...especially JT's "Grandson".

My first semi tropical dive was during Christmas when I was 15. Mom and I drove down to Fort Lauderdale and Dad followed on the train. One the way down, we stopped at numerous beaches where Mom sat on the beach knitting while I paddled around an inshore reef. I was in hogfish heaven. Had she known how dangerous diving could be, I would never be allowed in the water with that gear. I was astounded, you could get air anywhere and at one place fills were only 50 cents. That was cheap in 1957.

When Dad arrived my big day came. A fifteen year old can be in the way of adults so it wasn't difficult to convince them to allow me to go on a four day dive charter to Bimini. Desperate for money the dive operation agreed to take me along. Mom and Dad were free to party on with friends while I was in the hands of professionals. They dropped me off at the boat and introduced me to the divemasters. Boy were they in trouble. A 15 year old kid with 6 years of diving experience and a mouth to match. I'm surprised I made it to Bimini alive.

A busy Bimini Street
in December of 1957

My first dive in Bimini is still burned into my brain. We had arrived off the shore and I could see the bottom from the boat. Surely tired of my yakking about my freediving and the wrecks at Hatteras, one of the divers handed me a bag and asked me to freedive down and get some of the numerous conchs on the bottom. I flipped over the side, jacknifed and headed down. Seemed to clear my ears more often than normal but made it to the bottom and surfaced with five or six conchs in the bag. I wasn't used to that visibility and if I could see it, I could swim down to it. When I handed it up, the guy reaching for it had eyes as big as saucers. All of them were looking over the side at me. The water was 70 feet deep. The boat was very quiet. Their little joke on the mouthy kid backfired since none of them could have made that dive. As I said, freediving skills make diving a lot easier. Of course in those days, we knew nothing about shallow water blackout.

I remember my first salvage job that summer. I got called up to retrieve an outboard motor that had been dropped. I told the man I would charge five dollars to find and get it. He said he knew exactly where he dropped it. He took me to the spot and I slipped overboard with a search rope. I came upon the motor sticking out of the muck at the bottom of the bay almost instantly and brought it up with a big smile. He said that was too easy for five dollars and was not going to pay me. Those were dollar an hour days so 5 bucks was big money for a high school kid. Upset, I threw the motor back overboard and started to jump in and swim to shore. He capitulated and gave me ten dollars to get it back up. Guess he wanted that 75 dollar motor. Afterward Dad gave me some fatherly advice. If you are doing something someone else cannot do and charge for it, make it look hard not easy. Give him his monies worth. Make bubbles for a while and when you bring it up, act exhausted. It was a great lesson. I never had someone complain again and I raised my rates to 10 dollars a dive. That was big bucks. I was ready for the bigtime. It just never came. Just a long list of small jobs retrieving motors and the occasional shotgun during duck hunting season. While my dad has always been supportive, he never showed an interest in diving. Only once did dad go snorkeling with me.

Sometime around 1959 Carl Johnson wandered into my life. Carl was an excellent diver and usually able to go. Carl had a set of double 38 cubic feet tanks and a double hose regulator. He also had a calypso camera....the first one I ever saw. We had a lot of fun camping on the beaches in front of shipwrecks and shore diving. What we lacked in money, we made up for with our desire to get into the water. Sometimes other divers would show up with unexpected results. Carl and I did a lot of diving and spearfishing along the coast of Virginia and North Carolina through 1972 when I lost track of him. Here he is with a pneumatic speargun on a wreck at Nags Head.

As you advance in teenage years, horizons expand. At 17 I entered VPI (Va Tech) as a chemical engineering major. I was there off and on for 10 years. They chucked me out three times but I always returned. During that period I met a number of great guys, we started the dive club, and made annual spring trips to Ft. Lauderdale to dive in warm semitropical water instead of the icewater in nearby mountain lake. In my freshman year an upperclassman knocked on my door and introduced himself in his direct way as we braced. "Hi, I'm Bill Weatherford, at ease, are you Tom Rose the diver from Va Beach? We relaxed and I confirmed his suspicions. Bill was from Blackstone, Virginia, a sleepy little town with two Dairy Queens and one stoplight on a gravel side road somewhere between VPI and Virginia Beach.

