When Geri Tzimoulis and Leslie Leaney of the Historical Diving Society asked me to write an appreciation of Paul Tzimoulis, my friend of forty-seven years, it was a daunting prospect.

All one had to do was read the numerous accolades to Paul’s many accomplishments, written by other divers whose lives he had changed. How could possibly add anything to them?

Then I realized that there was a way I could bring a very personal dimension to the public record. Over those many years there were key moments when Paul had completely changed the direction of my life. I realize today, after the long twilight of his illness that there must be dozens, or even hundreds, of others whose lives and careers he had changed for the better as well.

As a memorial to Paul and a service to his magnificent spirit, I could illustrate how he had influenced one life, and the dive industry he helped to be born. I could thus show for readers the enormous impact that his long and distinguished career had on just about everything to do with the recreational diving industry during the last half of the Twentieth Century.

Since I spent my diving career in international dive travel,that was where I experienced Paul’s impact the most. However, it was easy to see that his influence was equally powerful in other sectors such as equipment development, diver certification, medical research and underwater photography.

As a New Yorker, Paul started diving a long way from the exotic destinations he was to make famous in later years. He began free diving in 1951, chasing fish around the lakes of Connecticut. By 1956 he had progressed to an Aqua-Lung and gotten a serious bite from the new scuba bug. This infection prompted him to open a scuba diving school in New Haven in 1957, and this is where I first met Paul.

I had been a snorkeler and spearfisherman since 1950, but wanted to explore the underwater world with the newly-available scuba0-diving equipment. I signed up for a YMCA scuba certification course, and my instructor was the young Paul Tzimoulis.

Even then he displayed some of the personal skills that he would later use to mold not only divers but the industry that served them. He was an excellent instructor. Both knowledgeable and patient with students of varied aptitudes. I soon graduated Paul’s course and joined his local club, the New Haven Barnacles. I would see him at club ‘meetings,’ which were long on eating and drinking and short on diving. Paul certainly livened up those Barnacle meetings with accounts of his travels and diving. We all asked whether we could carry his bags, a compliment I received myself in later years. Paul appreciated the good fortune he had in giving birth to diving as a potential mass-market sport, and he put into it all the energy and intelligence he possessed.

After a year of occasional weekend dives off Connecticut and New Jersey a new job took me away from New Haven. The job consumed all of my time and I didn’t have time for diving or much of anything else. It wasn’t until 1964 that I even got away for a vacation.

Paul remained devoted to his fledgling diving career and started to build a solid reputation in this new industry by running his own dive store and working for U.S. Divers and Sportsways. He gained further dive training credentials with NAUI and started making underwater movies which were shown at the different film festivals which were becoming popular in those days. He also began writing about his diving experiences and supplied his own photos to accompany his text. Articles in Skin Diver and Life Magazine confirmed that his star was rising, and by 1964 he was part of the staff at Skin Diver.

Our paths crossed again around this time. I was once again based in New Haven, working as a salesman for IBM, with Yale University, International Silver and other companies keeping my life full and completely tied up. Out of sheer frustration I had begun to organize my own tropical travels for diving, to islands in the Caribbean and Bahamas, sometimes struggling to find local tanks to rent, properly-maintained compressors and boatmen who had any knowledge of exciting dive sites. I read in Skin Diver that Paul had joined the magazine, so when my frustrations with do-it-yourself travel reached a critical level I called him.

It went something like:
“Paul, hasn’t anyone organized this overseas diving yet so that we can just buy good off-the-shelf vacations with everything included?”

“Well, Carl, you called at the right time,” he said. “A guy named Dewey Bergman has just started a travel agency in San Francisco just for divers.”

Little did either of us know how fateful a conversation we were having.

I called Bergman and signed up for See & Sea Travel’s Summer 1967 adventure to the then-mysterious Cozumel, Mexico. The group was fascinating. They were the Underwater Photographic society of San Francisco, a club with swagger and dozens of big, glamorous photographic rigs. I was totally dazzled, limited as I was to a Nikonos with a minimal lens and no strobe. I called that my Blue Period and regularly put all of my relatives to sleep with my results.

The group members began the proceedings by putting all of the beautiful, custom-designed housings on a huge table in the morning sunshine and posing all of us behind them. Good thing, too, for most of them flooded within the first few dives. I still have that photo on my wall to remind. Ah, yes, that’s how it actually was in the Good Old Days.

