Profiles & Interviews

Jakub Šimánek lives for diving and dives for a living. He inherited his passion for the underwater world from his father at a young age. Currently, a Factory Instructor Trainer for the Liberty closed circuit rebreather (CCR), Jakub has been a part of the development team at the dive equipment manufacturer Divesoft since 2012.

In my line of work as a dive industry professional, I attend a lot of dive shows and get to meet a lot of people, most of them nice and interesting in various ways. It was also at a dive show in Italy, many years ago, that I first met Andrea Donati and his partner, Daniela Spaziani, of Ponza Diving.

Thirty-four-year-old Marissa Eckert is a passionate full-time cave and technical diving instructor who co-owns Hidden Worlds Diving in Fort White, Florida, USA, with her partner, James Draker. When she is not teaching, Eckert enjoys traveling all over the world, exploring new places, hiking through the jungle and doing challenging new dives that help her grow and learn as a diver.

Greek diving is back on the menu. X-RAY MAG’s Peter Symes asks Avgerinos Vrazopoulos, the director of Scuba Hellas—the Greek diving marketing group—for insights into the development of new dive locations and trip packages for international divers.

Powerful images can help achieve a goal. Art can stir up emotions in people and emotions lead to action, leading to change. By conveying one strong message in a visually striking image, viewers may stop and think. They might decide to make real changes in their lives, affecting their friends and families—the message spreading outward, ultimately leading to a real and positive change all over the world. It all starts with a single image.

Bill “Hogarth” Main is the co-founder of the Woodville Karst Plain Project (WKPP) deep cave diving team, a world record breaking cave explorer, and godfather of tech and cave diving minimalism. With an energy that belies his 64 years, Bill Main climbed out of his car to greet me, looking every inch a child of the ‘60s in a Beanie hat, with wild wraparound sunglasses.

Rarely in life do we encounter someone who was as impressive yet unassuming, humble, and gracious as R.W. “Bill” Hamilton, Ph.D. On September 16, 2011, Bill died surrounded by his family and close friends. Within hours, e-mail and telephones reached thousands of people and the news of his passing went viral. Nearly four hundred scurried to make plans for attending his memorial service. So what made this particular man so special?

In 1979, Lamar Hires was 23, living in Jacksonville, on the east coast of the US state of Florida, and harboring a dream from his childhood. As a child, his family had taken him to the Florida Keys and he had subsequently grown up watching television shows such as Sea Hunt, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Flipper. The adventure of scuba excited him and he wanted to learn to dive.

Samuel H. "Doc" Gruber began studying sharks in 1961, perhaps before any other scientist had done full-time research on a living shark. During his long career, he founded the Bimini Biological Field Station (Shark Lab), the Shark Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a United Nations organization based in Switzerland, and the American Elasmobranch Society.