The Ocean First braintrust — Graham Casden, Cathy Christopher and friend.
Last Cast
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BY FRED GARTH
used to belong to a snow skiing club in Pensacola, Florida. We had a ton of members. Weird, huh? Not really. One of the dudes in the club told me that Florida has the most skiing clubs in the country, and Colorado has the most scuba diving clubs. I’m not sure if he was right or wrong, but he said it with such conviction that I believed him. A quick internet search (which has to be true, right?) reveals that Colorado has more certified scuba divers per capita than any other landlocked state and fifth most in the country. 96 | GuyHarvey.com
Maybe it’s like this: people who are freezing their patooties off in Colorado in January daydream a lot about hot sandy beaches and total submersion in the warm ocean, and those of us in Florida, who are sweating like a sumo wrestler in a Walmart parking in July, wish we could be zipping down a mountain covered in epic white flakes. (Editor’s note: that’s what really rad skiers and snowboarders call “snow”.) So, if you’ve ever thought about starting a scuba diving shop — and I mean who hasn’t — and you were thinking that Miami or San
Diego or maybe Honolulu would be a good location, then you’d just be fooling yourself. No, you need to be thinking of places like Boulder, Colorado, where the air is parched and the good citizens are just itching to go underwater and blow some bubbles. I’m just assuming that was the logic a nice fellow named Graham Casden had when he bought a dive store in Boulder 14 years ago. A transplant from Southern California, Casden has the air of a Tony Hawk surfer dude. He’s thin and lanky, smart and confident, and, of course, wears beige sneakers. He’s the total package. Casden left the beaches and sunsets of SoCal to attend the University of Colorado in Boulder and decided to stay for a while. Then he bought a dive shop. Under his guidance, he’s built his dive store — called Ocean First, even though it’s 1,500 miles from any sort of ocean — into the second largest Scuba Schools International dive center in the United States. With just under 1,000 dive shops scattered across the 50 states, the fact that Ocean First certifies more than 1,500 divers per year is a testament to his business savvy and understanding that teaching diving isn’t just about jumping into a swimming pool and breathing underwater. Casden has become an educator. Ocean First has grown out into three separate companies, the others being Ocean First Education, which develops marine science curricula for K–12, and Ocean First Institute, a 501(c)(3) that focuses on conservation through research and education. “When we dive beneath the surface,” Casden said, “we experience this entirely new and foreign universe. Most of us want to know what we’re seeing, so we offer extensive marine
PHOTOS COURTESY OF OCEAN FIRST
Training pool