It was a celebrity event. Dewey Bergman. A long-time travel-agency owner who had lived in Tahiti and been part of the Marlon Brando film Mutiny on the Bounty, was there. Bob Hollis, CEO of Oceanic Worldwide was also in the group. Back in those days Bob was owner of The Anchor Shack and only beginning his career in equipment design for photographers. And, as fortune would have it, Paul Tzimoulis was there, preparing a story for Skin Diver on this new concept of packaged diving vacations. This was most definitely the Big Leagues for a guy from Connecticut with his Nikonos.

The adventure was magnificent, from the weather to the water clarity to the 1300-foot dropoff at Palancar Reef. Halfway through the trip I became a pawn in a mini-mutiny instigated by Hollis. My role was that of an innocent spokesman fomenting a gentle rebellion in the group so that some of us could take one of our two fishing boats southward to the remote Chinchorro Banks. Today this would seem routine, but in 1967 it represented the absolute frontiers of high adventure.

I learned a lot about my friend Paul Tzimoulis during this comical rebellion. Dewey was, of course, hysterical over his loss of control over his own arrangements and the potential liability. He wouldn’t speak to me for weeks. Members of the group took sides: to stay with the main boat at Palancar (The Captain “Dewey” Bligh boat), or to sail South with the mutineers (The Fletcher “Bob” Christian boat).

Paul, ever the diplomat, remained completely above the fray, subtly nudging the process, making notes for his story, understanding both sides and not getting anyone further inflamed. It was a virtuoso piece of statesmanship. Of course it all had a happy ending, and both boats enjoyed fabulous encounters with marine creatures that made stories for long months afterward. “Ole, Cozumel,” Paul’s account of this new adventure, became the cover story on the April 1968 issue of  Skin Diver.

With that expedition, though, Paul had initiated me into the California wing of diving, which at that time was the leading edge of underwater photography (despite all the flooded housings). I began to travel to California whenever possible to buy and test housings and strobes. As Publisher of Skin Diver, Paul kept a constant flow of articles and reviews of the latest underwater imaging equipment on the pages of the mnagazine, as a supplement to the rapidly expanding boundaries of dive travel that now regularly appeared. It would be impossible to overstate Paul’s leadership role at this early time in dive travel tourism. Under his guidance Skin Diver became a sort of underwater National Geographic for recreational divers, with images of reefs, fish and tropical locales that most divers had never even heard of, much less visited. The diver’s world was changing, and Paul was the navigator.

On one of my photographic ‘testing’ excursions to the Left Coast, Paul, bob Hollis and I had one of those pivot-point adventures that cause one to examine life from a new perspective. Paul was in San Francisco to test some of Bob’s new products and I was in town from my Yale University Computer Center Director duties for a meeting about some new software. Paul and Bob insisted that I stay a couple of extra days because I had never dived in California. Now, those who have ever dived with Bob Hollis know that he is, to put it kindly, disaster-prone. I could write a book on dives with Bob that were at, and over, the edge but at the time all of those treasured experiences lay ahead of me.

The day began at 5:00 A.M., with the distinguished Editor of Skin Diver and the kid from Connecticut having to push Hollis’s ratty old panel truck down the dark streets because it’s batter was dead from neglect. An omen, surely. On our way down the coast to Monterey’s Point Lobos Park, Bob, realizing that he was clearly towing an oversized and illegal trailer with his big Zodiac on it, spotted a police car in the distance and turned off the road  to wander through a housing development, hoping to avoid the officers. Paul and I looked at each other with knowing shrugs, because we had seen movies like this before and knew how it had to end.

Sure enough, after several minutes of evasive action that resembled hiding a hippopotamus in a closet, Hollis pulled out onto the main road. Within a minute the siren sounded and we were cited. With Hollis, it was just another day!

When we got to the ramp to launch the boat, the three of us struggled to the point of herniation to off-load it and slide it into the water.

There should have been at least six of us to lug the !#!$!%!^!&! thing. As we motored out through a bit of wave-surge, Paul and I again exchanged knowing looks as Hollis maneuvered the Zodiac closer to some big, photogenic rocks with huge waves crashing on the seaward side of them.

