A Throwback Thursday Album: Island of the Sharks

Tom D and I later became known as the "Nitro Boys"

by Skip Cohen

​In the early '90s, thanks to my good buddy Helmut Horn, I got my certification in Scuba. That introduction to the sport launched a quest of over 300 dives over the next three years and a reminder of a funny tagline I heard about diving..."It's not a hobby but a sickness!" LOL

But there's a fun aspect to my love for diving - like the degrees of separation Kevin Bacon game. Helmut Horn introduced me to diving. At the time, he was President of Coastal Hotels, which managed Cheeca Lodge in the Keys. Here's the first connection - Helmut is an incredible artist and Hasselblad shooter. When Hasselblad sold Ansel Adam's Cadillac for charity, Helmut bought it and returned to one of his hotels, the Carmel Highlands Inn, just down the street from Ansel's house, where I picked the car up initially.

Helmut introduced me to Tom Danielson, also a Hasselblad underwater shooter. A few years later, Tom and his wife Linda were headed to Bonaire on a trip, and I needed a dive buddy if I wanted to join them. Somebody suggested Bob Rose (now teaching at RIT), who is known by so many of you in the industry, especially from his days with the MAC Group. Well, those two knuckleheads, Tom and Bob, became my most frequent dive buddies. I got my kids certified along the way, and my daughter Jaime came on many of our trips as well.

At one point, we were doing so much diving that somebody would go to the DEMA (Dive Equipment Manufacturers Association) show and find another trip for everyone to do, and the "family" started growing—That's Jeff Gunderman, then at Kodak, in the first row on the left, me and Bob Rose. My daughter Jaime is under the Okeanos sign on the boat. 

These are from a trip to Cocos Island, AKA the Island of Sharks. I describe it as the most fun I never wanted to do again. It was definitely advanced diving with thermoclines and strong currents. In fact, a few weeks later, one of the dive boats lost two divers.

But in spite of some hard diving, I got to see a part of the underwater world that only a few people in the world have ever experienced - and thousands of sharks!  In 1999, I got a call from Bob Rose inviting me to join him at the IMAX theater to see the newly released "Island of the Sharks" film. To keep it real, we took our scuba masks and snorkels with us to watch the movie! LOL

These days, the film is available on YouTube, and I've included it below.

Here's the bottom line about Throwback Thursday: Photography allows us to take incredible walks down Memory Lane. Those "walks" are powerful reminders of the importance of imaging in our lives. If you haven't taken the time today to hunt down a few old photographs, trust me and do it now. As I've quoted Jodi Picoult hundreds of times, photographs remind us of a time when everything was perfect, even if just for a heartbeat!

Happy Throwback Thursday!

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