Page 26 - AlertDiver_Spring2013

AD: Thanks for taking
the call. I know you are
a DAN member, and we
appreciate it.
Crosby: No worries. I get
Alert Diver, and I actually read it — great information!
We have a family membership, and my son, Django, is 17 and
really passionate about diving. Ed Stetson in Santa Barbara was his
scuba instructor, and Django took to it like a duck. He’s a strong
swimmer, and with me being 71 and Jan being 60, we love diving
together as a family, knowing Django is looking out for us.
I’ve been diving for 43 years, so it’s become second nature
to me. I haven’t been certified that long though. At first we
just had a compressor on my boat, and I went out diving with
experienced friends who taught me enough to keep me out of
trouble. You would have laughed at some of our original gear.
In the early years of my dive adventures we sailed Mayan to
Hawaii and salvaged aluminum sheeting for backplates and
held the tanks in place with seatbelts from a junked car. It
wasn’t until I wanted to dive off other boats that I realized I
had to be certified to get my tanks filled.
One of my best friends is dive-equipment manufacturer Bev
Morgan. He is well known in dive circles for developing Kirby
Morgan commercial dive helmets among many other things.
We met at the marina in Santa Barbara a long time ago, and
we have been diving and sailing together forever. After meeting
Bev, finding modern gear was never a problem again.
AD: Bret Gilliam quoted Morgan’s recollection of your
early years together as follows: “He had this big Alden
schooner, and he used it to get away from the crazy side of the
music business and concert tours.... I had a lot of underwater
camera gear and time to break away to do things. Crosby had
a great sailboat set up for diving, enjoyed diving and was a
good guy. The boat always also seemed to have a lot of very
good-looking girls aboard. Let’s see now: big sailboat, lots of dive
gear, lots of camera gear, good food, good music, lots of money
and time enough between concerts and work to go anywhere we
wanted.” It does sound like a recipe for lifelong memories.
Crosby: It’s true, we’ve had some amazing dive adventures
off Mayan. Actually, the waters of my backyard, the Channel
Islands off Santa Barbara, have provided some of the best
dives I’ve had anywhere. You can get good days with amazing
visibility, and when we started diving there were abalone and
lobsters everywhere. These days I
dive the Channel Islands from my
own boat sometimes and from one
of Truth Aquatics’ dive boats other
times. I love just getting out there.
I’ll take almost any excuse to get
in the water. The ocean is real. It is
welcoming if you respect it, and it’s
a great teacher. It can punish you if
you underestimate it, but the time
I’ve spent underwater is the most
purely satisfying time I’ve spent in
life. The more time a person spends
in contact with the ocean, the more
complete that person will become.
AD: If you had to pick one song
from your catalog to represent
your love of the sea, which would
you choose?
Crosby: Graham Nash wrote a
beautiful song called “To The Last
Whale” that we first recorded in
1975 on our Wind on the Water
duet album. I wrote a harmony
called “Critical Mass” to be played
at the front end of that song, and
it came to the attention of the
Cousteau Society. They graciously
24 | SPRING 2013
MEMBER
PROFILE
DIVE SLATE //