Moments later, a freak wave came right between the rocks, slammed the inflatable boat and swept Hollis over the side where the razor-like propeller actually ripped his wet suit. Paul and I frantically struggled to keep all the cameras and diving gear from going out of the nearly-capsized boat.

We were able to rescue Hollis, who typically shrugs off any disaster he survives. And, he has survived more than a cat with ninety lives. Motorcycles, diving, whatever. Paul and I looked at the slashes in the wet suit and rolled our eyes. I’d love to have a Dollar for every time I’ve tolled my eyes over ‘adventures’ like these .Hollis brushed the incident off as just another distraction on the way to a great dive. Sure.

During that great dive, Paul got tangled in giant kelp and had top cut his way out. His yellow safety-vest powered by a CO2 cartridge (like the ones flight attendants demonstrate on airliners) failed to fire and he almost didn’t make it back to the boat. It was another day of diving in the Good Old Days with the top experts. Yikes! So, young divers, when you see the old geezers up on the podium at underwater film festivals, this is the very sort of pantomime that got them there.

This California connection Paul had created for me proved invaluable. Everything that was anything in recreational, and sometimes commercial and military, diving came across his desk. As an example, thanks to Paul, I met an unusually talented submarine engineman at a party in 1967. We got to be friends, and I learned that he was an instructor in the huge submarine escape training tank at the U.S. Navy base in Groton, Connecticut.

Croft could hold his breath for several minutes. He wanted to break the world record for free breathhold diving then held by Jacques Mayol, as portrayed in the movie, “The Big Blue.”  Croft asked, did I know anybody among my friends who could be a film crew and make a movie of his expedition? “Hello, Paul?” I made the call and the film crew was organized. Paul himself had a conflict, as I recall covering an Andrea Doria expedition, and couldn’t go with us.

Dewey Bergman, Bob Hollis and Al Giddings (later of The Deep and Titanic fame) spent two weeks with Croft, my and a team of U.S. Navy research scientists. We met, among others, Johnny Weissmuller, the old-time Tarzan film star, and we beat Mayol’s record with him right with us watching at 240 feet in open ocean. Al Giddings’ movie The Deep Challenge saved the story for future generations. That was it! I love diving! I was hooked.

In 1969 I decided to leave my position as Director of Computation at Yale and go into the diving tourism business full-time in the Caribbean. This decision was only made possible by my complete faith in Paul and his knowledge of the diving industry. He and the Californians would guide me on this huge undertaking; without the prospect of their assistance I’d never have risked it.

Having made the vital mental commitment, I called Paul and told him of my grand plan. He said I’d better come out West and he’d help me plan the business strategy. When I arrived in California, Paul and Dewey Bergman had just returned from promotional visits to Curacao and Bonaire in the Dutch islands of the Netherlands Antilles. They had stories of great schools, hospitals, roads, water supplies, compressors and comfortably civilized living on Curacao, which would make it a solid residence for my family, while thirty miles and an $18 Dollar airfare away lay the pristine diving of Bonaire.

After visiting the islands I made an ambitious plan to form a company, purchase the Flamingo Beach Club on Bonaire and start a string of dive resorts. When I visited Paul in Los Angeles and described my entire Plan A vision, he took me into his study and opened the bottom drawer of his desk. It was full of brochures for hotels that had failed, gone broke or never been built. “They all told me stories just like yours,” he said.

Sure enough, Paul helped save me from what would have been a terrible mistake. I canceled Plan A and went to Plan B: move to the Caribbean and learn properly about doing business in the third world without the huge investment risk. To this day I wonder how many other people Paul’s calm advice saved from their own “I love diving!” folly.

With Paul’s blessing I put Plan B into action. He kept his communication lines from California to the Caribbean open for me and continued to provide wise counsel. I spent the three years from 1969 to 1972 living Plan B on Curacao and Bonaire, receiving dive groups from Dewey Bergman’s See & Sea Travel.

Then one day Dewey visited Curacao and invited me to leave the Caribbean, buy into his travel agency and dive the entire world. After about a nanosecond of hesitation, I yelled “YES!” I already knew every fish in those islands by their first names so the thought of diving remote reefs in areas such as Australia, Micronesia and the Red Sea made it an easy decision. This was a unique chance to push the frontiers of international recreational dive travel. A chance to be among the first humans to see the undiscovered wonders of distant tropical seas.

