Bob Soto

Who is Bob Soto?

Bob Soto was born in 1926 on the Isle of Pines to a Caymanian mother and a Cuban father. As a teenager during the Second World War he served in the Home Guard, and he was later introduced to underwater work as a hard-hat diver in the United States Navy. After the war he joined the Merchant Marines, which took him diving in waters as far afield as the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf before he settled permanently in Grand Cayman. In 1957 he opened a dive shop on the George Town waterfront, starting with a single wooden boat, a handful of tanks, and guests he personally taught to dive, and in doing so effectively founded recreational scuba diving as an industry in the Cayman Islands. He ran the business for two decades, produced his own promotional diving films for the Cayman Islands Department of Tourism, and introduced the territory's first live-aboard dive trips. Long before formal conservation laws existed, he lobbied the government to establish the islands' first protected marine park and personally stopped divers from removing coral from the reefs. Widely called the "father of diving" in Cayman, he was made a Member of the British Empire and inducted into the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame in 2000. He died on 17 March 2015 at the age of 88.

Sources: X-Ray Mag, "Scuba diving pioneer Bob Soto dies age 88" (2015) · International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame, member profile · Cayman Compass, "Scuba diving pioneer Bob Soto passes at 88" (18 March 2015)