LAMAR HIRES
CAVE EXPLORER
FLORIDA • USA
In 1982 a good friend and co-explorer Wes Skiles called Lamar and informed him of a job opening at Branford Dive Center in Branford Florida. The opportunity to explore and still pay the rent seemed to be a logical career decision at the time so he took the job. Wes was Lamar’s cave instructor and Lamar was the first cave student that Wes ever certified so the two of them working together and exploring together was a great fit. A few years later Lamar left the dive store to get in on the ground floor of new dive equipment company, Dive Rite. After 13 years of hard work and thousands of dives, he took over the company in 1997 and continues today as CEO and President of Dive Rite. Much of the equipment that we have come to know as “standard” for cave and technical diving are products of Lamar’s innovation—Dive Rite offered the first commercially available nitrox computer and created the backplate and harness with 11 inch standardized bolt pattern, to name just a few!
After five years of cave diving Lamar became a cave diving instructor. To date he has certified over 600 individuals to cave dive and logged over 3000 cave dives around the world. While leading remote cave diving expeditions to places like Japan, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Australia, and Antarctica are part of Lamar’s passion, he can still be found diving, mapping, and exploring the caves of North Florida on any given weekend.
“There is still so much to learn right here in our own backyard. Places like Madison Blue, where we are more than a mile back and it is still going, are just as exciting as any dive on the other side of the Globe.”
Service to the National Speleological Society Cave Diving Section include
• Training Chairman for five years
• Chairman for two years
• 1996 awarded fellowship in the organization
• 1998 recipient of the Outstanding Service Award
• Contributing author to the NSS Cave Diving Manual “An Overview” Cave Diver Student Workbook and numerous articles on cave diving.
• Member of the Chairman’s advisory panel
• Side mount Cave diving program
Other affiliations and achievements
• Recipient of the 2000 Florida Springs Exploration Award
• Board of advisors for IANTD
• Training coordinator for the International Underwater Cave Rescue & Recovery (IUCRR) organization
Organized and designed by Advanced Diver Magazine © WET 2006 All rights reserved