THE HANS HASS FIFTY FATHOMS AWARD
Bev Morgan was a beach boy in the 1940s when the first Aqua-Lungs started to appear in California. They were expensive and often sold with no more briefing than“ don’ t hold your breath on the way up”.
Inadequate training resulted in many diving deaths, and the scuba divers of the California beach Lifeguards had to recover the bodies. Morgan worked as an LA County Lifeguard on the rescue boat, Baywatch, and had firsthand experience of recovering dead divers. The death rate got so high that the LA County Board of Supervisors took steps to ban the Aqua-Lung from its beaches.
By this time, friends at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla had developed a scuba diving instruction programme, and Morgan convinced his supervisor to send him, and Al Tillman, along to learn more.
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Having got this new“ diving bug” Morgan decided to try and make a career from it
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Morgan reworked the curriculum into the LA County diver training programme, and later upgraded it to America’ s first scuba instructors training programme, including the first manual. Underwater Safety carried the credit“ Prepared by: Bev B. Morgan July 1954”, and it became the foundation of certifying divers and instructors’ programmes in America.
Having got this new“ diving bug” Morgan decided to try and make a career from it. He and surfing buddy Hap Jacobs opened a store named Dive N’ Surf. Morgan found a report in the Scripps library by Hugh Bradner that endorsed foam neoprene as the best insulating material. Bradner called it a“ wetsuit” and Morgan quickly acquired some foam neoprene and built his first suit, which worked very well. Encouraged, Morgan built suits for buddies and it soon became part of the business at Dive N’ Surf. But Jacobs soon decided to open a pure surfing shop and sold his share to the Meistrell twins, Bob and Bill.
Morgan’ s mechanical aptitude emerged when he re-engineered improvements to a US Divers Mistral twin hose regulator. With neither permission nor acknowledgement, US Divers
02 In full dive kit for commercial diving
03 Outside Dive‘ N Surf in California circa 1955
04 Holding bronze diving masks for surface-supplied abalone diving in the 1950s
05 A nurse shark catches the last rays of sunlight at Picard