Robert Frazier here. I'm 71 years old, a retired Navy diver, and I live just outside Fort Pierce, Florida, which is where the Navy trained its frogmen during the war, so I'm in good company. My grandson set this page up for me last July, a few weeks after the first anniversary of the Captain's death, and showed me how to put words on it. I type with two fingers. Bear with me.

I learned to dive in 1946 in a canvas suit and a copper helmet, breathing air that came down a hose from a pump on deck, with two men up top holding my lines and my life. You went down a ladder in lead shoes and walked on the bottom like a man on the moon, more than twenty years before anybody walked on the moon. You did your work and you came up. You did not swim. You did not look around much, because in the harbors where the Navy sent us there was nothing to see but mud.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean, a French naval officer named Jacques-Yves Cousteau had gotten together with an engineer named Émile Gagnan, and in 1943 they worked out the Aqua-Lung. The trick of it was a valve that handed the diver air at the same pressure as the water around him, only when he breathed in. Put a tank of air on your back with that valve and you didn't need a hose, or a helmet, or a pump, or two men on deck. You could swim. You could turn upside down. You could go where you liked and look at what you liked.

Nothing changed more in my lifetime of diving. Before him, the bottom of the sea belonged to men like me, paid by the Navy to go down there and work. After him, it belonged to anybody with a tank, a little training and a little nerve. He gave it away. And then he spent the rest of his life showing all of us what we'd been given.

The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau came on American television in 1968 and ran until 1976. When it was on, the television was the boss of our house. My wife, Eunice, made popcorn. Our son Larry and our daughter Sally were both in high school when it started, and that's the age when kids stop watching anything with their parents, but they watched this. Later, when they were off at college, they'd call home after a show just to ask, "Dad, did you see it?"

I won't tell you what happened in particular shows, because after thirty years I'd get it wrong and somebody would write in. Here's what I remember. The Calypso pushing out of some port with the crew on deck. The divers going over the side backward and the whole screen turning blue. Sharks, lots of sharks, and whales, and octopus, and sea otters, and coral reefs so bright you'd think somebody painted them. The little yellow diving saucer going down into the dark with two men inside. The red caps. And his voice, with that accent, talking about a fish like it was a poem.

What I remember most is that he showed us the animals as creatures with their own lives, not as something to catch. That sounds ordinary now. In 1968 it wasn't. I had spent twenty years in the water and I learned things from that program every single week.

I'll be honest about one thing. His first big film, The Silent World, has things in it nobody would do today. They set off dynamite on a reef to count the fish, and the scene with the sharks is hard to watch. That was 1956, and that was how people thought then, me included. He changed his mind, and he spent the rest of his life changing ours.

Here's what hasn't changed: the water is still the boss. It doesn't care how much your equipment cost. Respect it, plan your dive, and come up slow.

Twenty years in the Navy as a hard-hat diver, most of it on salvage work. Eight years with a commercial salvage outfit working the Florida coast. Twenty-six years teaching scuba at the Y on weeknights and Saturday mornings, a little over a thousand students, and not one of them hurt on my watch. I put the whole story down, as best I remember it, on a page of its own.

I've been in and on this ocean for more than fifty years, and I'll tell you plainly: there's less of it than there was. Fewer fish on the reefs off this coast than when I was young. Fewer big groupers. More trash on the bottom. The Captain spent the last twenty-five years of his life telling anybody who'd listen that the sea is not endless and that we're using it up. He was right, and he was early, and most people weren't listening.

Here's what an old man asks of you:

	Don't touch the coral, and don't stand on it. It took longer to grow than you've been alive.
	Don't take anything off a reef but a picture, and leave the shells on the beach for the next kid.
	If you see trash down there, bring it up. Every dive. I still do.
	Take a child snorkeling. Put a mask on that child's face and show him the bottom. That's how it starts.

Two other pages on GeoCities.us I've enjoyed. The Man in the Red Cap is by a young lady in San Diego, a surf teacher and divemaster, who grew up watching the Captain on her grandmother's floor. And over in the Reef, Scuba Diary: Getting Certified at 45 covers the pool sessions, the quarry dives and the first reef. Forty-five is young, son. Keep going.