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Sea Salt: Memories & Essays by Stan Waterman
Sea Salt: Memories & Essays by Stan Waterman
I was diving at Alcyone in Cocos, a sea-mount and known for quite difficult diving conditions. Most of the divers had already retreated to the panga but I was on closed-circuit, so had more time.
When I finally decided to leave, I came across Stan Waterman, still busy in the fierce current, effortlessly focused on a tiny jawfish with his massive video outfit while countless hammerheads whirled about his head, ignored.
He opted to join me on the ascent and we hung together while he made quite long open-circuit deco-stops on the way up.
Above us, the Pacific Ocean was exploding with power, and I watched the underside of the panga as it bucked and dipped on its anchorline. The surface was punctuated from time to time with clouds of vomit from those waiting above. I had time to reflect that diving was not so much an active as an intellectual sport.
Stan was then 80 years old. He is now 84.
The growing frailty of age can mislead the less-experienced into thinking that it reduces competence. Stan has the diving competence that comes with having spent more time in the water than some of our companions on that trip had had on the planet.
However, he is also one of the kindest gentlemen I know, and he usually responded to well-meaning advice from youthful 'experts' with a merry 'Good for you!'
As you can guess, I am a fan. Stan could fill a set of volumes to match the Encyclopaedia Britannica if he were to commit all his experiences to paper.
So his modest volume Sea Salt: Memories and Essays can give only the briefest of tastes of what this wonderful man has tucked away in his memory banks.
I suppose Stan Waterman is best known for his underwater camerawork during the shooting of the feature film The Deep, but his break came when he sold National Geographic the rights to a film he had made of his family's tropical odyssey, after he had taken them to live in Tahiti many years earlier.
In 1968 he collaborated with Peter Gimbal on the shark classic Blue Water, White Death, and his film-making continued with 10 years of production with friend Peter Benchley for the American Sportsman series on US television. In 1994 the Discovery Channel broadcast a two-hour special on Stan, The Man Who Loves Sharks.
Stan is a diving raconteur of the first order. I can't do better than quote from Benchley's foreword to this volume: 'Stan Waterman has spent more than half a century in, on and under the sea, and in these pages he takes you with him on the amazing ride he calls his life.
'Sea Salt is far more than just a catalogue of critters and close calls. Stan has a profound rapport with the sea, and his command of language and literature eloquently conveys the depth of his feeling.
'As you enjoy each grain of Sea Salt, I hope that your richest reward will be a sense of comradeship with the very special man who's sharing with you the story of his utterly beguiling journey.'
There are plenty of quietly spoken, well-read, educated Americans and Stan is one of them, but it is rare that such a man has devoted so much of his life to scuba-diving. I only wish I had met him 40 years before I did.
John Bantin
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Sea Salt: Memories & Essays by Stan Waterman
(New World Publications, ISBN 187834840X). Hardback, 320pp, £16.85
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