Pioneering Jersey’s Dive Culture

Unpredictable weather, variable visibility, and cold water add to the challenges of New Jersey scuba diving.

Pioneer shipwreck diver Michael De Camp.
Photo by Bjoern Kils.

Factor in rudimentary gear and little training. Those are the conditions Michael de Camp faced when he first splashed into the Atlantic almost 60 years ago.

De Camp, 81, is a pioneer of New Jersey shipwreck diving. When he first dove here in the early 1950s few had even heard of scuba. Today, dive shops provide instruction, gear, and charter boats to ferry divers to wreck sites. De Camp did not have such options. He would hitch rides with fishing boat captains to spots where fish congregated. De Camp knew he’d find shipwrecks there.

Even very deep dives were made on “just plain air,” de Camp says. Today’s deep divers use special mixes of nitrogen, oxygen, and sometimes helium for such depths. And buoyancy control devices, which help a diver stay level at a certain depth, did not exist. De Camp’s goal was just to sink. “We weighted ourselves for the bottom.”

De Camp’s friend Carlton Ray, curator of the New York Aquarium, was the closest thing he had to a scuba instructor. Ray took de Camp on his first dive in the Bahamas, where his only advice was, “don’t hold your breath.” One session was all it took and de Camp was hooked. Since he “couldn’t get to the Bahamas very often,” de Camp tried the Jersey shore.

De Camp, who grew up in Short Hills and lived in Morristown, eventually organized the state’s first dive trips out of Point Pleasant in the late 1950s. He also put together the first recreational dive to the Andrea Doria, just 10 years after she sunk.  De Camp’s underwater photography caught the eye of Frank Mundus, the shark fisherman who is believed to be the inspiration for the character Quint in the movie Jaws. He asked de Camp to be the photographer and shark cage operator for his documentary In the World of Sharks.

When de Camp was not diving or teaching at the Peck School in Morristown, the Princeton graduate lectured across the country about shipwrecks.

Long retired to North Carolina, de Camp still dives—and has frequent flashbacks to times spent with shark fisherman Mundus. “North Carolina has a lot of wrecks with a lot of sharks,” de Camp says. “Last year I spent fifteen minutes just staring one down until he went away.”

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