The Adventures of Gilliam and Garth

— a remembrance of a great friend 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 … Read more

Bret Gilliam

When I first met Bret, I disliked him intensely. My friend Rob Palmer, a self-effacing Englishman, had invited me over to the Bahamas for the launch of the Draeger semi-closed circuit rebreather and I found myself in the company of a group of loud-mouthed American technical diving pioneers, each competing with the other to hold … Read more

On Diving Deep, Breathing Air
  it’s what we did because that’s all we had

Twenty years ago I met an old French diver at the DEMA show who was displaying oil paintings of various wrecks he’d dived in Bonaire. I didn’t recognize any of them and he told me where they were to be found. They were all very deep. I asked him if he used a helium mix … Read more

A Crisis Lurking Below the Surface Emergency Hyperbaric Treatment Availability

By Dan Orr (danorr@danorrconsulting.com) There are millions of recreational scuba divers in the U.S. and hundreds of thousands of traveling divers from countries around the world making tens of millions of enjoyable recreational dives each year in unique dive locations all over America. In the unlikely event that any of these divers would suffer a … Read more

Diving Dahab’s Real Blue Hole

1983: There was little or no infrastructure in the Sinai then. We traveled down the coast from the border with Israel by ancient battered Landcruiser and slept uncomfortably under the stars, battling the cold desert air with ineffective sleeping bags. Leaving the Bedouin guides on the rocky beach to build a fire for lunch, we … Read more