When Santa Barbara diving pioneer Bob Ratcliffe was 16 years old and in the 11th grade, he snorkeled into the major turning point of his young life. Ratcliffe, who died on October 29, 2024, had started his diving career in 1948 in San Diego when he was just 12 years old, snorkel-diving for abalone, which he sold door-to-door.
While he was hunting for abalone off La Jolla, Ratcliffe met commercial abalone diver Jerry Todd, who was working from his boat in the same area. Todd dived with standard surface-supplied helmet equipment, and stacked high on his back deck were 104 dozen abalone. To the young Ratcliffe, with his day’s catch of three dozen abalone, this was a truly amazing sight.
He was still in the water when Todd offered to buy his entire catch for $4 per dozen, which was the price Ratcliffe would get for them once he swam to shore, packed all the abalone in gunny sacks, and then sold them door-to-door. Right then and there, he decided to become a commercial abalone diver.
Although Ratcliffe graduated high school in 1954, he skipped his graduation ceremony to dive abalone at Catalina Island, using Al Hanson’s walk-in freezer as his bunk room. His first post-school career step was to get a commercial abalone diving permit from the California Department of Fish and Game.
While looking for a commercial boat from which to dive, he met 17-year-old Lad Handelman, who was looking to lease a commercial abalone boat. This meeting and their shared interest would be the first step in a friendship that would carry the two teenagers down a path of diving adventures together for the rest of their lives. Ratcliffe and Handelman leased a boat together from San Diego–based abalone processor Eli Ready, and they were soon working the coast from San Diego north to Morro Bay.
In the same year, Ratcliffe was drafted into the U.S. Navy, serving in Japan, where he managed to dive for abalone. Discharged in 1957, he relocated to Morro Bay, living with Ed Wood, Ralph Eder, and a rotating cast of “abalone divers, alcoholics, and other misfits.” During this period, he met fellow diver Bob Kirby, who had been recently discharged from the U.S. Navy and was an associate of Jerry Todd. Kirby had built a stainless-steel mask based on Henry Henson’s original version, and Ratcliffe teamed up with him to work on the production of a mask made from sheet copper. Ratcliffe credited Kirby with teaching him to solder, but the market for a new mask was very limited, and the Kirby-Ratcliffe partnership dissolved.
By 1958, Ratcliffe and Handelman were based in Morro Bay as part of Barney Clancy’s Black Fleet but decided to move to Santa Barbara to work the Channel Islands. Ratcliffe took classes as UCSB and would study for one semester and then work the rest of the year, thus slowly “diving” himself through college. During this time, he met Dan Wilson, an abalone diver who owned the Anchor Abalone processing company. Ratcliffe sold his catch to Wilson’s company, and they occasionally dived together.
Wilson was another of the dive pioneers mentioned so far. In 1962, he completed his first 400-foot mixed-gas dive off Santa Barbara, which launched what became known as the Santa Barbara Helium Rush. Wilson formed General Offshore Divers (GOD) to service the developing offshore oil business. Ratcliffe worked at GOD building helium demand helmets and was involved with the development and testing of the Purisima diving bell.
Although Purisima was a glimpse at the future, in 1965, Ratcliffe, Kevin Lengyel, and brothers Lad and Gene Handelman left Wilson and founded their own company, California Divers Inc., also known as Cal Dive. The four partners contributed $3,000 each to get the company launched, becoming equal 25 percent shareholders. They then went back to diving abalone while Handelman started searching for Cal Dive’s first paying contracts. Cal Dive’s first office was in the Ratcliffe house and garage at 515 Alan Road in Santa Barbara.
Around the same time, Hurricane Betsy had caused damage and destruction to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, and cleanup and salvage operations would require diving to depths in excess of 200 feet. At that time, helium-diving techniques were not well-known in the Gulf.
In early 1966, Handelman met with Mike Hughes and Johnny Johnson of World Wide Divers Inc. of Morgan City, Louisiana, who had an abundance of Betsy-related work. The outcome of the meeting was a joint venture arrangement, during which Cal Dive introduced helium diving techniques into the Gulf. With the joint venture in place, Cal Dive took on the inspection job that World Wide had won. It was the challenges that this job presented that pushed Ratcliffe into the helmet-manufacturing business.
According to Ratcliffe, the job required a helmet that would allow the diver to swim, had a helium demand capability, and would also provide excellent communications for recording the diver’s voice. He designed a lightweight fiberglass helmet and was able convert a military surplus U.S. Air Force high-altitude pilot’s helmet shell into a swimmable demand helium helmet with good communications. He spent about $350 building the helmet that would shortly earn Cal Dive and its partners hundreds of thousands of dollars. The helmet became known as the Rat Hat, and it led Ratcliffe to start the Ocean Development Corporation. The first Rat Hats were built for Cal Dive and other customers.
In 1968, Ratcliffe worked on plugging and removing old abandoned underwater oil wells at Summerland. By the end of 1969, Cal Dive partnered with Can Dive of Canada and World Wide, and the group became Oceaneering International. Within a few years, it became the largest and most successful commercial diving company in the world. By 1975, it had become a public company and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
With the rapid expansion, Ratcliffe became President of Underwater Technology Services (UTS), an Oceaneering International subsidiary servicing between 30 to 40 of the company’s office or job locations in more than 25 countries.
Ratcliffe retired from Oceaneering International in 1978 and went surfing to exotic locations around the world with his son Ron. Around 1980, he became interested in the abalone industry in Australia and moved to Perth, Australia, to resume his abalone diving career. After about a year and a half, he returned to California and joined Handelman in an abalone aquaculture project. They eventually sold the abalone project, and Bob went into retirement.
Ratcliffe was an Advisory Board member of Santa Barbara’s Historical Diving Society — HDS U.S.A. — which was founded at City College in 1992. He was inducted into the Association of Diving Contractors International’s Commercial Diving Hall of Fame in 2010 and received the HDS U.S.A. Diving Pioneer Award in 2020. Some of his contributions to diving are recorded in exhibits in the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum, which include his Rat Hat.
Bob Ratcliffe’s place in diving history will be permanently recognized for future generations by the towering Deepwater Diving Monument at the entrance to Santa Barbara harbor. A unique public tribute to a unique but private man, whose pioneering contributions left the commercial diving industry in much better, and safer, shape than when he joined it.
Farewell, old friend.