Without even breaking pace, he informed me that he wanted to learn to dive if I would teach him. He took to diving like a duck to water. Today he is an instructor. It was the beginning of a lifetime friendship and some fantastic experiences. The picture above is of Bill helping a "friend" out of a wetsuit at Nags Head. I told you he was a nice guy.

During this period we would go into any water we could find. One of the special places was Mountain Lake just west of Blacksburg. During the winter we went icediving. Some of the guys who braved the cold were Steve Skolochenko and Jim Fortune.

One of those early 60's springs got me out of Blacksburg to Nags Head at University expense. A casual remark in a fish identification class and my usual big mouth set the stage for a fish capturing expedition .

The summer of 63 was fantastic. Bill Weatherford had graduated from Tech and was waiting to go to Nam. He spent the summer living on our porch and working for my dad at the restaurant. Bill and I spent every available minute diving at Nags Head on the many shipwrecks near the shore. At the end of the summer we took a three week dive/camping trip to Florida and the Bahamas. This shot is our camping and diving rig parked in Boca Raton. Today there are condos in that spot. (This by the way was our favorite camping ground during college spring breaks where the Va Tech Dive Club would live while we chased fish during the day and girls in nearby Fort Lauderdale at night) We went with another character named Joe Zukowoski. Joe was in the Navy stationed at Dam Neck. I think he was from Pennsylvania. He should be around 60 now. If you run into him send him to this site. The next picture is of me coming aboard the day cruiser to Bimini. You can see my 8mm underwater camera housing hanging in my right hand. We went over for a few days, had some fun diving, learned about scorpions, sailboats, and sailing against the current on an old boat.

I returned to VPI in January of '64 for my third attempt. I met my wife Patti that winter. I cannot say it was love at first sight...she hated me. Guess she eventually got over it. I only think she was attracted to the VPI uniform. Some of us need all the help we can get. Luckily for me, she got over it and finally decided I was minimally acceptable.

In the summer of 64 I met Surfy, the California Sea Lion, my best ever freediving partner. Bill Weatherford was slogging through the jungles of Viet Nam. Surfy gets his own page.

In 1965 I flunked out of college again...it was the third time....I was told by the Dean in no uncertain terms that there was no place for me at VPI. He made some really stupid suggestions about what I should do with my worthless life. I am afraid that I told him what he could do with his desk and the building.... I turned my back on college and headed home to Virginia Beach.

That fall I headed out for several years of diving in the Caribbean islands and around South America. The stories from those years will eventually be written. Then again, it might be better that they are never told.

In Spring of 67 Patti found me in Fort Lauderdale Florida at the end of my quest and brought me back to reality and the real world. Married Patti my current and only wife in September of '67 and where did we go on our Honeymoon but St. Thomas....I had lived there in late /65....

From the fall of '67 through the fall of '70 were some great years. Patti was gainfully employed, I ran the bar at my Dads restaurant, trained dolphins, and taught school during the winter. In the summer I would drop Patti off at work on the way to Nags Head for some spearfishing and on weekends we would go out diving together or with a number of buddies. Some of those trips did not work out so well.. No rent thanks to a doting grandmother, no dependents except for a great little dog, a sports car for her ---a voltswagon for me, and more expendable income that we deserved allowing us to ski all winter and dive and play all summer. We did not save a penny but damn we had fun.

In the fall of '69 I returned to college under pressure from everyone around me. In '70 I graduated on the Deans List...amazing what a few years of maturity will do. No plans, pregnant wife and needing a job.

In September I got a job that lasted three years in Richmond with the State of Virginia in Air Pollution Control. It started me on a great lifes work that has taken me all over.

I bite the bullet and get certified

While I could get air where ever I was known, getting air in a strange place was getting tougher. I was also an embarrassment to the local dive shops being the most experienced diver around and not certified. They offered me a deal I could not refuse. Sit though the classes and help with the water work and I could have a certificate for the filing fee of $5.00. I took them up and became certified PADI, NAUI, and YMCA for $15. It was kinda funny cause only one of the instructors had even a small part of the diving experience I had although they were much older than me. The NAUI instructor had not even been in salt water. One high spot was that Bill Weatherford lived in Richmond and reconnecting with him was one of lifes great pleasures. (It now being the fall of 2002, Bill and I were hashing out old times on our way to the quarry to start his rebreather lessons, when I learned that he certified under the same deal that I did. Bill is now an instructor in just about every scuba skill as well as being a trimix deep diver.)

