For those of us at Halcyon, diving is more than
"just another way to spend the weekend."

• It's the rush that never fails to kick in each time you slip beneath the water and draw your first breaths from the regulator.
• It's cobalt blue water and seeing the boat from your 180' stop.
• It's realizing that you know your tables by heart.
• It's wondering if the shark was ten or fifteen feet long.
• It's when you think "I wonder if it goes..." whenever you see a sinkhole.
• It's when your dive gear costs more than your car.
• It's about late nights with friends in Cayman, trying to remember the year of your first staged decompression dive.
• It's when 50 degrees and ten feet of visibility sounds about right.
• It's knowing that no other human (besides your dive buddy) has ever seen what you have.

The dive's the thing. We make the gear that we know will make our diving better. The process begins with designing, testing and refining; making it better in the process, never settling for "good enough." It's knowing it as opposed to guessing it. It's about having such high standards and expectations in how we want our products to perform that we are relentless in our pursuit of perfection.

2004: Jarrod Jablonski and Robert Carmichael, on location in Bimini for Halcyon's catalog photo shoot

Halcyon began as a group of divers who knew exactly what they wanted but couldn't find in any dive store. Our passion for the dive led us to business. We started designing wings and lights to satisfy ourselves, but soon discovered that we were not alone in our pursuit of equipment in tune with the approach known as "Doing It Right" diving.

Robert Carmichael has been a mainstay of the Florida diving industry since he was a teenager selling masks and fins from the back of a Zodiac to the yacht crews wintering in Ft. Lauderdale. As the owner of Brownie's Third Lung, Robert helped to define the use of surface floatation hookah diving. Robert's development of the original Halcyon rebreather in the mid 1990s provided an essential component in the Woodville Karst Plain Project's record-setting exploration of the Wakulla Springs cave system.

1999: Jarrod Jablonski (left) plans the day's dives on the Britannic with Todd Kincaid and Richard Lundgren

Back when Jarrod Jablonski was a college student living in a trailer at Ginnie Springs, he surrounded himself with a group of friends who were literally taking more breaths a day through a regulator underwater than of fresh air between dives. When not teaching diving, Jarrod was pushing the boundaries of cave diving with his team in north Florida. Robert began using his Brownie's factory to produce a new, simplified buoyancy system engineered to the specifications of the divers on the team.

Meanwhile, Jarrod began to see the advantage of teaching his students the sort of teamwork, emphasis on buoyancy skills, and rational approach to gear selection that the team used for its big exploration dives.

By 1998, Jarrod had formed the non-profit Global Underwater Explorers as both a platform for his drive to elevate the quality of dive instruction, and as a framework for underwater research and conservation projects. That same year he started Extreme Exposure to build lights and accessories. Halcyon had grown into a full-fledged business in its own right; in 2001 Halcyon split off from Brownies and Jarrod consolidated operations with Extreme Exposure's production facilities in our north Florida home under the name Halcyon Manufacturing.

1999: Halcyon sponsors GUE's expedition to unlock the secrets of the Britannic

Jarrod formed his own team of accomplished divers to handle operations at Halcyon. As one of Jarrod's friends and long-time diving buddies, Halcyon's COO Casey McKinlay left the routine of the corporate world for the challenge of managing Halcyon’s day-to-day operations. Accomplished himself as a diver, Casey began cave diving with Jarrod more than fifteen years ago and has partnered with Jarrod on many of the north Florida cave exploration pushes. In addition to overseeing Halcyon's daily operations, Casey serves as the Project Director for the Woodville Karst Plain Project and advises state and federal agencies on cave and resource management issues.

The senior staff at the factory have come from diverse backgrounds ranging from academia to manufacturing consulting, but they share one common thread: an average of 20 years of dives in each of their log books.

If you ask a Halcyon staff member why they dive, you're likely to get a variation of the response provided to us by our friend David Rhea, whose photographs grace our catalogs:

I dive because it is my life, my passion, my love.

[Next: Halcyon Product Development and Testing]