Real diving instruction taught by a real, human instructor. 

We are greatly influenced by our mentors. Capt. John Zumrick, M.D. and Bill Main have been lifelong friends and dive partners and continue to guide us toward excellence.

Scuba diving education that is a byproduct of a relentless lifelong pursuit of safety, simplicity, and thinking differently.

Bill is one of Robby's closest friends and primary diving partner. They share many interests outside of diving. They both have a "never satisfied" quest for the perfect diving configuration. 

William "Bill" Hogarth Main is a cave diving pioneer who is best known as a developer in the 1980s, and the namesake of, the "Hogarthian gear configuration" holistic approach to scuba diving. According to Jarrod Jablonski, the Hogarthian style "has many minor variations, yet its focus asserts a policy of minimalism." The configuration was refined in the 1990s, partially through the Woodville Karst Plain Project (WKPP), established in 1985.

Main began diving in 1966 or early 1967 after completing the NAUI Open Water Course, made his first cave dive on a single tank in 1969, and switched to double tanks on a single regulator in 1972. Main describes this period: "There was no formal cave training back then. We just worked things out as we went along, and made the things we needed that didn’t exist." Following a challenging dive, Bill Gavin and Main decided that all WKPP deep dives would be on mixed gas.

Described as "a perfectionist," Main and Sheck Exley adopted the long hose that had been devised by dive partner Capt. John Zumrick, M.D. and began methodically applying the principle of minimalism, efficiency, and safety to every component of his dive gear. Fellow WKPP founding member Gavin added to the Hogarthian approach philosophy that a well-functioning human body was the most important piece of equipment of a diver and that a diver should care for his or her body accordingly. As Main put considerable efforts towards streamlining configurations, his middle name was taken to represent the approach.

Main asserts that term "Hogarthian" was initially used as a joke by fellow diving pioneer John Zumrick.
While Main continues to tinker with equipment in the search of ever more efficient configurations, the "Hogarthian approach" became widely known, largely through the WKPP breaking every distance record for cave diving without any fatalities or serious injuries. The most obvious component of the “Hogarthian” configuration is constant improvement.

Although Capt. John Zumrick, M.D. has retired from diving, he and Bill Main remain close friends. Bill continues to dive regularly and often with his and Capt. John Zumrick’s close and lifelong friend and protege, Robby Brown. Bill and Robby continue developing and simplifying Bill’s hallmark minimalist configuration to this day. Robby actively teaches Bill’s minimalist approach to open water students and beyond.

Capt. John Zumrick, M.D. (USN - Retired)










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"The Captain" and Robby met when he was a teenager and became fast friends. He has been a constant, steady guiding force in Robby's life. A combination of a second father and partner in crime. 

There I was at the University of California, San Diego doing and surgical residency and not to happy about it. A Navy Physician recruited me to become an Undersea Medical Officer that year which began my 14-year journey through diving wonderland. For most of this time, I was stationed at the US Navy Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU) whose job, like that of the Starship Enterprise, was to go where no one had gone before. I was the chief medical officer.
Whenever a new diving apparatus was introduced, we got it first, tested it to the limits, and then if acceptable approved it for Navy use. For example, I got my first opportunity to dive a rebreather in 1974, the GE Mark 10 to a depth of 750 fsw. I then dove the Mk 14 Deep Dive System to 1000 fsw. One of my first jobs was in evaluating the US Navy MK 15 rebreather for canister duration and life support.

Of course, new gear often means new ways of diving. Our job was to develop the necessary procedures. The most involved procedures were determining times and durations for different gas mixes and any decompression tables that might be needed. I didn’t develop tables, another medical offer did, but I had a lot of opportunities to fix bends. In one case a diver had central retinal blindness in one eye after an extended Table VI. Unwilling to give up we persisted and along the way to fix this developed a new treatment table for extreme cases.

Some teams needed oxygen rebreathers for their missions. However missions often arose that were not covered by existing oxygen exposure tables, so we had to look for a way to solve their problem. Sometimes that required our best guess. We often found ourselves having our test divers diving past normal limits seeing if they would convulse or not, and being prepared to make changes in our protocols to be tested the next day.
A major part of my responsibilities was to support deep saturation diving. We frequently conducted dives to 1000 fsw with the deepest being 1800 fsw. These were long dives that afforded us an opportunity to look at the physiological changes resulting from the high pressure. For example, during a 1500 fsw dive on which I was a subject, we investigated micro-sleep associated with high-pressure nervous syndrome (HPNS), along with respiratory changes associated with doing heavy work while breathing dense gas mixtures.

Throughout this extreme environmental testing, which included bends, and convulsions, not a single diver was permanently injured. I found out later that all of the divers there thought I was nuts when I left to explore the Underwater caves just down the road nearly every weekend.

Robby V. Brown
  
Diving Experience
Active scuba diver since 1987
3000+ scuba dives, 1042+ Cave dives, 1000+ dives using staged decompression and mixed gas
1000+ dives between 100—450-foot depth
 
Discoveries / Research Experience
Discovered Golf Course Spring and cave system. Bushnell, Fl.
Discovered Christophos Cave. Cowee, NC.
Florida Institute of Oceanography. USF research vessel Bellows. Gulf of Mexico
Rookery Bay National Estuarine Reserve - Summer research program
Mote Marine Laboratory– Sarasota Bay Benthic ecology
MarineLab, Scott Carpenter Man in the Sea program. Key Largo, Fl.
Crystal River Marine Research Institute
Participated in the first cave dive with the Cis-Lunar MK 5 closed-circuit rebreather
Virgin cave exploration with swimming penetrations in excess of 6,800 feet.

Experimental Diving
Test diver for Cis-Lunar MK5 Closed Circuit Rebreather

Conference Presentations
​“Sub-aquatic Speleological Exploration” Florida Audubon Society 1998