SeaHorse Dive Club: 1958 - Today
The
first Northwest sport divers made their own wetsuits, poured their own
weights and taught themselves how to scuba dive. Their flippers were as
stiff as plywood, as heavy as plaster. And their rigid rubber masks
leaked most of the time. They were enthusiastic participants in a
burgeoning sport that relied on unproved technology and immature
science. They accepted irrational risks and forged life-long friendships
while plumbing the dark, unforgiving depths... This was the beginning
of the SeaHorse Dive Club.Today, the SeaHorse Dive Club is one of the
largest SCUBA clubs in the Northwest.
50th Anniversary Celebration - November 1, 2008
Report by: Bob Burnett
Fifty years later, they are still telling their tales...
Several charter members from 1958 were on hand as the Boeing Sea Horses
celebrated the dive club’s golden anniversary at the Museum of Flight in
Seattle. It was a nostalgic afternoon of old friends reunited and old
stories retold.
While the audience munched catered McCormick & Schmick’s, a series
of speakers relived what they called the golden years of Northwest
diving and offered an unforgettable glimpse into the club’s history and
evolution.
Although each speaker covered a different generation, they all said belonging to the Sea Horses was like being part of a family.
"There were 70 attendees, almost half of them being some of the original
members from the ’50s and ’60s," said Linda Beckelman, one of the
organizers. It was pretty amazing to see them there and hear their
stories." Club founders at the anniversary included Herb and Anne
Leake; Howard and Marlys Borough; Erwin Mullin; Virgil and Laura Boyt;
Oran and Judy Downs; Alma Miller, who was married to the club’s first,
self-appointed instructor; spearfishing champion Barbara (Boling)
Baggaley; and Baggaley’s grown children, Keith and Kathi, who also were
part of the early Sea Horses family.
The speakers, charter members and other old-time Sea Horses provided information for this report.
Meager Beginnings
Bob Staunton took his first dive in Lake Erie in 1940 when he was barely
16 by slipping a modified hot-water tank over his head while a pair of
allies ashore forced air into it with a hand pump. He couldn’t tip his
head or the air would spill out. Masks and fins were the domain of an
elite breed of secret military frogmen. Cousteau wouldn’t invent the
Aqua Lung for another three years.
When he moved to Seattle to work on Boeing’s Bomarc project a few years
later, Staunton met Gary Keffler, who had formed the region’s first
skin-diving club, the Mud Sharks. (SCUBA, the acronym for Self-Contained
Underwater Breathing Apparatus, wasn’t widely known outside military
circles yet.) When ex-commercial hard-hat diver Frank Wolf started
another dive club, Staunton thought Boeing ought to have one too.
"I went to HR and they said all I had to do was get some members and
Boeing would sponsor us," Staunton said in a 1998 interview. "So I went
and got a Boeing photographer and found three good-looking girls to pose
in bathing suits as I was coming out of the water in my dive gear.
Boeing put the picture in the company paper. The bathing suits got us
lots of members. And that’s how the club started," he said. (Apparently,
PC wasn’t an acronym back then, either. Not even for personal
computer.)
The vamping lured an unabashed group of intrepid young males, who, in
turn, flushed an unabashed group of confident young females. The Mermaid
dives often drew more members than the coed dives. Lloyd Bridges and
Sea Hunt brought scuba diving into our living rooms. The Sea Horses took
us beyond the water’s edge and made our fantasies real.
Self-Taught
 John Miller was the club’s first instructor, an assumed role. He
and his students studied Boyle’s Law and learned about the bends. The
Navy dive tables modeled for athletic young sailors 18 to 25 years old
were ill-suited to recreational diving, so the Sea Horses created their
own dive tables.
"We taught ourselves." wrote George Bollerslev, a charter member who
retired in 1989 after 35 years with Boeing. "We never thought about
certifications or certification agencies because everything we did was a
first. Students from the first class helped teach the next one, and so
on. Pool sessions were at Gold Creek Park in Woodinville and training
dives were at Alki Point in West Seattle." still a popular dive site and
training grounds half a century later.
