I believe that I am one of the lucky guys, having been able to start diving in the military. Why lucky? Because my first diving experience didn't cost a cent or, better, an Austrian schilling.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get the chance to experience the full military diving education as I had wished. A few years later, however, the diving industry took me in, and I began working as a divemaster for "Sea Pro", a diving school in a hotel resort on the beaches of the Caribbean. The Dominican Republic gave me the chance to gain a lot of experience in scuba diving while guiding the dives in 5 difference languages above, and sign language below the surface, in the beautiful Caribbean sea.

To get my international open water instructor license from PADI, I needed to take my instructor course in New York. There, I joined an incredibly well organized diving school on Long Island named "Dive Inc., New York". "Diving Darryl", Walter, and all of my other friends helped me through my course, and at the same time they got me excited about technical and cave diving.

While working in the dive shop during the day I had the chance to learn a lot about the large range of scuba diving equipment on the market today. This gave me the motivation when I got back to start cave diving, as well as working on my specialties.

Back in Austria, I worked for "Dive In Vienna" and while teaching I took lessons, and soon the rebreather, dry suit and nitrox specialty licenses were soon mine.

I have spent some time in the Czech Republic, but the cold water and the diving environment in Europe made me leave again and catch up with a friend of mine in Tokyo. I met Patric on one of my trips to the Dominican Republic, where he was already teaching in one of the schools. It was on my next trip a few months later that we became real friends, and he taught me a lot about diving. At that time I was still a divemaster, and we did some nice deep dives together. After we met the third time we came back from New York and did some nice cave dives.

In between we met once in Vienna, but he took off with his wife, Nobuko, to Japan to open his own diving school. When I came to Tokyo I started at "Tokyo Scuba Club" working with him.

SCUBA & SURFING IMAGES