The second year I worked at the Island Villas I got fired. I lied to my boss, and one thing you didn’t do with Mr. Olsen, was lie. I told him I had to go back to the mainland to take a draft physical.

He said, “OK”.

I wasn’t going for that reason, I was competing in a spearfishing competition. (See the mistake). He found out I lied when he saw my picture in the paper. My team won third prize. I have a lot of third prizes to my credit during my life. It was early in the summer.

I was packing up to go back home, very heavyhearted and embarrassed when the local hard hat diver, Al Hansen, asked me if I would finish out the summer putting on a show underwater in his tourist attraction. He had a 27 foot diameter, 8 foot deep, Aquarian tank there in Avalon.

Al Hansen dove in hard hat gear, and took care of the moorings in Avalon Harbor. They had to be inspected, I think every year, and that was what he did. He had a small 22 foot boat named the, ‘Jeannie’. It had a compressor on it and supplied air through a hose to the diver on the bottom in the hard hat dive gear. I would be using the same gear in the tank. The tourists loved it. They thought they were watching John Wayne in an old movie.

Of course, I jump at the chance to be a hard hat diver. I had never done that and I wanted to learn how. I finished my summer working for Al, and his wife, Norma, also a diver. I dove not only in the tank but off the ‘Jeannie’ inspecting moorings in the Avalon Harbor. By the end of the summer I had logged well over 100 hours in the hard hat.

Two of my three near death experiences in diving happened when I was in the hard hat gear. They both happened not in the ocean, but in the tank in the center of town.

The gear we were using was called a Jap Hat. It came from Japan I guess. Not exactly politically correct name in today’s world.

I came to work at the aquarium and Al’s two children were there. They were in their very early teens. Their parents were both busy somewhere else and they were taking care of the aquarium that morning. They helped me get into my dive gear, started the compressor, which Al normally did, and put the ladders into the tank so I could climb up, and then down into the water.

I was not feeling very well that day and not paying attention like a good diver should, which is a cardinal sin for any diver, but a really big bad no-no for a hard hat diver, because your life depends on your tender and the people out of the water not just on yourself. The kids helped me up the ladder into the tank. They closed the faceplate, and down into the water I went. They pulled up the ladder, and went out to take care of the small tanks in the yard.

I started walking around still really not feeling very well when I realized there is no air coming into my helmet, that means get out of the water in about five minutes or die.

I had a microphone in my helmet so I could talk to the tourists looking into the window at me. I called to the kids to get me out, but they were not paying any attention to me, because they were used to my chattering all day long on the loudspeaker.

To the couple of people looking through the glass I asked over the speaker, “Can you understand me?” They nodded their head yes. I said, “Get those two kids over here, I have no air. I only have a couple of minutes to live. This is not part of the show.” The man ran over and told the kids and they came running back, put the latter back into the tank, and I climbed out. They opened up the faceplate just in time as I was getting ready to pass out.

I had another scary few minutes in the dive tank, when I was first learning about hard hat diving. I had been using the gear for about a week and started feeling comfortable in the suit. The air came in the top of the helmet and the suit would fill with air because there is no automatic exhaust to let it out

There was a valve in the helmet that I needed to push by putting my head on it and pushing backwards, it was on the back right side of the helmet. When I started to get too light because of the buoyancy the air in the suit was creating, I would tilt my head back, and pushed the valve. Being a novice without any instruction book I couldn’t tell when the air was all gone unless I felt the water coming in and running down my back.

My system worked quite well. The water would just accumulate around my feet. This particular day I had been in the tank for about four hours and we had a big crowd watching me through the window.

I was showing off , (I know that’s hard for you to believe), and reached out to grab the tail of a very big stingray. It wasn’t dangerous because we had cut the stinger off the tail. I caught the tail and held on. I had a lot of air in the suit at that particular moment because I was concentrating on the ray instead my suit, and was light in the water. The ray pulled me along and I was laid out flat as he did. The air in my suit shifted from my helmet to my feet. Instantly, I was upside down. I started to laugh, and then I felt the water that had accumulated in my feet was now running down my back into my helmet, filling it up.

Not becoming inverted in a hardhat ring is one of the first things you learn in a diving school. As the water rapidly filled my helmet, I used every stroke I knew from skin diving for what seemed like for hours, and finally managed to get one foot down. The air rushed back into my helmet giving me enough head buoyancy to get the other foot down. The water was flowing down my back into my feet again. I was a happy camper once more, and a lot smarter than I was just a few minutes earlier. The people outside looking in the window were happy, and clapping as well as laughing. I was just hoping that my comments, while all this was going on, didn’t go out over the speaker, but I think maybe it did, and that’s why they were laughing. We learn by experience, if we live.