Sure. I am an SDI instructor based in Virginia and the East coast is my underwater home.
My interest in diving began in the year 2003. As a TV journalist, I was covering a shipping accident and an oil spill and the story required underwater video. My inability to obtain that led me to pursue an Open Water diving certification. After getting certified, I tried to operate a camera and struggled. I needed to flap my hands to maintain buoyancy and could not commit them to holding a camera. Poor buoyancy and camera in the hand was like a bird attempting to fly with one wing. A total fiasco!
Then I discovered scubaboard and a guru on here said “why don’t you try back-plate and wing?” So I ordered myself an Oxycheq wing and a plate and took my first serious buoyancy class in it. It was an eye-opening experience. After that, I pursued DIR style training which emphasized stability and precision underwater as I needed that to hold the camera still.
In 2008, convinced that I could hold a camera without killing myself, I embarked on producing an under documentary. My film on American shipwrecks got picked up by a big overseas TV channel and became such a huge hit in its target market that the audience wanted more episodes. My employer ended up funding four of those episodes and my very first diving documentary became an episodic series. The series then won a gold medal from the US government and within a few months, I had gone from the guy who could not hold a camera still, to a gold medal winning documentary film-maker!
I went on to produce more underwater content from lost cities and submerged towns to wrecks, cold water marine life and what not. As a journalist and a documentary filmmaker, I learnt one thing early on. Ships do not sink where we want them to sink. In order to get the story, I had to dive deep and cold, and sometimes in limited vis. Thus, I got into drysuit and technical diving because the content that I wanted to pursue would often be outside the domain of tropical recreational diving.
Newly certified divers were often excited and curious about the work that I did. They wanted to come and join these TV projects with me and many of them did. But when I looked at them, I often saw the earlier me. I saw the version of me who needed to flap his hands to stay afloat. By this time the GoPro revolution had already happened and broadcast quality video capabilities were now in the hands of almost everyone. Yet very few newly certified divers knew how to use the video that they were shooting and turn it into a documentary. “I never turn the camera off. I just let it record the whole dive!” or “I like to wear my camera on my helmet” would be a very common thing I would hear on dive boats.
Tens of thousands of divers out there with sophisticated technology in the size of a matchbox were filming video that was much higher resolution to my gold medal winning TV series but did not know how to put it to purpose. Can you take that video and send it to the Tribeca film festival or Cannes film festival? Would it win? Maybe some environmental agency or television channel may want to acquire that for broadcast! If your purpose was to achieve that, would you be diving where you are diving or would your choice of your next diving destination be someplace else?
During the days of the pandemic lockdown, I thought to myself that if I could take all these underwater tourists and turn them into underwater journalists then many of them could actually start supplying content to TV stations. We would have so much media coverage underwater! We could produce content for film festivals, TV channels, NetFlix. The possibilities are so endless we could start our own channel called H2O or something! Television is my bread and butter and that is what I have always done for a living so I am always thinking along those lines.
I totally understand that people dive for different reasons and some people just want to look at fish and relax. But after interacting with divers, I do know that there are some of you out there who want more from your diving than the tourist experience. If you are the type who would like to research old maps for submerged towns, dive and film them, then find the people who grew up in those underwater ruins and turn that Gopro dive of yours into a short film that would hit major film festivals around the world then you are something else. Diving a wreck is nice but to research for its survivors and film what they are up to today is a totally different experience. Diving is so much fun when it is part of something bigger than the experience of the dive itself which only lasts until you surface. If any of this investigative diving strikes a chord in anyone out there, then as an instructor I would be willing to invest my time in your long term development for my own selfish reasons. The sea can not speak for itself. It has a lot of stories to tell and it relies on YOU to tell them.
So this September, “Depths Unlimited” was born. The Captain Sinbad that you all have known and interacted with on here for ages now has a business profile called “Depths Unlimited.” Many thanks to Pete and Wookie for your help in setting this up.
Have fun and dive safe!
