Rich Keller

I have been a diver since 1970 when my cousin and I bought a tank and regulator along with a book on how to use them. I did most of my diving at that time in the Huntington and Northport bay areas of Long Island New York. When I went to college four years later I took a course and got certified. Six years after that I took a commercial diving course and spent the next ten years working as a commercial diver.
Most of my time as a commercial diver was spent working for Xplo a company that specialized in underwater demolition and bridge reconstruction. Other companies I worked for had me doing pipe line work, pipe penetration, power plants and saturation diving. The most hours I spent under water in a single year was 1,237 and my deepest dive was to 686'.
About twenty years ago I got into kayak diving. On Long Island beach access is limited so this got me to places easily that could only be reached by boat and did not require me to trailer a boat and find a boat ramp in the area. I set up a small umbilical to run off a scuba tank so I could leave the tank in the kayak as I towed it behind me. Due to the size of the kayak I had to keep the size of the umbilical to 50', so diving with it limits me to about 35-40'. This works very well for me when I am going for lobster in the shallow and very rocky waters of the north shore.