About me
I didn’t begin writing until 2007, underwater photography exhibitions began in 2020, and watercolor paintings in 2021. My current underwater photos can be found at Olena Gallery in Hawi.
Besides my underwater adventures, I have published stories about spiritual experiences, wild turkeys, and geckos. They have appeared in Lost Magazine, Black Earth Journal, Ke Ola Magazine, Kohala Mountain News, and Hawaii Writers Guild’s Literary Journals.
For most of my career, I was a magazine publisher, who oversaw teams of creative talent, to bring art and useful information to the audiences. I led art directors, designers, writers, editors, advertising and circulation staff, sales, and production people. I pretty much had a hand in everyone’s job, so I knew how to get the best from them. My teams won many awards and recognition nationally and internationally. In this role, I was passionate about what the team could produce as a whole, generating millions of dollars for the parent companies.
Since 2000, I have been a PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) Dive Master taking groups of scuba divers around the world for their underwater adventures. I took photos during that time, but only made albums and DVDs for these divers. In 2019, I learned to freedive and that made a big difference being with the ocean creatures up close and to interact with them. I had my first photographic exhibit in North Kohala in November, 2020.
I am also a writer whose stories and photos have appeared in Kohala Mountain News and Ke Ola Magazine about my encounters with the green turtles, spinner dolphins, and sharks. I try to show the marine life personalities, behaviors, and essence. We have no idea how important they are to the planet and our lives. I’d like to share what I see in them to as many as I can. For it is only us who can protect and save them.
When I lived in Hong Kong, I wrote about the places I visited, the festivals, the food, getting around, but they were stories about what I was doing and thinking. These stories were seen in a WordPress blog that I had years ago.
In Seattle, I volunteered as a beach naturalist for the Seattle Aquarium, and I would take groups of people on tours of the beaches during the low tides of summer. The low tides of winter were done at night, and may have been more interesting than the daytime tours. I wrote about the things I saw and took photos. I was a seal sitter in my neighborhood where the baby harbor seals would be left on the beach while their moms hunted food. These seal pups would be subjected to dogs, hoards of people, and boaters who could come close to the beach to look. The seal sitters would keep these encounters to a minimum.
Moving to Hawaii and swimming in the ocean became a natural place to observe and learn about fish behaviors. I had been spoiled by scuba diving, so the reef fish weren’t of much interest to me, but after a time, I couldn’t help but notice unusual things taking place. In 2018 I went to Thailand for a week of scuba diving on a liveaboard. I decided to buy an underwater camera and that got me started shooting on my daily swims back home.
