The Adventures of Gilliam and Garth

Bret Gilliam and Fred Garth were business partners from 1994 until 2004, when their publishing company was acquired by Petersen Publishing (Skin Diver, etc.). The two ran popular diving expeditions and were the first to take Draeger semi-closed rebreathers to places like Cocos Island, Palau, and the Silver Bank. In addition to business, they and their wives were close friends.

On October 8, Bret, a frequent contributor to Undercurrent, passed from complications of a stroke he suffered a year ago. Fred asked if we would publish his piece, a portrait of the Bret Gilliam we all admired, loved, and laughed with. So here is Fred's remembrance, with a connecting link to a few more stories he tells about their time together.

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I first met Bret Gilliam in 1989. Well, actually, I just heard about him. Not in a good way, to be honest. He was running - more like commanding, as he tended to do - the diving operation and hyperbaric chamber aboard the Ocean Spirit, the first and only cruise ship ever devoted entirely to scuba diving.

Bret was unarguably one of the planet's most accomplished divers. He filmed submarines for the Navy, ran thousands of dive trips in the Virgin Islands, became a world-class underwater photographer, held every instructor certificate ever invented, and won dozens of ocean-oriented awards in leadership, writing, and photography.

The cruise ship owners hired Bret to run their hyperbaric chamber and design a system that could fill 300 scuba tanks four times a day, a nearly insurmountable task. Employing his Jupiter-sized brain, Bret utilized long high-pressure hoses to fill the tanks without having to remove them from the eight 30-foot dive boats, which he also designed. No more schlepping heavy tanks. No worries. It was just one of the myriad accomplishments that sprung seamlessly from his hyperactive gray matter.

During his Ocean Spirit years, he broke the world deep diving record, descending to 452 feet on a single tank of air, a feat that should have quite easily killed him, if he wasn't so brilliantly tuned in. Decades of saltiness had taught him how to manipulate his body's physiology by slowing his breathing and heartbeat - critical to surviving those unfathomable depths. The nitrogen narcosis alone should have delivered a 20-martini punch and scrambled his brain, but perhaps he'd built a tolerance through extensive experimentation with recreational substances. John Prine's song "Illegal Smile" comes to mind. (He LOVED John Prine!) Skeptics claimed he cheated, that he could have just tied his computer to some fishing line and dropped it to 400 feet. Maybe. But there were witnesses, co-workers mostly. I believe he broke the record. Or perhaps he fudged it. Either way, it was another juicy Bret story.

Gilliam always had the quickest mind in the room. Or, for that matter, the building and the surrounding metropolitan area. The dude also knew every joke ever told. On our scuba diving adventures, we'd have joke wars. Someone would start telling a joke he'd blurt out the punchline after the first line or two had been spoken. His clever wit bent me over cackling more times than I can count. No one was safe from his sardonic and sometimes sick humor.

As much as I admired him, let's be real, the man was a certified narcissist. He knew he was smarter than 99% of his peers, and he seemed to take pleasure in asserting his dominance over lesser humans. When he was annihilating someone in a debate, he'd sometimes finish them off by saying, "My father told me it's unfair to get into a battle of wits with an unarmed man." Then he'd bellow out that boisterous laugh while his victims searched for a hole to crawl in. He demolished attorneys, CEOs, judges, whomever got in his way. Sometimes it was messy, unless you were on his team. Fortunately, I was.

In his self-designed, sprawling home in Maine, he created a massive wall of fame with photos of his accomplishments and friends in high places. Famous musicians were his favorites, and he had shots of hanging out with Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, David Crosby, and many others. He told stories about partying with Jimmy Buffett, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and more, even though he probably made half of that shit up. We all let the bullshit slide because his wild tales were so entertaining we didn't care if they were fact or fiction.

For most people out there, his real-life adventures were so outrageous that he didn't need to stretch them. Yet, as a dedicated narcissist, he couldn't resist embellishing. I was lucky enough to partner with him on some far-flung madness from Micronesia to Costa Rica. We orchestrated a month-long expedition at the Silver Bank to mingle with humpback whales. We brought in National Geographic Television, enticing them with the prospect of filming a humpback giving birth - something no one has ever filmed.