Capt. Jacques Cousteau accepted honorary Sea Horse membership when he
visited Seattle in 1960. "The Aqua Lung opened up a whole new world"
said pioneer diver Herb Leake, charter member and club president in the
early ’60s. "We had to make our own suits because that’s the only way
you got one." he said.
The first Sea Horses would outline their bodies on paper and use
the patterns to cut wetsuits out of 3-foot by 20-foot strips of
quarter-inch neoprene. Keffler, of the Mud Sharks, designed the patterns
and Wolf, who opened Seattle’s first dive shop, provided the rubber.
Suit-making bees were popular events. Despite gluing the pieces together
with copious quantities of rubber cement, split seams were not
uncommon.
Zipperless in Seattle
There were no zippers, no smooth inner lining.
"None of this zipper business," Bollerslev recalled. Divers applied
liberal amounts of talcum powder to ease into their unproven suits. By
the second dive, the talcum was all gummy, so they used liquid soap.
"Put a little Joy in there and it made it slippery enough to slide in."
Wolf made fasteners for beaver tails, the paddle-like appendages of
rubber that hung behind the suit jacket until slung between the legs and
fastened in front to keep everything together.
The first drysuits were front-entry shells the thickness of a bicycle
inner-tube. They didn’t have zippers, either. The suits were
single-piece pullovers that took about as much energy to don and doff as
a Nautilus workout. Divers entered the water to force the air out of
the suit, then gathered excess rubber in front and tied it off with
surgical tubing. "First little barnacle prick on the arm or something
and you had a wet arm," Bolerslev said.
Before there were BCDs or submersible pressure gauges, there were
spring-loaded J-valves. If you felt the tank running out of air during a
dive, you were supposed to reach around behind you and jerk a rod to
release just enough air to get back to the surface. There were only two
problems: First, you had to remember to reset the J-valve between
dives, and, second, you had to be able to find that damn rod by feel
with frozen fingers in that instant of adrenaline-charged clarity when
you become clued in to the fact that you don’t have a clue where your
next breath is coming from.
Some divers wore inflatable life vests with CO2 cartridges that were
guaranteed to get them back to the surface one way or another.
Don’t Look Now
Despite over-harvesting, Northwest waters still teemed with sea life in
the ’60s. The old-timers used to say that anyone who speared a lingcod
weighing less than 20 pounds had to throw it to the seagulls. Clubs
would compete in AAU-sponsored spear-fishing contests and send the
winners to national competitions on the East Coast.
A fading black and white photo of spear-fishing champ Barbara (Boling)
Baggaley, decked out in a flattering rubber suit and surrounded by
trophies, peered from an album. She attended the anniversary, but didn’t
make a presentation. The Sea Horses hosted starfish mops to clean out
the starfish at local parks (Why is uncertain.) "The ranger would put
out garbage cans, but the starfish piled up so fast the cans disappeared
under the mound. There were prizes for biggest, most legs, most
unusual, most caught any category we could think of," Bolerslev said.
We called a couple farmers and they hauled the starfish away for
fertilizer.
There were a lot of avid women divers. The Mermaid dives often drew more
members than the coed dives. Many matches were made over the years,
and a few were unmade.
Sea Horses built their own compressor, a three-stage, 3,000-psi monster
made from scrap parts, to avoid the outrageous price of 75 cents a fill
charged by dive stores of the era. The most expensive regulators cost a
whopping $40, while a day aboard the San Juans dive charter Koffee Kup
went for $8, including hot lunch.
"Some days we were able to squeeze in as many as five dives," wrote John
Shrader, who joined the Sea Horses in 1967. It was common then to come
back with several hundred pounds of seafood. Lingcod usually accounted
for the most, but we also found abundant abalone, scallops, rockfish and
crabs.
Howard Borough was president in 1980. As competitive
spearfishing dwindled, he said members would trailer their boats and a
portable compressor on dive trips throughout the Puget Sound and Georgia
basins: Galiano Island, West Beach Resort, San Juan County Park, Neah
Bay.