Janie was born and joined me underwater within 5 months.These were the lean years in terms of diving. One small salary, a little apartment, with an red ammo box in front of the sofa. I was over two hours from salt water and could not just run off every weekend leaving my wife and child behind. Yes lean, but not total diving starvation.For the most part, my diving was limited to an occasional trip to Nags Head, Virginia Beach, and the rivers of Virginia.


Some of the diving was in 90 feet of water in Chesapeake Bay with 10 inches of visibility.



We followed the anchor line down, hooked up our "Safeline Reel", and crawled across the wreck, crowbars ready, looking for artifacts with Iklite Super Lights as the stinging nettles (jellyfish) washed by in the current. Sometimes we would find something neat. On one trip I found the engine telegraph. I kept the pointer.

Life was still fun with bike trips, volleyball in the afternoon, Harvey Wallbangers and good times. After three years I had worn out my welcome with the State and we moved to EPA in Athens Georgia. It was even further from the ocean and civilization. I got in some diving with the local dive club and managed to find time over a number of weekends to get to Florida. Nothing big time though.

Talked much more diving than I did. After 5 1/2 years, I "graduated" from EPA and went into business in Raleigh, NC. ...nearer the ocean, more income, and more diving opportunities. It was then that I became aware of cost effectiveness of diving in the islands rather than a weekend trip to the beach.

Beach Trip
Time to beach 2 to 5 hours. Total transit 4 to 10 hours.
Boat trip 1 to 2 hours each way.
Dives four at best....less than 3 hours in the water...
Charter cost...about $100 dollars for two days (this was 20 years ago)
Hotel nights 2
Meals 7
Possibility of a blowout....30% or higher.

Island trip
One day down and back 16 hours
Motel 6 nights
Cost for two tank dive 25 to 35 dollars
Shore diving free
Meals 18
Warm clear water.....

It wasn't hard to figure out that the cost per dive hour was much less with the longer trip. The family costs were lower too. Instead of being away for a lot of weekends, I would be gone just two and be available for important family stuff much more. I just about quit diving the North Carolina coast.

Except for a couple of bumps in the early 80's, the business continued to prosper over the years.

Many of my diving adventures and misadventures can be found on the pages reached from DIVE TRIPS & STORIES. .

The years rolled by with many adventures and the standard diversions from diving such as soccer, chess tournaments, summer riding camp as well as some occasional good diving. My profession started taking me all over the world from Siberia in the winter to Caracas in the fall.

In 90 my wife found about a little resort in Honduras named CoCo View. I had just returned from Cosumel when she said, "I think I have found the perfect diving spot for you."
Every married man knows that when a wife makes that sort of suggestion (however wrong cause how can "she" be that tuned to my diving), he had better check it out. She will ask the follow up question later and you had better have an answer. I checked it out and took my first trip in January '91.

I now have spent hundreds of hours underwater on those reefs since her discovery.

Our son Patrick joined me scuba diving when he was 9. I set him up with his own diving gear. The BC for his little skinny body was a modified snorkle vest. At 12 he certified and went with me to Honduras that summer having a ball. Each summer we would take a tropical trip. Janie was focusing her time in the summer on going to riding camp. She finally got over horses and certified in 99 and started joining me diving.

As the kids got older, I noticed that I did to. It was sometimes a shock to see the old guy swimming on the reef in my videos. I certainly swim slower now, and at my wifes urging spend only 4 hours or less in the water a day. I started getting involved in rebreathers as a home builder. Falling under the influence of Dr. Bob, a California Dentist and homebuilder, rebreathers have been a new outlet for me. I also rekindled my interest in pot head diving, playing with shallow water diving helmets.

I decided to semi-retire. That means that I do more work at home, delegate more, cut down the office hours (unless of course I am working on diving gear in the shop at the office) and, take more vacations with my long suffering wife (she loves cruises...even the one where we were in a Hurricane in the North Atlantic for three days) and of course diving trips.

In 2004 two events came together that opened up the world. I hit a million miles on Delta becoming silver elite for life and Delta and Continental (the gateway to the Pacific Islands) joined frequent flyer miles. I had over half a million miles in the bank.........

Writing these trips up brings back floods of memories of happy times.