What was diving industry like 40 years ago?

[CAPTAIN SINBAD]

Can any of the senior members here shed some light on how recreational diving industry was in the 70s or even earlier? Were there charter boats or dive resorts? Any liveabaords? What were the popular places in the Caribbean or wherever you went for diving? How about diving gear? What were your brand / equipment choices? Was it expensive to be a recreational diver? Lets hear it ...:goingdown:

 

[TMHeimer]

Well, about 45 years ago I recall my older brother (maybe 20 at the time) getting his tank filled at some gas station in Portchester, NY. He dived for clams in 15-30' in Long Island Sound. I'll have to ask him about his equipment when I see him next. I do know he resembled Mike Nelson--I think I still have his old round mask.

 

[mdb]

J-valve tanks, just the start of pressure gauges and BC's. NASDS and PADI and NAUI offering courses that took weeks to complete
with multiple open water dives. Scuba-Pro, Sportsways, Healthways, Swimmaster, US Divers as the major brands. A good time to be
a diver. Lots of fun.

 

[Doc]

Working off the Navy tables.

Got my PADI and AOW, both of them- in a pool.

Resorts were in Freeport and Cayman. The oft seen phrase on SB, "great diving", actually applied to both those exotic island destinations. You got in two dives a day and the wives/gf's stayed at the beach and had lunch ready upon your return.

36 chances for one good one in a Nikonos: Ektachrome and m5 flashbulbs. The m5 flashbulb was to today's current strobes as would be the atomic bomb to a CFL.

You got your tanks filled at the local automotive service station.

You mail ordered SCUBA gear, likely from those full page ads from Berry SCUBA in Chicago, which in reality was a 900 square foot store with a shipping room in the back. Horsecollar BC's were arriving. Everything was "Tech Black". Johnson Wax owned SCUBAPro. Howard Head knew skiing, considered Tennis, had no thought of diving manufacture.

Mike Nelson was muy macho.

You were brought into the sport by Captain Cousteau or Jacqueline Bissett.

Your local dive shop was a hang-out and had a table in the back that was piled with SCUBA magazines (like Skin Diver), beers, ashtrays and repairs. Local guys who drove pick up trucks and worked with their hands were customers. People who owned them did it with no illusion of doing better than break even.

 

[Nemrod]

SCUBA was an exciting new adventure sport. The instruction was often 8 to 12 weeks long. We used tables, made direct ascents at 60 FPM and nobody did a safety stop or thought it was needed. There was no such thing as a BC and the spg was a rare thing, 300 PSI reserve levers were routine. Double hose regulators were king (and still are) and the majority of people who were attracted to SCUBA diving were themselves water people. Local diving was much more common but of course people traveled then as well. Color was much more common with yellow and blue fins and masks and multi colored suits and more often than not, it was a t shirt and cutoffs. Sears, Wards and J.C. Penny carried dive gear, air fills were often at a hardware store that might also sell some SCUBA stuff, mail order was common straight from the back pages of Skin Diver magazine. Women were prettier, children were to be seen, not heard.

I had between 1966 and 1970 collected a full U.S.Divers set, Nemrod and a lot of Voit gear and a smattering of Healhtways.

USD Calypso J single hose regulator*
USD Mistral double hose, single stage, regulator*
Voit Skindiver A66 fins
Voit round mask, Nemrod mask
USD J snorkel and a Nemrod J snorkel*
Healthways weights on an Aqua Craft belt*
Two USD steel 72 tanks*
USD Dolphin pack and Voit SnugPack*
USD full 3/16 inch suit set
USD spg and banjo bolt*
USD and Voit depth gauges*
Unknown brand of watch case*
Bulova Caravelle dive watch*
USD SeaHawk knife and USD catalog item Grisbi knife*
Ikelite C6 light
Arrablette speargun, 36 inch
USD CO2 "Mae West" safety vest*

(*) Still have and occasionally use

N

 

[Islandheart]

LoL...... Ditto to all above !

don't forget about wetsuits that needed to be glued and sewn after every dive.

try buddy breathing from double hose regs.... J valves, pressure gauges just beginning, tanks with straps, horse collars....

single hose regs on the horizon..... Crappy masks... US divers cool stuff

PADI certs done in a pool... Cool dive watches ...lol

 

[GrumpyOldGuy]

I only started diving 35 years ago, just at the end of the J valve age.

The training was more complete - one course covered a lot of ground and left you at least as prepared as AOW.

Diving for me at that time was more local (being in So Cal), we had dive boats of course out to the Channel Islands, but fly & dive vacation to exotic warm water locations was for the very rich.

The LDS were fighting mail order suppliers rather then the internet. Same old arguments were used.

It seems most of the LDS were wither SP with steel tanks or USD with the first round of AL tanks. No one seemed to carry both, so if you did not like their brand you mail ordered Voit or Dacor.