They were huge social gatherings with camping, fishing, cooking and
sitting around the campfire late at night. There also were gala
Christmas parties and costume balls, photo contests and 4th of July
weekends. They were all family affairs, even the Incredible Edible (and
drinkable?) with the Boeing Wine Club.
Beach Brats
"The older kids took care of the younger ones, but we were all subject
to anybody else’s discipline," remembers former Beach Brat Keith Dewey,
Barbara Boling Baggaley’s son. "We were all like family and looked
forward to meeting up again at the next event."
The Beach Brats built survival shelters, ate raw seafood and explored
every pathway in every kind of weather, even snow, while the adults were
diving. Who needs to go snow sliding on an inner-tube when you can use
a wetsuit? When they were done diving and eating, a handful of adults
would gather at a picnic table and play poker late into the night.
Meanwhile, the Beach Brats would be playing cards in one of the tents.
"We knew Bowman Bay and Rosario Beach like our front yards," Dewey said.
We were everywhere, clear out to the Deception Pass entry light, which
is only accessible at low tide. We nearly got trapped a couple of
times.
The Sea Horses have always been at the forefront of the Northwest diving
community. The first Sea Horses captured their dives on film and
created a 13-part series for public television. Early members were
instrumental in organizing the Washington Council of Skin Diving Clubs,
just as more recent members have been active in the Washington Scuba
Alliance and other groups.
The ’90s were the decade of equipment, said former president Todd Osborne. Octopuses, computers, pony bottles, Nitrox.
In addition to maintaining a calendar of weekly shore dives and monthly
programs, the club organized trips to the San Juans, Hood Canal, the
Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island. At one point the club had 200
members in two chapters. There were underwater treasure hunts, Easter
egg hunts, beer and wine hunts. There were river runs, spearfishing
trips and photo safaris. Sea Horses organized beach cleanups and built
underwater parks. They competed in human-powered submarine races and set
a world record for the largest pumpkin carved entirely under water.
There might a Northwest dive site that the Sea Horses have missed in 50
years, but it’s doubtful.
Fly-Aways
Once or twice a year someone scheduled fly-away trips to a tropical dive
resort: Mexico, Hawaii, the Caribbean. A group of daring Sea Horses
recently returned from a week diving with sharks in the Bahamas.
Sea Horses have become instructors, photographers, videographers,
aquarium divers, charter captains, travel agents and creators of
leading-edge rebreather systems.
The Sea Horses don’t make their own suits any more. Double-hose
regulators are long gone, as is a Puget Sound choked with sea life. But
some things don’t change. Today’s Sea Horses still spend a lot of time
together, diving, traveling, partying and building immutable bonds that
clearly have withstood the test of time. "We are a family," Osborne
said. "Most clubs can’t say that, but we really are family."
Party Animals
"This was a unique event," said Beckelman. We had members from the
founding group all the way up through the different decades and some
future divers too," she said, indicating Todd and Alissa Osborne’s
youngsters, Spencer and Tara.
"After the exec board made the decision to hold the 50th anniversary
party, it took a lot of work and a close-knit team of Sea Horses members
to pull it off successfully," she said. Club President Ed Gullekson
planned the agenda, coordinated the speakers and served as emcee.
Beckelman came up with the idea of holding the event at the Museum of
Flight. She handled tickets and registration and took some of the
pictures during the event. Adam Merritt’s wife, Lexie, took the formal
pictures. Beckelman and Randy Pedersen created an extraordinary
commemorative DVD that documents the club’s 50 years through historical
photos and video clips. In addition to a delicious lunch of salmon or
chicken, everyone received a copy of the DVD.
"Sandy (Gullekson) did all the work getting the room and dealing with
the caterer, decorating the cakes and putting the table decorations
together," she said. Randy Pedersen put endless hours into the DVD and
pouring through the boxes of historic records for more details we could
use.
To view Beckelman’s photos from the anniversary, check out the following URL. She promised to add more photos later.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/13452556@N04/sets/72157608614349985/
To order the historical DVD, contact Dive Locker Coordinator. It’s a treasure, and only $10 to members.
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