A razor and a salary of $15,000 a year was all that local hotels would offer Bermudian Greg Hartley when he graduated from college several decades ago. Mr. Hartley had a degree in business administration with a concentration in finance, and qualifications in hotel management.

Mr. Hartley, known for his shaggy, brown beard, turned down the ?generous? offer and went into business for himself.

?It is easier to have a foreigner under heavy manners than it is to hire a Bermudian,? said Mr. Hartley. ?So here we are.?

Today, Mr. Hartley operates Hartley?s Reef Safari and has taken hundreds of people helmet diving.

At the beginning of June Royal Gazette reporter Jessie Moniz went out on one of Mr. Hartley?s tours to find out what helmet diving is all about.

In a nutshell the diver dons a wet suit, puts a metal helmet on his or her head with a window and an air tube and goes underwater to visit a coral reef. Mr. Hartley?s tours take people down eight to 12 feet but some helmet diving tours go down deeper.

This tour left from Dockyard with around 19 people, minus two people who chickened out at the last minute.

Being a tour boat operator sounded fairly straight forward, but Mr. Hartley was a man of many helmets. To start with, a large part of his job was amateur psychology.

When one little boy grumbled that Mr. Hartley kept calling him ?shark bait?, Mr. Hartley joked, ?Be nice to me. I give you air.?

As the time came to put on wetsuits and get in the water, many of the divers grew visibly more nervous. As one lady hovered on the boat ladder, waiting for the helmet to descend on her head, she told her husband, with all seriousness, that if she didn?t come back her affairs were in order, and the children were provided for.

The group was split up into three dives, each lasting 20 minutes.

Mr. Hartley?s Mr. Hartley went down with the group, leaving his 19-year-old son Ben to run things on the boat.

When one red-headed ten-year-old took a little while to go underwater, his friend waiting for his turn in the next group, leaned over the side of the boat and yelled down, ?Hurry up, your air supply is running out!? (Air is pumped down in a continuous supply and will not ?run out?.) The mouthy boy?s mother grabbed him by the waistband of his swimming shorts and hauled him back to his seat. After a scolding, the mother asked the mouthy boy if he was nervous, and he shrugged her off telling her stoutly, ?You don?t understand mom, I want to go. I can?t wait to go!?

?A lot of what I do is fear management,? Mr. Hartley admitted later. ?They are ambivalent. Part of them wants to do it, but they have been watching movies. They have this natural fear of the unknown. Sometimes I get accused of being too flippant with them, but if you concentrate on the fear, you validate it.?

He said joking about it helped to make helmet diving seem less intimidating, but he also had to keep the tension going, just a little, to make it fun.

The helmet is not as heavy as it looks. You don?t sink down under the weight of it, but climb down a ladder until you reach the bottom of the ocean. Many people have to have weights tied around their waists to make them sink properly. The water does not fill the helmet but only comes up to your chin. In the brochure, Mr. Hartley has a picture of someone diving with their Persian kitten in the helmet. The kitten looks happy that someone has finally taken him fishing. There is enough space around the neck of the helmet that you can reach up and adjust your glasses. When you come up your hair is still dry. If for some reason your air supply stopped there would be enough air in the helmet to use to swim to the surface, or push the helmet off and swim to the surface.

When underwater, the dive group held onto a white pole and were led around to various points around the reef. Mr. Hartley had a special knife with different words written on it. He pointed to various sea creatures on the reef and then pointed to the corresponding word on his knife. He used finger signals to indicate if it was stinging or non-stinging.

The fish were what made it all worth while. Most people are only accustomed to dealing with a grouper or angel fish if it has a hook in its mouth or through the thick glass of an aquarium. How many people get to stand nose to snout with a live grouper and actually touch it, or feed it by hand? It is an amazing experience.

While underwater, the helmet divers had their picture taken feeding the fish. Mr. Hartley used to use a Polaroid camera, but now uses a much more sophisticated camera which transmits its images to a computer onboard. While the divers were still exploring the reef Mr. Hartley?s son Ben printed out the pictures or burned them to a compact disc for the lofty price of $15.

