Name: Steve Crosby
Age: 34
Hometown / Nationality: Hattiesburg (Mississippi / USA)
Living in Tulum (Mexico) since: 2021
Favorite food & drink: Rajas Tacos& Sandia
Pets and names: Two Mexican cats: Ronda and Barbara
Favorite piece of dive equipment: Shearwater Perdix Dive Computer
Oldest piece of dive equipment (age): Green moldable mouthpiece (11 years – that’s gross Steve!)
Steve, you have been living in Mexico since 2021. Which other countries have you called home?
Before Mexico I was in Thailand for about 5 years, Indonesia for a year and in Egypt for a year as well. This was all while working in diving. Other than that, I have spent a year in New Zealand / Australia.
Why have you lived all over the world? What was the reason for leaving your hometown, Hattiesburg?
Hattiesburg, while a great place to grow up, does not lend itself well to underwater adventure and exploration. Most of the people you see who are divers in Mississippi can only afford to do this part time or as a summer job. I wanted to be able to commit my life to this sport.
So you left the US to follow your passion and became a dive professional on Koh Tao (Thailand). What was your day job before that?
Before becoming a professional diver, I did a little bit of everything. Working in construction, working in furniture installation, as a lifeguard, as a bartender and other random jobs in between. Anything that would help me afford to dive.
When and how did you realize that diving was taking over your life and that you wanted to follow that path?
After my first fun dive in the Bahamas (2004). Everyone was floating on the surface and talking about the dive, as you do. Our dive guide asked what we thought of the dive and everyone else says “It was great!”, “So much fun!”, and stuff like that. I was the random 14 year old kid who looked at her and said “You’re getting paid today…”, She answered “Yep, of course.” – At this very moment I knew that I wanted to swap roles and be the one getting paid to dive one day.
So you’ve been a diver for 20 years with approx. 9’600 dives under your belt. What do you consider to be your biggest achievement as a dive instructor or diver?
I have a lot of moments in diving I am proud of. But mhmm what is my biggest achievement? Probably my biggest achievement is receiving my Deco60 Instructor rating by my good friend and mentor Edd Stockdale in Hurghada (Egypt). He does not hand out these certifications easily.
The dive I’m most proud of out of an instructor perspective involved the next to last dive of a Deco50 course I was teaching in Thailand to my friends Lj and Andreas. On the course they were exceeding expectations, so I did what any person in my position would do: I wanted to see how far I could push them and how great of divers they could become. I gave them an insane number of reasonable problems on that dive and no matter what I threw at them, they solved each problem brilliantly and were able to finish the dive safely. That was my proudest moment.
You lived all around the world pursuing your dreams while executing technical dives, reef dives and wreck diving. Now what drew you to cave diving?
As an avid wreck diver who loved working my way through wrecks and the added challenges that they provide, caves drew me as one much bigger overhead environment. Because I loved wrecks, to me it only made sense that I would also love caves!
So here you are in Mexico working as a cave diver on a daily basis. What brought you to Mexico though?
I helped plan a trip with my friends to become full cave divers. Of course I asked several technically minded dive friends, if they were going to take their full cave course in Mexico, where would they go? Every single one of them told me to talk to Kim at ProTec in Tulum.
You and your friends made that trip happen in 2018. What was your first impression of ProTec?
I can honestly say that my first trip here seriously impressed me. I arrived a week before my other “soon-to-be” cave diving friends, so that I could teach an Open Water course to three of my friends. For this Open Water course my students were using ProTec’s rental equipment. The rental equipment was APEKS regulators and XDeep Backplates/Wings. We also emptied Nitrox tanks so that my students could use air tanks. That is a concept I had never heard of until coming here! As an instructor who was always trying to give my students the best equipment, arriving here and seeing everything as close to perfect as I could imagine, made a lasting impact on me.
However, the idea behind your trip to ProTec Dive Centers was to become a full cave diver yourself. Did the progression throughout this course change your perspective on diving?
I feel like I had to go through the Dunnig-Kruger effect twice in my diving career (so far). Once when I was doing my technical instructor courses and once when I came here. The amount of precision and perfection required of a decent cave diver cannot be accurately written into words.
How did going through the Dunning-Kruger curve again impact your long-term scuba diving goals?
I realized that my one year goals really should be 5 year goals, my 5 year goals became 10 year goals and my 10 year goals were absolutely insane.
Can you elaborate a little bit more?
It’s easy to have improper goalposts in life when you have a hard time measuring things in the short term. The main reason, I feel, most people have difficulties measuring themselves in terms of “diver skill” is, because in many places in diving it is easy to become the best diver in the room. When working at a small completely recreational dive center the person who takes one Tec course can suddenly find themselves as the most qualified diver in the room. When you have done 100 dives and your friends have done 20, it’s easy to think that you’re a fantastic diver. Something I have observed in my diving career is that you never want to be the best diver in the room.
Your explanation of how becoming a full cave diver changed your mindset, must have changed your goals in diving quite dramatically. What is your most important 5 year goal you’re working towards then?
Five years from now I would like to be a full cave CCR instructor for ProTec Divecenters.
Now that you have transitioned from ProTec-client to ProTec-staff member, how has that changed your “normal week of diving”?
One of the nice things about my job here is the amount of variety offered on any given day. Sometimes cavern diving, sometimes deep diving, sometimes cave diving or even multistage cave diving. With the thousands of cave passages we can pick from and the dozen or so cavern lines we have available it helps ensure that no two weeks look horribly similar.
Other than being a great diver and instructor, I know that you’re an amazing chef. As not everyone is lucky enough to be your personal guest, which Taco cart and food option would you not want to miss, when visiting Tulum?
If there’s only one restaurant you’re going to when being in Tulum, it must be El Sudaca. It is a lovely, small family-owned Argentinian restaurant, which specializes in Empanadas. It’s not Mexican, I know! But I just love it!
So, there’s diving, cooking, your wife and the cats. Which other passions do you have in life?
I’m going to say Arduino and microelectronics. Arduino are really small computer boards, which you program to perform different tasks. Sensing the temperature or humidity of a room, the hydration level of soil, or knowing how much water is in your water reservoir on the roof can all be done with Arduino.
And to end with: What is THE ONE THING you still want to achieve in your life – be it dive related or not.
I want to dive the Andrea Doria!