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Brett Gilliam/TDI head....Do drugs and heading an agency mix? Mounting Death toll says NO! A number of people have found my hammering of Brett Gilliam and his �tech agency�, TDI, to be unkind and un-called for. As the death toll of advanced recreational divers gravitating to transitional and tech skills has skyrocketed, and Brett�s deep air ideas implicated in the majority of them, you might begin to wonder what kind of man would allow his own instructor trainers, instructors,and new students off the street, to engage in a practice so completely implicated in an escalating death toll. Some WKPP members have even called Gilliam a pot smoking slob----his behavior making him unfit to set an example as the head of a training agency. The story below should go along way toward explaining the justifications of our past posts.... SEX , DRUGS AND ROCK & ROLL ( OH YEAH, AND DIVING TOO) BY BRETT GILLIAM From the Scubatimes article at http://www.scubatimes.com/scubatim/adj_sexdrugs.html There are few opportunities in life that allow almost complete and unmitigated indulgence in whatever may hold your personal interest. But, over the years, my career in professional diving and tropical travel has occasionally hit a serendipitous home run. Consider that I was actually asked by the U.S. Navy in 1971 to volunteer to smoke copious quantities of marijuana and then perform otherwise mundane tasks underwater, such as assembling pipe puzzles, taking psychological tests and tying a few simple knots in brightly colored lines of various diameters. All this while belching clouds of bubbles and trying to ignore how terminally amusing the antics of the Virgin Islands sea cucumber could be. Of course, I had nearly fallen to my knees in my rush to be the first to volunteer for this dangerous, but strategically necessary, experiment. Go ahead, call me a patriot. Someone had to do America�s dirty work while everyone else was back home protesting. Then, a year later, I got a call asking if I would consider taking a four-week assignment to supervise the ocean scenes in an early "adult" film to be shot in Virgin Gorda. Apparently, there would be a lot of cavorting in tidal pools along with naked swimming (and other activities absolutely necessary for full artistic plot development) just off the pristine sand beaches of the Baths. And they needed a crack professional to make sure that no one poked any soft parts into an urchin or something. I was quick to point out that I was additionally qualified to smoke marijuana and tie knots. I think those previously acquired job skills put me over the top in their selection process. Anyway, I can assure you that there are few better ways to pass a month in the Caribbean than surrounded by nubile beauties with more than a passing interest in rope tricks. My own version of the GI Bill was coming along nicely. Many years later, when I operated a fleet of large motor yachts in the luxury charter trade, similar opportunities would present themselves and I was glad to have gained valuable experience on earlier assignments. While on a charter with the Rolling Stones off Montserrat, bass player Bill Wyman coaxed me into relating the circumstances of my Navy experiment. This immediately drew the attention of Keith Richards, who, as it turned out, was a huge fan of pipe puzzles and tying things up. We got along famously and I like to think that my input helped him to further the advancement of valuable work in this exciting field. So in 1987, when I was contacted by a group of investors who were putting together the Ocean Quest company � which would operate a 500-foot cruise ship for divers in the western Caribbean � I didn�t hesitate. By that time I had learned that, no matter how zany a project could sound, inevitably someone with seriously deep pockets might want to finance it. As Ben Franklin might have put it, "A fool and his money... are some party!" They wanted me to do a whole series of projects for them in advance of their start-up. Like design the 10 35-foot dive boats, the recompression chamber facility, the air system, hire the staff, buy the diving equipment, write the operations and safety manuals, and, oh yeah, go to the Mexican Yucatan, Belize and Honduras to scout locations. Any job description that includes the phrase "scout locations" immediately gets moved up a notch or two in my consideration. Especially since they did not mean scout locations for toxic landfills in New Jersey or some other less compelling mission. So I went to work to plan an itinerary that would allow the ship to place us in reasonable proximity to the best diving, while affording a comfortable anchorage that might amuse our non-diving guests. Things proceeded quite well and, a year later, most of the advance work was completed and we had bought a ship. Now we had to finalize the route for each week�s voyage. So it was decided that three of us "executives" would take a gym bag full of cash and go resolve all the pesky little details like port entry fees, local agents, and government relations. Sort of like Ollie North�s mission with the Contras, but without any ramifications for the Republican party. Mexico, with its traditional ports of Cancun and Cozumel, was pretty much a known product, offering two distinctly different types of diving opportunities. Essentially, Cozumel had fabulously beautiful reefs, boundless marine life diversity, absurdly clear water and a lovely "old world" feel to the bustling local town of San Miguel. On the other hand, Cancun�s diving basically "sucked." That�s a technical term for "bad viz, no fish, and not much in the reef department." Belize, however, was a different story. We wanted to concentrate our visitation on the offshore atolls, where we had plenty of room to maneuver the ship, and excellent dive conditions. Our concept was to have the mother ship deliver us and our dive boats to an area, and then