After doing a dive, a woman on the tour asked the Royal Gazette if she could give Mr. Hartley a testimonial.

?This is my second trip to Bermuda,? said Michelle Wiggins of Winterville, North Carolina. She was with her two children, Ashley, 13, and son Stephen, 10, and three other families totalling nine people. ?My children both have asthma. When we signed up for the tour we asked Mr. Hartley if they would be alright. He said it would be fine, but that they should take their medication before they left the hotel, and they should also bring it along with them.

?While my son Stephen was underwater he felt nervous, so Mr. Hartley brought him up. I don?t know what Mr. Hartley said to him, but he got Stephen to go back down. And you saw that he came up with a big smile on his face.

?When my kids saw the pictures later, they said, ?wow, we did that?. Mr. Hartley took a lot of time with the pictures when we were down there. He also went to a lot of trouble to make sure we were comfortable.?

She said the helmet diving was a highlight of their vacation in Bermuda, and she would definitely do it again.

Unfortunately, all of the people on the tour were visitors with the exception of the reporter.

?When I tell Bermudians about helmet diving, a lot of them say, ?oh, you wouldn?t get that thing on my head?,? said Mr. Hartley. ?They don?t like to try anything new. It is sad because all this beauty is right in their backyard.?

He said he has tried scuba diving, but found it physically uncomfortable. You have to put a tank on your back and put breathing apparatus in your mouth. With helmet diving you are much freer.

Ironically, the first Hartley diving helmet ever consisted of an old paint tin with a hole cut out and some plastic nailed over the opening. ?My grandmother, Gladys, brought my father, Bronson, here in 1930 to escape the Great Depression,? said Mr. Hartley. ?My father was just a little boy. He was expecting to see parrots and monkeys and jungles and exotic stuff. As you can see we don?t have any parrots or monkeys.?

When Bronson Hartley looked underwater, however, he found all the exotic creatures he could desire. As a young boy, Bronson Hartley, who now lives in Florida, became a protege of famed marine scientist William Beebe.

?My grandmother knew of Beebe from social circles in New York,? said Mr. Hartley. ?She was a bit of a socialite. My mother came here at age 19. A relative of hers worked for Cable & Wireless. Her name was Martica. She was Cuban. She and my father got together and started doing this after the war in 1948.?

The first Hartley tour group consisted of five school teachers who paid $5 each.

?Then he built more helmets and he started taking more people down,? said Mr. Hartley. ?He was diving originally in Green Bay. Then he moved to Baileys Bay for a little while, and then went to Stag Rock outside of Shelley Bay. That is the location that most old timers associate with helmet diving.?

The Hartleys name many of the fish they work with. One favourite grouper?s name is Stormin? Norman. Mr. Hartley calls the fish ?business associates? rather than pets. He is often heart-broken to find that his fish have been poached or injured with a spear.

?All the fish that you see in the brochure have been killed,? he said sadly. ?I keep telling people that if you take one fish and kill it, you might sell it for $50 or $60. For that same fish, I can charge $50 a person to see him, again and again. Surely, that is using the ocean without using it up.?

He said over the last year all their hog fish have disappeared. ?All last year we did not have a hog fish,? he said. ?All last year I dove armed with a mussel to throw to a hog fish and I only saw one small female the whole season.? He said the weather can also take a toll on some species of fish, particularly angel fish.

?For some reason the angel fish do not fare very well after a hurricane,? Mr. Hartley said. ?Teddy Tucker said he finds them floating with their gills full of mud.?

Mr. Hartley?s brother, Chris, runs a similar helmet diving operation in the Bahamas. Mr. Hartley doesn?t know if his son or daughter will take over the family business.

?My son Ben is into computers,? Mr. Hartley said. ?My daughter is into horses.?

And he said he wasn?t sure if he even wanted his children to go into tourism, because of Bermuda?s changing business world. The tours are $65 for adults and $47 for children 12 years and under. For more information contact www.hartleybermuda.com .