I navigated the "chase" boat with the film crew while Bret held court over the cameraman, executive producer, and the talent, a guy named Boyd Mattson, who was an affable talking head with perfect hair. Bret gave Boyd relentless shit about his coifed doo. He also told the Nat Geo guys exactly why they wouldn't get the footage that they so desperately wanted. He finally demanded that we drop Boyd back at the boat so we could put a wig on a dive instructor - a "real diver" - and step in stuntman style. They finally got the footage, with Boyd's stand-in double gliding next to a humpback.

One evening, as we were on the stern deck, probably burning some medicinal herbs, a Frenchman came by in a skiff and yelled at us. "Is Doug Perrine onboard with you?" Bret immediately responded. "Oh, sorry, Doug was killed in a tragic hot tub accident." The Frenchie had no idea how to respond, so he just eased onward with faraway eyes.

We were coming into the galley of the 140-foot Sea Hunter dive ship early one morning at Cocos Island, 350 miles offshore of Costa Rica. One of our passengers, who had consumed too much red wine the night before, sat at the table, choking down some black coffee and looking like a wrinkled omelet. Bret pointed at him, "That is the face of irritable bowel syndrome." Bystanders howled. You just had to be there. You wanted to be there.

We did six trips to Cocos and ended up spending at least a month there each time. Our little expedition company was the first to bring 20 rebreathers to the shark-infested outpost. Getting those through customs took Bret's silver tongue and persuasion- - not because of the high-tech rebreathers but the 50 tubs of soda lime we needed, a substance that looks quite a lot like rock cocaine. I'm pretty sure Bret pressed a few Ben Franklin's into the custom man's hand.

During that stretch of my life, I was diving 200-300 times a year, all over the world. Without a doubt, Isle de Cocos was the best diving of my life. Bret and I both liked the dicey, extremely challenging conditions - high currents, sharks, down currents, clear but dark water. And the rewards! Giant Pacific mantas, schools of gliding eagle rays, turtles everywhere, monster tuna, schools of jacks that would blot out the sun, and sharks of so many shapes and sizes. No place was more exhilarating,

Along with his musician friends, Bret saved his highest admiration for diving's most talented explorers - perhaps his most sincere and authentic quality. Except for the love he showed Gretchen, the love of his life, on the day they married. His faults were tempered by those outward displays of humanity. The friends he respected most were those who equaled his diving prowess - Al Giddings, Stan Waterman, Howard and Michelle Hall, Dick Bonin, Kirby Morgan, and that list went on. Those folks earned his respect, something that was harder than cutting granite. If he didn't like you, even God couldn't save you. I saw him make some people's lives a living hell. That was the ugly side of Bret. He could be vindictive to the extreme. He once told a high-powered diving executive that he was going to "Rip off his head and piss down his throat." And he did just that, metaphorically, of course. The stories are literally endless.

Bret spent decades in the Virgin Islands and the Caribbean diving and running large charter ships. An excess of tropical sun all eventually overheated him to the point that he sought out the cool weather, escaping to Maine and building a gorgeous home on Arrowsic Island and another one on Moosehead Lake. If you joined us on a liveaboard trip, the very FIRST thing he did was turn the air conditioning to Frigid and demand that no one touch the thermostat but him.

His many obsessions included music - live or played on expensive stereos - movies, women, food, wine, photography, art, writing, diving, football, and accumulating wealth, a goal he accomplished from his many business ventures. He used to post his financial statement on the corkboard in his office so others could witness his success.

We were in business together for a decade or more. That was a hellacious roller coaster ride for me. Oh, we made money with our diving expeditions and magazines - Deep Tech Journal and Fathoms - but working with him was like swimming with tiger sharks in a rip current. A bloody death was always lurking. We ended up selling the mags for a handy profit.

As a long-time journalist and writer, I was jealous of his ability to write so well. His humor came through in spades. He could also be a serious author and penned a number of books. I'm sad that he never wrote (to my knowledge) his autobiography. He was going to call it Into The Blue. The idea was to wait until he was out of the ocean business altogether, then write his life's story with no holds barred. I'm sure it would have been a bestseller.

In the end, he couldn't take the wealth, fame, or status with him, but he left behind a legacy like few have, along with many deep friendships. I was lucky to hang on for the ride of a lifetime and not get thrown off. The last thing he said to me a couple of weeks before he died was, "Fred, you wouldn't believe my house. It's over 10,000 square feet now. You and Blair are welcome to come stay anytime."

-Fred Garth

Click here for my full story, including the second part with tales of our adventures, such as Hanging with a Big Hammer.