stand off while our guests tapped into the virgin waters for two or three dives before rendezvousing for food and air fills. Then each boat would head out again for the afternoon. But, unlike the average dive operator, who had to satisfy maybe 20 divers or so on a couple of dives a day with one boat, I had to multiply that by 10! That meant I needed enough good sites to spread out all these folks without them bumping into each other, while putting them on sites spectacular enough to keep them stoked. That basically worked out to 40 to 50 primo sites, spread over a 15-mile radius from the ship. Our local agent, Stanley, set me up with a charter sailboat guide named Gino, who purportedly knew all the atolls on a first-name basis. That was easy to believe since I had yet to meet anyone in Belize who seemed to have a last name � "Mr. Gilliam, we�d like you to meet our Minister of Tourism, Ralph." Maybe Madonna was really from Ambergris Cay. So, as Gino and I pounded our way 65 miles to windward in search of Lighthouse Reef atoll, I outlined my plan of attack. Gino was a veteran scuba guide who was used to the rigorous schedule of about four dives a week with his charter guests. Thus, when I started explaining that I wanted to do about 10 to 12 dives a day to maximize our exploration and identification of suitable sites, he expressed some trepidation. "Look, mon, ya can�t do dat many dives or we�ll be bent up like pretzels by lunchtime," he said. "And I�m not getting bent for $40 a day." I understood his reluctance and we swiftly confirmed that his price to be bent like a pretzel by lunch time was more in the order of $50 a day. With those delicate negotiations handled faster than Paula Jones can find a new lawyer, we settled into a discussion of my dive plan. "There�s no reason why we have to dive deep at all, since the wall begins in water about 15 feet deep," I explained. "With the great visibility we can jump in, look around briefly and set the coordinates for our site buoy. We mark it on the chart and move on to the next site. I doubt if we�ll ever need to go deeper than 40 feet or so. That will give us a huge window for exploration without running up a lot of bottom time." Gino could see the wisdom of this cunning plan and eased us into a sandy spot adjacent to the precipitous wall at Long Key. Just looking down from the boat, I could see that this was going to be a great dive. The top of the wall featured exquisite coral growth and then dropped off nearly straight down into a blue abyss. Gino said I should go first and he would hand me my camera and then meet me under the boat. Great plan, well-thought-out all the way. But, when I reached to rinse my mask on the swim platform, the watchband pin on my solid-gold Rolex Submariner chose that exact moment to break. About $20,000 worth of precision Swiss technology bounced once off the side of the boat and began spiraling over the drop-off. Not good at all. Luckily I was already mostly into my gear and I crashed off the platform, mask in hand, madly finning after the plummeting timepiece. Gino watched in bewilderment and wondered at my enthusiasm to get in so quickly. Meanwhile, I watched my Rolex rebound off a purple sponge and disappear over the edge. It had a good start on me, but kept ricocheting off parts of the slope, slowing down just enough to entice me to pursue it. Finally, it came to rest on a narrow ledge at nearly 300 feet. I grabbed it and started up. Observing the necessary decompression took a while, and I surfaced to find Gino eyeing me with the kind of look you might give teenagers who play in traffic. "So tell me again," he deadpanned. "How many dives a day were you planning?" "No, you got me all wrong," I apologized. "I won�t do that again. I just dropped my watch and I had to retrieve it � it�s worth a lot of money... even more than $50 a day." Gino looked unconvinced but I suggested that we take the rest of the day off and just lay out some snorkeling sites, and he calmed down. We spent the night on Half Moon Caye and had dinner with the lighthouse keeper, who had guests drop in roughly every fifth year or so. He seemed fascinated that we wanted to bring tourists to his island and was endlessly expounding on the exciting features of the atoll. "Ya gotta see da pink boobies," he effused. "Ya won�t wanna miss dat." Being a booby fan from way back and noting the sans-suit penchant of the ladies in the sailboat anchored just off the beach, I began to recount my adventures with the X-rated film crew in Virgin Gorda. Then Gino broke our mood by noting that our host was referring to the pink-footed boobies, feathered fowl which resided in the bird sanctuary at the island�s west end. Let�s just say that my impression of that attraction the next morning paled in comparison. We hit about a hundred great sites in the next week while living on the island and finally decided to wrap up our work with a trip to the famous Great Blue Hole, located inside the reef, 10 miles from Half Moon Caye. As we prepared to drop in, Gino gave me his best serious dive-guide face. "This is about 460 feet deep and it goes straight down," he said quietly. "If you drop your watch or any other family jewels, just let �em go, mon, okay?" I agreed. Later on I re-kindled his subliminal interest in pipe puzzles and nautical knots with the girls on the sailboat. They all agreed that we had the basis for a very successful cruise experience. Maybe the Navy might be interested in a long term experiment. I had the volunteers. Bret Gilliam was vice president of Ocean Quest, the largest sport diving operation in the world, from 1988 to 1990. They routinely conducted over 1000 dives a day on weekly voyages, and made frequent visits to the booby sanctuary. Gilliam is now CEO of UWATEC and president of Technical Diving International. March/April 1998 -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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