About
An engineer who can't stop taking diving apart.
I've been diving since 1989, and I still love it as much as I did then — being underwater, and teaching other people to dive. I'll own that I'm a geek about it; I can't help taking a skill apart to see what makes it work. But when I'm teaching, the point isn't to show that — it's to make it click for you.
Away from the water I'm a mechanical engineer by training, with a PhD from Virginia Tech, and I run a software company, Click & Pledge. So the analytical streak comes with me underwater — to me, diving really is physics and a math problem: buoyancy, gas, and pressure all working out to something you can solve. But diving is the passion, not the job, and I like keeping it that way.
The specialties I teach didn't come from me sitting down to invent them — they came out of conversations. A student once joked, half-seriously, "why can't we play chess underwater?" We kept talking it over, and that became Diver's Gambit. Another time, one of my divemasters was deep in an underwater mapping project and got me thinking about GPS and sonar — that turned into Reef Cartographer.
And after Cartographer it turned into a series of what ifs. What actually lives on the thing you just charted — that became Reef Demographer. What is the water around it doing — Reef Hydrocaster. And what if a diver put all of it together and left a record of one reef precise enough that a stranger could re-occupy it years later — Reef Chronicler, the fifth and last. Five courses now, and not one of them was my idea first; each came from a question the previous one raised.
Taken together the five lead to Master Reef Science Diver, a recognition PADI has confirmed for divers who complete the sequence. It is a work in progress — 3 of the 5 are approved and taught, 1 is submitted to PADI and awaiting approval, and 1 is still being written. This site will be updated as each is finished, and nobody can earn the full recognition until they all are.
What is already here is the material itself: all the lessons, calculators and recording slates for the completed courses, free, with no account and nothing recorded about anyone. That is deliberate — what a certification attests is that an instructor watched you do the work in water, and no website can do that. The reading costs nothing; the card is arranged the ordinary way through a dive center.
I take the safety side as seriously as the fun side — I'm a DAN Instructor and Instructor Trainer and an EFR Trainer — and I teach through Diving Enterprises in Salem, Virginia, because I love it. If you want to dive with me, the schedule is the place to start.
The crew
Peggy Sue: a life in rescue, and never one word of thanks.
That's her up there in the good sunglasses. Peggy Sue is my rescue mannequin — the official drowning victim of every Rescue Diver class I teach. I bought her, all foam and good intentions, before I ran my very first rescue course as an instructor, and she's been the one going under in my classes ever since. Every student I've walked through a tired-diver tow or hauled up from the bottom has practised it on her, and she has never once complained.
Her origins are humble and, frankly, a little mysterious. As the legend now goes, she was born to Mamma Sue and Papa Sue — a long and dignified line of rescue mannequins whose entire reason for existing is to be in trouble. The Sues are people built only to be saved: no hobbies, no opinions, no survival instinct to speak of. Peggy arrived in a cardboard box, weighed about as much as a wet labrador, and has spent every year since living right up to the family name.
And what a career it has been. She has been recovered from the bottom of quarries and the murk of rivers, towed across more surface water than most divers will swim in a lifetime, given mouth-to-mouth by total strangers, had her chest compressed by nervous students counting under their breath, and been shocked back into a life she never actually had by a training defibrillator more times than is strictly polite to mention. Sunny days, rainy days, cloudy days, the odd night dive — Peggy Sue gets rescued, and Peggy Sue says nothing. Not a cough, not a sputter, and certainly not a thank you.
For years she didn't even have a name; she was just "the manikin." Then one warm afternoon I was down running a class and left her bobbing on the surface between drills. While I was under, one of my students — a twelve-year-old girl who'd just earned her Open Water certificate, with a sense of humour well beyond her certification level — conspired with her equally guilty father to give my training aid the holiday it had clearly earned. I surfaced, scanned the water for my victim — and found her instead reclining in a deck chair, in a bikini, behind a pair of sunglasses, a brightly colored cocktail in one hand, tiny paper umbrella and all. My freshly minted diver looked me dead in the eye, christened her "Peggy Sue," and the name has stuck like wet neoprene ever since.
She's still with me, of course. She's outlasted gear, gear bags, and one or two dive buddies, and she has quietly attended every rescue class I've ever taught — the patient, soggy, faintly smug heart of the whole thing. Every diver I've ever brought through a rescue course owes her a small debt. She is the most-rescued and least-grateful being in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and I wouldn't trade her for the world.
Recovered from: quarries, rivers, the deep end, the shallow end
Resuscitations received: uncountable
Defibrillations: enough
Holidays taken: one (bikini, cocktail, sunglasses)
Thank-yous offered: zero