PADI Rescue Diver Course

Diving History and Experience:

Cliff Cammert (Director of HiTek Scuba) has been a diver since 1987, he was officially certified in California in 1989. His first picture taken of him diving is in his High School yearbook at age 17. He then went into the NAVY, and dove all over the world for 6 years. When he came back he decided to become an instructor, and has been involved with the SCUBA teaching process since 1994. He received his PADI Instructor rating in 1995.

He has led many SCUBA excursions both as an Instructor and as a Dive Master all over the world (Guam, Siapan, Truk, Palau, Yap, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Thailand, Australia, the Red Sea, the Persian gulf, Kenya, Grand Cayman, and the Mediterranean Sea to name a few). He has logged over 1900 dives since he was certified in 1987.

His true area of expertise however, is NW cold water diving, including leading many different trips to Canada over the last 12 years. He also specializes in search and recovery operations, if its been lost underwater, he can usually find it! This includes planning and executing trips to find wrecks. He is also the training officer for SWORD (Southern Washington Organization of Rescue Divers), who's charter is to perform search and recovery operations for Clark and Skamania Counties.

He was a collection diver for the Seattle Aquarium for 5 years. In that capacity he worked at collecting live specimens from all over the NW for the Aquarium. He was involved in collection trips, and assisted the Seattle Aquarium marine biologists in many different areas such as collecting, counting, feeding, cleaning, and care for a variety of different NW species.

Cliff was a member of the Aquarium Docent Program, and was trained as a Pacific NW marine life Docent, during this time he was specially trained and took part in the Sea Otter Watch program in which a trained team of volunteers successfully assisted the recovery and rehabilitation of Sea Otters. During this same time Cliff was part of the dive team used to film the Discovery Channel program "Ultimate Guide to the Octopus". The teams mission was finding and filming the Pacific Giant Octopus. They were very successful, and the show aired back in 2000. Part of his job was to help locate the animals, and then more importantly to get them out in the open gently, and in front of the camera.

In more recent news Cliff has elevated in the ranks of Technical Diving. As a full Trimix Diver, he now conducts Deep Mixed Gas Dives to 300ft (give or take) and documents via HD Video what he finds there. In his words, he finds that managing multiple deco bottles, a video camera, wreck penetration reels, low visibility, cold water, and perfect buoyancy at the same time is, "a bit of a challenge".

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