One thing we lost was custom fit wetsuits. They were not all the expensive and kept you warmer. The materials were not stretching much, so you needed the custom fit, but once you got it right it was nice.

 

[Bonairetrip]

Lets say circa 1976. The old guard was conceding that a SPG was a good idea. There were still dual hose divers but most had already transitioned to single. There were a few dive computers around (the ScubaPro Bend-o-matic). Many were diving with some sort of BC and the colored ribbon depth gauge was pretty much gone. Go back to the late 60s and it was pretty different from the mid-1970s.

The hottest BC was a Fenzy (with a little inflation bottle). There were few drysuits (I only remember seeing vulcanized rubber ones at that point) but almost everyone dove wet. My wetsuit was a Nylon In/Shark Skin Out and the gloves were the three fingered mittens. The thing that carried your tank was called a backpack (and had nothing to do with a bc). BCs had crotch straps and autoinflate was coming on (although most thought it wasted air). Tanks were often steel and the valves came as either a J or a K. J was the thing to get. Octos were around -- if you were an instructor or DM. Fins were pretty much the Jet Fins or the Rocket Fins. Regs breathed harder but were pretty stout. Everyone had a speargun or sling and dove with a goody bag.

My training was way harsher -- it took 8 or 10 weeks and every pool session began with lap swimming. We had a hell night. We we had to dump all of your gear into 16ft and gear up on the bottom. Lots of stuff you still see in some of the Navy course. On my first OW dive, my buddy froe and wouldn't respond to commands. I was expected to assess the situation, protect his airway, tow him to shore and help in out of his gear. Then the instructor would go out with me.

Cozumel and Hawaii were exotic destinations.

The interesting thing is how gear is sort of making a complete circle -- at least with some. For example, I use a backplate and an old style "brass and glass" SPG.

I am unable to recall all of the gear I had but it included as USD regulator, AMF mask, ScubaPro fins, USD horsecollar (with c02 and autoinflator), BC lead brick weights and a traditional belt, 1/4 inch farmer john westuit (Harveys, IIRC) Nylon 1. Later replaced the mask with a Tekna.

 

[Thalassamania]

Here's an extract from something I wrote that talks about diving almost exactly 40 years ago:

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was a student at U.C. Berkeley. It was notorious as the paradigm of the impersonal megaversity. But within Research Diving Program I found an oasis of incredible people who loved and cared for each other as only people who trust each other with their very lives are able. Our shared experiences had profoundly deep effects on us all. Relax, I'll get to the hand signals in just a little while.

There were many unique aspects to the Research Diving Program at Cal, there were divers in identical gear, that put GUE's DIR to shame: most of it black, most of it bought at Steele's Dive Shop, down Telegraph Avenue, almost to Oakland. This was because there was a equipment list, and you needed to show up the first night of class with a full set of gear. Everyone wore a skin out, farmer-john, attached hood, no zipper suit. Everyone had a neoprene instrument cuff on their left forearm that had an Ikelight compass, a Sears "Waterproof Sports Watch" and a capillary depth gauge. Steel ’72s with a K-Valve and a plastic backpack featuring two stainless steel twistlocks on the left shoulder were in fashion as was a black Mae West life vest with CO₂ detonators and a weightbelt with a wire buckle. You had to have a Dacor 300 regulator; and when you saw another Berkeley Diver, you knew who they were. Well … you knew most of them. Then there were the odd-balls, like me.

I was already a diver, at least I thought of myself that way. I’d been diving for more than 10 years, and had made about 500 dives. That’s about the point in every diver’s career that they know everything there is to know. Well, knowing everything about diving that there is to know is fine, but back then, when diving was dangerous and sex was safe, it was much more important to look sharp, and I looked sharp. Besides being 6’2” and a rather muscular 190 lbs., with a clean shaven, cleft chin and thick brown curly hair that fell down to my shoulders, and my eyes, which some jokingly described, stealing a line from Clive Custler's Dirk Pitt novels, as being, "opaline green, both alluring or intimidating, as need be" my gear was really knarly.

An orange U.S. Divers Taskmaster suit, with matching hooded vest, shiny aluminium ’72, Swimaster MR-12 regulator with (gasp) an SPG, and lots of ScubaPro: a triple pane mask, Jetfins, JetSnorkel, CamPack, five finger gloves, and the blue stripped weightbelt with the bungies in the back. And then there were my instruments, only the hippest gauges, a ScubaPro Helium Depth Gauge, a Suunto SK-6 Compass and my pride and joy, a U.S. Divers, orange face DOXA 300 dive watch that strengthening the rumor that Dirk Pitt was modeled after me even more than my passport, exhibiting, as it did, visa from most of the countries boarding on the last decades' trouble spots in the world. But even more than the watch, my BC was the pièce de résistance: a Fenzy.

