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