With great trepidation, he sent me to Catalina as divemaster on a chartered boat with twenty other divers. Staring up at the kelp from the seafloor as it spirals toward the surface is a sight you'll always remember. I know I'll never forget how the sport divers attacked the food spread on the deck like a school of malnourished barracuda.

Using my devious talents for promotion, I pulled off all types of crazy stunts to increase business, endeavors that doubled sales inside six months. Besides standing a bikini-clad mannequin out on the curb in front of the store, painting an aircraft belly tank fluorescent orange and installing it on the roof after filling it with more bikini-clad mannequins, I began phrasing strange witticisms on a theater marquee in the parking lot. One traffic stopper, as I remember, read, KEEP AMERICA GREEN, BAN LOBSTERS FROM THE HIGHWAYS. I always felt smug about the fact that we far outsold Mel Fisher's dive shop in Manhattan Beach.

Of course, Fisher got the last laugh after he found the treasure-laden Spanish galleon Atocha.

I also became a legend of sorts when I took over the recorded dive report that divers phoned for water conditions before heading into the deep. Instead of the old austere "This is the Aquatic Center dive report," in a droning voite that murmured, "The surf is three to four feet, the water temperature is seventy-six degrees, and the visibility is ten feet," I came on and said, "Hi, ho, divers, this is your daredevil darling of the dismal depths, Horace P. Quagmire, once again with the latest report on diving conditions." I even threw in recipes for abalone. And, not one to let an opportunity pass, I ended the report by mentioning several items of merchandise that happened to be on sale. Don't ask me why, but they loved it. California divers still ask me to autograph their books with Horace P. Quagmire.

When business slowed in midafternoon, I sat at a card table in the back of the store and wrote a book called The Mediterranean Caper on a portable typewriter. After making up my mind that I had at last found my niche in life, and signing with New York literary agent Peter Lampack, I sadly left the Aquatic Center dive shops to pursue my new career as a writer. Spencer, Merker, Wood, and I shook hands all around, and they were kind enough to present me with an orange-dial Dora dive watch that I've treasured for over twenty years. I wrote all three of them in as characters in Raise the Titanic!, which became a best-seller and a terrible movie.

Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, with the success of Raise the Titanic!, I now had the time and funds to search for lost shipwrecks.