Yeah, I was as cool a diver as they had ever been, and my poor instructor, Ken McKaye, had to deal with me. Exactly how Ken turned that refugee from the Thunderball set into a committed Berkeley Research Diver is a story for another time, suffice it to say that through a combination of Ken’s incredible skill as a diver, patience as an instructor and brilliance as a researcher I found myself, within just a few months, looking exactly like every other Berkeley Diver; well … almost … I did hang onto my really hip gauges and my Fenzy.

To answer some of the other questions:

There were a few charter boats down in Southern California, but in Monterey it was shore diving or private boats. Diving was not particularity expensive, air fills were under a buck and gasoline was less that $.25 a gallon, which made local diving easy and cheap. There was a guy who came around to some of the dive sites with a diesel powered compressor on a trailer.

There were a few liveaboards that I can remember, one down in Mexico, run by NASDS are part of their Club Aquarius operation. Very few resorts, Trudy's on Utila was something out of a spaghetti western, but had a compressor. There was a compressor and a pension out on Corn Island, Nicaragua. Folks dove the Keys and the Bahamas. Cayman had Ron Kips and a few others, Cozumel and Hawaii were just starting out and were considered very exotic. Lots of other destinations that we have now were almost unknown and often took days to reach. There was a compressor in Pataya, Nah Trang, and in Vung Tao, but no dedicated dive shops or dive boats. We often took small 2 cfm, gas powered compressors with us on trips.

 

[NAM001]

Late 60's I was diving a healthways steel lp72 with icc stamp on it and not the familiar dot of today. A relativly new technology single hose double stage healthways reg. 1/4 inch wet suit 10# of 2# weights. The tank was 50$ new from monky wards. the reg 50$ from wards. the 2 piece wet suit with bever tail without hood 50$ from wards. us divers rocket fins 20$ and a nemrod mask with nose purge valve for another 10$. Diving course 40$ including the book and was a 40 hour class. Us divers was the predminate manufacture of gear used in the area. I forget the dive magazine but the latest thing being advertized was ELECTROLUNG 2, a rebreather. The rich divers had k valves and an spg, while us poorer ones had j-valves. You did not need a card to get a fill, only 1.25 and 15 min to kill. You learned to weight correctly. at 40 foot the greatest change is suit compression occured, to some it was called suit squeeze. you got reall heavy quick but we all had the horse collar to manually inflate or you could pull the cord and have co2 fill the collar. there were no bc's we had devices that were used for bouyancy compensation if you could afford them. but they were 2 3" tubes connected to the tank one on each side. a hose to a fill valve. No venting in the system. the top of the tubes were sealed and the bobttom was open. You swam with an up angle to keep the air in the ballast tubes. To vent you went head down. dacore was a beginning company as was scubapro. No respectable diver would dive those as long as the biggy name of US DIVERS were available. My harnes was not more than a flat board type of plastic thing with belts and a tank clamp. Dacor and then USD had the back plate that molded to the lower back. perhaps 6" wide on top and wide enough to wrap around the mid drift at the bottom. A much more stable design. There were still a lot of double hose, both single and double stage regs being used. and a royal aquamaster was perhaps 100.00 at the time. Electro lung was I think 11 hundred dollars. but gasoline was 23 cents a gallon and if you could find a gas war on it was less. the chepest i got was 11 cent gas. Hourly min wage was .75 to 1.00 an hour. so that made gear expensive. roofers were getting 1.75 and hour. To put money is a little more perspective. i saw the family tax return and gross income was 2200$ for the year. not much for a family of 6, and we still went on vacation every other year. Blue cross ins was 20-40 per month. i got my tank filled free at the fire station where my step dad worked. I saw on a couple of occasions a set of double 50's used by one of the locals. looked like a copy of a mike nelson rig. manifold with a single valve in the middle to turn air on and off and spiderweb of 1" straps. Training was quite extensive as i remember. We had to swim a mile, don doff tanks (piece of cake compared to todays rig's) first aid, recessa anne, a 5 min deco lecture buddy breathing, depth change rates were 60 per minute both up and down. i think going down may have been faster. The deepest you could go on air was 2 atm ppo2. At 3 atm ppo2 you were statistically history. We called the o2 hazzard ANOXIA. We covered spear fishing. I was from iowa and the best place for diving was a 120 mile trip to a place called lake okaboji near spirit lake in the nort west part of thae state. occasionally we made trips to wisconsin to a place called devils lake. its attraction was live sponge and great visibility. Qualification dives were giong to a shallow bottom do your skills including a buddy breatning assent. then to deeper water and we went till we could see any more. (buddies connected by a hand held line) to a min of 40'. Waters were still enough so that navagation was easy so long as you kept your head straight and watched the algee flow across you mask face from top to bottom with out any slant or diagonal flow. any diagonal flow ment you were ging in a circle. After completion off we would go for a 100 ft night dive. So much for mamory lane...