I never did find out if Dewey consulted Paul about bringing me in, but it certainly would not surprise me if he did. Paul was certainly one of the first people I told. Come to think of it, he didn’t seem at all surprised!

For the next twenty-five years, with Paul watching us from afar, we would methodically open the most pristine and isolated dive sites in the world to traveling divers. I joined See & Sea in the Summer of 1972 and inherited Dewey’s vast wisdom and experience. There could be no finer mentor into the realities of travel; the man had wandered the world for decades! He had started and sold three successful travel agencies, and See & Sea was his labor of love for divers.

By October of 1972 we took the first live-aboard group to Australia’s Coral Sea, 320 miles off the Queensland coast of Australia. We did astounding shark feeds in which anything could have happened and almost did; we dove with sea snakes when they were considered murderous monsters; we did night dives in the middle of nowhere. All of these adventures appeared under my byline in the pages of Skin Diver, with photos for proof.  A new version of our sport was born and Paul’s magazine published the historical record.

The next Spring we took the first live-aboard diving cruise in the Galapagos. Dewey’s experience with Bob Soto’s boat in Grand Cayman, the Cayman Diver, had convinced us both that the future market for really avid divers lay in the live-aboard method—unlimited diving in remote dive sites with good food, air conditioning and good crews.

In 1973 our good friend Paul Humann (himself now in the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame) bought the Cayman Diver from Bob Soto and proved the concept:even an old boat, when offering great diving and a dedicated crew could give divers thrills and value that hotel-based day-boat diving often couldn’t. Live-aboard diving far from any population centers became our goal everywhere.

Over the next few years we debuted live-aboards exclusively by See & Sea in Aldabra in the Indian Ocean, Hawaii, Belize, the Virgin Islands, the Maldives, Truk Lagoon, the northern Red Sea, Fiji, Palau, Vanuatu, Malpelo, the Sudan, Eritrea, as well as booking live-aboards such as the Agressors, Peter Hughes and many others.The process of opening the world involved many players, but reviewing the roster of destinations we collectively opened, Paul was the key in almost every case to getting each new venture visible to its needed audience. Over the years, every exotic new diving destination had to endure a birthing process.

 First, there had to be a remote place with superb, unusual diving that would be compelling to divers. We had to be able to reach the diving from the U.S. in at most two or three travel days. There had to be a boat, preferably for ten to twelve divers so as not to overcrowd the dive sites, that was sufficiently sturdy and comfortable to sustain a group for several days while they dove a heavy schedule. Most of all, there had to be one of a rare breed of entrepreneurs who would take care of clients as conscientiously as I would if I had been there. He had to be an expert on diving, be a good mechanic, and understand good food and comfort as demanded by Americans.

Satisfying all those conditions would meet my needs and those of See & Sea. However, we needed to get hundreds of thousands of potential customers all over the world to know that these great destinations existed. At some point, that meant satisfying Paul Tzimoulis so that he would commit a precious slot in Skin Diver Magazine’s schedule. With literally hundreds of other products clamoring for that same crucial exposure it was never easy. Paul and I were friends, but I had to run the editorial gauntlet like everyone else.

Why was it so tough? Simply because it isn’t enough to find a new live-aboard and announce it. It has to find a market, and then it has to perform to demanding standards. The live-aboard business in third-world countries is extremely difficult if you are determined to operate at that highest level. For every vessel that performs at the top of the insider charts, at least five others fail.

Operating a live-aboard in a third-world locale is one of the most difficult jobs I know. People like Bob Halstead in Papua New Guinea and Navot Bornovsky in Palau typified for me the best of the best of these pioneers. I could count on their utter reliability to protect my reputation and that of See & Sea Travel. Paul, sitting as he did at the very center of all intelligence about diving, not only understood these elemental rules about live-aboard diving but all the other sectors of the diving industry as well.

I got to see the combination of judgment and incredibly hard work which Paul and his wife Geri brought to the travel sector of diving; examples spring to mind readily. In one spectacular casem we were having trouble getting more divers to try the big-animal diving at Cocos Island. People worried about long overnight cruises, about currents, about the big animals. Paul and Geri made one cruise, wrote an astonishingly effective description of the realities of diving Cocos, and boosted the bookings by a sizeable percentage almost immediately.

