News >>

DIVE RITE 25 Years On

DIVE RITE 25 Years On

Thu 16th Jul 2009

LAMAR HIRES – President and CEO of Dive Rite. – The original Tec Diving Equipment.

Open water certified in 1979, Lamar and a friend began driving from their home in Jacksonville to north central Florida to explore the springs (and look for girls). Without proper training or equipment, they began diving Peacock Springs, Little River Springs and any spring they could find in Ned Deloach’s “Underwater Guide to Florida”. Too poor to think about paying an instructor, Lamar and his dive buddy stopped for air fills at Aquifer Dive Center in Jacksonville one afternoon. There they met an instructor named, Wes Skiles, who topped off their tanks and asked them where they were going.

“We were too nieve to know any better. We told Wes we were diving Peacock and he immediately became worried,” Lamar explains, “he said we had to get training and we shrugged him off. We didn’t have money for training. Then he tried to give us a copy of Sheck Exley’s “Blueprint for Survival”. I shrugged that off, too. I didn’t have the $4 to pay for the book.”

Instead, Wes gave them Sheck’s guidebook and as Lamar began reading it he realized they HAD to get cave trained. They returned a few weeks later and Wes not only certified Lamar, but also gained a newfound dive partner. Lamar and his buddy continued checking out all the springs in the guidebook hoping to find something that had been overlooked. They had heard about Rock Bluff and when they discovered it was walled out at a tight restriction, they began digging. Lamar brought Wes back and together they surveyed the system and pushed it another 1400 feet.

Lamar went on to become a modern day explorer and dive pioneer. He has spent over twenty five years exploring and surveying the extensive underwater cave systems near his home in north central Florida. A legend among Florida cave divers, Lamar is known for his expertise in sidemount diving. He developed the very first training guidelines for sidemounting and has taught many of today’s well-known sidemount divers.

Underwater exploration, education and conservation are a passion that has led Lamar all over the world. He has mapped and explored cave systems from the rugged mountains of Japan to the remote jungles of the Dominican Republic. Not a stranger to the ocean, Lamar’s curiosity for exploration has taken him to the rarely dived icy waters of the Antarctic as well as countless wreck dives off the coasts of Florida and the eastern United States.

When Lamar began diving in 1979, exploration-quality dive equipment was not commercially available. At that time, technical divers made their own gear, fashioning backplates out of metal stop signs and sealing flashlights in plastic bags. In 1984, Lamar joined a start-up dive equipment company called “Dive Rite” and there he helped bring to market the first buoyancy compensator for double tanks known as the “Classic Wing.” Dive Rite also mass produced the first metal backplate and invented the “Bridge,” which was the industry’s first user programmable Nitrox – dive computer. In 1997, Lamar bought Dive Rite and has grown the company into a worldwide dive manufacturer with distribution in over forty-five countries. Today, Lamar continues as CEO, product development guru and top dive guy; leading a company of dedicated divers who share Lamar’s passion for developing state-of-the-art dive gear for fellow divers.

Return To Article Index