About | The 1970s

In the 1970’s, dive travel was starting to emerge as a hot topic, and most of the newest resort destinations were being premiered and featured at Clinics.  Sea Rover audiences traveled around the globe without leaving Boston, as speakers came from all over to introduce us to their fantastic diving, and fascinating marine life.  Diving also started to become more organized, as national training organizations united with dive industry leaders to promote national certification standards, and self-regulation.  The Sea Rovers have always been a proponent of safe diving, and provided ample speaking platforms for diving educators to share any new techniques and methods that would improve diver skills.

Throughout the sixties and seventies, Sea Rovers were safety divers and project leaders for saturation projects around the country, staff photographers for National Geographic projects around the world, and lead some of the first dive trips to exotic Caribbean destinations.  Others, were pioneers in deep ocean diving and exploration, discovering hot water vents, and later, such notable shipwrecks as the Titanic and the Bismark.  Exploration would also continue in other notable locations, such as Scotland, where searches continued throughout the years to positively (or not) identify the existence of the Loch Ness monster.  One such scientific exploration in 1976 involved several Associate and Honorary Sea Rovers, including Dr. Harold Edgerton, Emory Kristof, Marty Klein, and Sam Raymond.  Emory recalled some details of that trip a few years ago:
“There have been some very, very good times spent on expeditions with Rovers, probably starting with Loch Ness.  Sam Raymond went over and helped us set up the Benthos cameras for the first time as we tried to figure out how to bait the Loch Ness monster underwater into the National Geographic’s cameras, and I still remember with great fondness everything we did.  On this trip, Doc Edgerton was on the project doing sonar, and Bob Rines had a remote camera.

One night after a rather long episode at the Drum and Drocket Bar, we took out the Geographic boat – it was about three in the morning.  I think Doc had gone to bed early, but Marty was there, and Sam had his clarinet, so we decided to do a little hydrophoning in Loch Ness.  We put down the hydrophones, and got a really wonderful recording of Sam’s clarinet playing through about three hundred feet of water.  That water made a hell of a nice filter.  Sam then put the bell of his clarinet under the surface of the water, and made some wonderful mallard duck squawking noises with it that we got on tape.  I’m sure that one of these days, someone will resurrect that tape and present it as the sounds of the Loch Ness monster!”