The story of the Doc Polson

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Divetech Cayman

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Location
Grand Cayman
Hello all,

For the past 5 years I've lived here, I've dived the wreck of the Doc Polson many times, and I've heard many different versions of the story associated with it. However like anything else, I was really curious if the story was accurate and decided to research who Doc Polson actually was. It took the Divetech team almost a year of interviewing people and gathering details, but we finally managed to piece together the story of a beloved family doctor, who came to be the first hyperbaric medical doctor in Cayman, and why he has his own shipwreck.

https://www.divetech.com/post/the-story-of-doc-polson

Hope you enjoy it. We had a lot of fun interviewing people and learning about Old Cayman.

Tony
 
Dr. Polson was the doc that ran the hyperbaric chamber in circa 1978 when I was living there. I was on his staff as a chamber attendant and as I recall he pretty much did it as a volunteer....no pay.
 
Hey buddy, thanks for all the work of putting this together and sharing for us.
 
Awesome. Great work Tony.
 
That was beautiful. Thank you.
 
Great story! thanks for sharing Tony. We had looked into his story a little ourselves while we were creating our dive and snorkel guide for the island. We had found so many conflicting spellings of his name: Polson, Poulson, and even Paulson. Various Cayman government wesites, including the Chamber of Commerce and the Tourism Authority, had his name down as Poulson, so (alas), that was the one we went with in our book. Nick Harvey set me straight last week and mentioned that his son had confirmed the spelling. What an interesting life he led. I guess we'll be correcting his name to Polson in the next print run :wink:
 
Great story! thanks for sharing Tony. We had looked into his story a little ourselves while we were creating our dive and snorkel guide for the island. We had found so many conflicting spellings of his name: Polson, Poulson, and even Paulson. Various Cayman government wesites, including the Chamber of Commerce and the Tourism Authority, had his name down as Poulson, so (alas), that was the one we went with in our book. Nick Harvey set me straight last week and mentioned that his son had confirmed the spelling. What an interesting life he led. I guess we'll be correcting his name to Polson in the next print run :wink:

My original story was much longer as I I described in better detail the difficulties we had in research. I had to trim those out to make it a reasonable length. The spelling of the name is one of the issues. As you mentioned, many places have it spelled wrong.

We had combed the national archives, and looked through old newspapers, and tried to find people who knew him for about 6 months, and we kept hitting dead ends. Our big break came when we dived the wreck one day, and I posted some photos on Facebook with the caption "Nice dive on the Doc Polson today." The author Nick Harvey commented, "Nice photos and you spelled Polson correctly!" This lead to a dialog where Nick had reveled he was going to make a character in his next book, based around Doc Polson, and wanted the character to be authentic so he had spoken with Jim's son Mike. Nick reached out to Mike who was more than willing to help, providing a windfall of information and others to speak with.

Tony
 
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