A Diver's Dream Come True

The Explorers Club is one of a kind now, but for sure there will be others like it. The real wonder is not how such a club finally came to be, but how it happened to be built on Grand Bahama, a flat, 430-square-mile island that 20 years ago supported only scrub palmetto, gangling pine trees and a human population of 2,000. Most of the 2,000 people endured on the scraggly land by cutting down the pine trees for an American entrepreneur named Wallace Groves. About 10 years ago Groves, in alliance with other individuals and syndicates, persuaded the Bahamian government to set aside 234 square miles of the island as a tax-free area where industry might start unburdened.

The details of just who controls what on Grand Bahama is at this point as complicated as the old Habsburg dynasty. It is sufficient to say that the system works. In the past four years on Grand Bahama there has been nothing but change. Today there are deepwater anchorages and labyrinthine channels where yesterday there was only shoaling, unbroken coast. There are three hydroponically nourished golf courses (and three more coming), all attractively contoured on barren, flat land that Robert Trent Jones would not have looked at twice. There are gambling casinos that can take money faster than it grows on trees. There is an international bazaar with the architecture and merchandise of many lands—the whole thing built only yesterday but each section artificially aged so that it looks like a page torn out of a 50-year-old Baedecker travel guide. In Freeport, the tax-free area, there are 5,000 hotel beds where there were none four years ago, and there will be about 3,000 more by the end of this year. It is said that one tourist last March leaned over to tie his shoelace, and before he had straightened up a hotel had been built around him and he was charged winter rates for occupying a three-room suite.

The Explorers Club was built on Grand Bahama rather than in one of the older resort areas primarily because a Canadian popcorn magnate named Frank Strean thought the booming island should have such a facility. Not knowing whom to count on to work out the details, Strean put the matter up to Art Arthur, a California scriptwriter of his acquaintance. Arthur knew just the man to head such an enterprise: Albert Tillman, a California State Polytechnic College associate professor, who first breathed underwater through one of the 10 regulators that had supposedly saturated the U.S. market 16 years ago. Over the years, whenever Art Arthur wanted to put some fanciful aquatic action into a script, he usually telephoned Al Tillman. "Al," he would ask, "if I had some creep put a baby in a box and float it down the Amazon, how long could the baby live?" or, "Al, is it possible to teach a gorilla to scuba-dive?"

It is safe to say that if a gorilla were willing to learn, Al Tillman, the executive director of the Explorers Club, could probably teach it. Tillman started free diving in the days of utter anarchy and free enterprise, when masks were made of inner tube, when redwood shingles were used as flippers, and long underwear and baby oil were the best insulators available to divers in cool California waters. Of all the homemade failures, in Tillman's mind, none equaled the wet suit devised by a diver named Jess Ranker. To increase the insulation, Ranker boiled his long underwear in Crisco, and the only trouble was that by the time Ranker squirmed into it, he was so greasy that the tire iron he used to dislodge abalones would keep squirting out of his hand. When scuba equipment finally arrived, Tillman brought a fair amount of order to a sport that, at the outset, seemed to relish chaos. The diving safety manual that he wrote for the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation was one of the first and one of the few worth having 10 years ago. Tillman founded the National Association of Underwater Instructors, whose program is today the criterion of safety. He started the International Underwater Film Festival, a carnival of water-soaked art that now plays to an audience of 2,300 in Santa Monica before going on one-night stands in a dozen major cities.

A great many of the divers using the Explorers Club today are barely aware of the antic years through which the sport has passed or of the many parts played in it by men like Tillman. And that, of course, is as it should be on an island and in a sport where nothing of yesterday is half so intriguing as the promises of tomorrow.