Over recent years, Paul and Geri worked indefatigably with destinations such as the Cayman Islands, Hawaii, the Florida Keys, Australia, Micronesia and many others, on huige promotional campaigns that moved thousands of divers and millions of dollars. Hundreds of thoiusands of divers’ vacation decisions were shaped by the destination exposure in Skin Diver.

For another example, Paul organized a lavish campaign for Continental/Air Micronesia in the early 70s. Even after the campaign ended, See & Sea received a decade of bookings from people who told us, “I’ve wanted to dive Truk and Palau ever since I was a kid and read those stories in Skin Diver.”  An impressive testimonial to the power of one man who became an institution.

Occupying the most central position in the diving industry meant that Paul had every idea, every product and every player coming to him. After all, he was the ultimate arbiter of what appeared in Skin Diver. Which brings us to an important but touchy subject. In a sport such as international diving tourism there are inevitably winners and losers. That’s because a growing sports industry creates room for a lot of ideas, a variety of participants and a ruthless sorting out of the ideas that work from those that don’t.

Even worse, ideas that worked in the 1980s might not work in the new century. The Internet, for example, has been a relentless force for earthshaking change not only in dive travel but in the entire travel industry. In making his almost-Solomonic judgments, Paul inevitably disappointed many people and bruised some egos. After all, every good idea, every half-baked idea and every truly goofy idea in diving paraded across his desk. Precisely how you tell someone who is eager to be the next big success in the industry that his or her idea isn’t quite right, or that someone else has beaten them to it? The phrase ‘herding cats’ comes to mind.

I sometimes wonder what he thought when I told him I had a fabulous new dive boat in northern Chumba-Wumba and needed a big play in the magazine to get it launched in the marketplace. Hmmm. Perhaps I shouldn’t go there.

In all of this Paul had to protect his employer and his flagship magazine from other people’s faulty judgments. He placed his own interests third behind those other two, and it served him well.

I stress Paul and Geri’s hard work purposely, for that is another overriding theme of Paul’s amazingly productive life. I remember going out to dinner with them one time in L.A., and when the parking valet brought Paul’s car around I saw that the vanity plate was WRKHLC. Knowing them as I have, nobody ever earned a plate more completely. They worked harder than almost anyone I’ve ever known. How many dinners, weekends and long airplane rides they endured to advance the cause of diving nobody will ever know.

I came to experience this work ethic most when Paul and Geri moved to Las Vegas in 1998. We had been corresponding by phone and email regularly, and they were suddenly doing a lot of mysterious short trips; they finally confessed that they were moving out of Los Angeles. I was supposed to guess where they had chosen, and I guessed everywhere but the right place. They finally revealed that they were building a new home in Las Vegas.

Always known for my delicacy and tact, I sputtered, “How could you move to such a sleazy, glitzy, sterile, vulgar, phony place?” My only impression of Las Vegas, of course, was endless hours of exhausting work in my booth at DEMA shows, working my tail off.

When their new house was completed, they invited me over from San Francisco to stay with them for a week and get to know their new city, the ‘other’ Las Vegas. I laughed and scoffed, which made it all the more embarrassing when I began house-hunting for myself on the third day. I moved to Las Vegas in October of 1999, that was when I finally came to understand what that workaholic license plate really meant. Paul and Geri worked like slaves. They built a huge new office—no, a cathedral—to diving. Endless shelves of books, articles, software and research material stared down at me from what seemed like a miniature Library of Congress, right down to the rolling ladders!

The two of them worked so hard and for so many hours each day that it took verbal dynamite to get them to take an evening off each week for a cookout. I arm-twisted them constantly, though, and we enjoyed lots of dinners where we theorized, strategized and shared amazement at the directions our beloved sport was taking. Paul Tzimoulis, to the day he left us, never stopped caring about diving and the people who participate in it.

Finally, if I may be permitted a grace note: During Paul’s final illness his wife Geri was like a force of nature. Always supporting, never tiring, never losing her composure, constantly in attendance, she eased Paul’s path and always protected him as best she could. Paul was in her arms when he finally left us.

To Paul: good-bye, old friend. All I can offer is my personal view of one small facet of your towering career, one person’s gratitude for the ways in which you helped shape his life. I know that what you did for me you did for many; let that be your testament. When all the honors and all the tributes have faded, may you be remembered as a fine human being who gave everything he had to the sport he led, shaped and loved.

Find rest and peace.

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