Business icon Bob Hollis handed away peacefully on January 4, 2023, in Salt Lake Metropolis, Utah, surrounded by household. His life, full of journey, started on April 25, 1937, in Orland, California when he was born to Robert and Elinor Hollis. An trade large, Bob’s legacy as a pioneer, entrepreneur, businessman, and most significantly, a loving father and grandfather will stay on ceaselessly.
Bob achieved extra in 85 years than most and lived his life to the fullest. He was a danger taker who actually did what he liked and impressed others to do the identical. If there wasn’t a method, he created one.
Divers and people within the trade will keep in mind Bob as a groundbreaking affect not solely inside the sport of scuba diving but in addition within the subject of underwater pictures. Bob’s love affair with the ocean started in 1955 after studying an article about underwater exploration in Widespread Mechanics. Following his first scuba expertise, Bob turned one of many earliest underwater photographers on the West Coast and established the Underwater Photographic Society of Northern California in 1966. Moreover, Bob was appointed to the Advisory Board of the Underwater Parks and Reserves (California State Parks Division), the place he helped discover the shoreline and recognized future areas for preservation, together with Level Lobos, La Jolla and the Salt Level State Park.
A real entrepreneur, Bob actually met the second and realized that the scuba and underwater pictures gear out there at the moment didn’t meet his wants—so he started creating his personal, all whereas attending college for enterprise and engineering and dealing at Commonplace Oil to help his younger household.
His tenacity paid off and, in 1966, Bob opened the Anchor Shack dive store in Hayward, California, and started creating underwater digicam housing, strobes and hand lights, the inspiration of his firm, Oceanic. By 1976, the Oceanic product line had fully developed, finally turning each Bob and the Oceanic model into leaders within the scuba group. Throughout his lifetime, Bob based many corporations, together with American Underwater Merchandise, Pelagic Strain Methods, ROMI Enterprises and famend scuba diving manufacturers Oceanic, Hollis, and Aeris.
Utilizing his expertise, Bob helped create an underwater saturation system in 1978 for the Andrea Doria shipwreck. The system was hooked up to the wreck at a depth of 240 toes for as much as seven days, permitting divers to discover the wreck for a number of days with out having to swim to the floor. Bob logged extra dives than anybody on the wreck and, in 1981, served because the underwater photographer for the nationally aired movie Andrea Doria: The Remaining Chapter, detailing the workforce’s objective of recovering the financial institution secure from the sunken Italian ocean liner.
Along with creating pictures and scuba diving gear, Bob additionally led a few of the first-ever dive journeys to Cozumel, the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, Belize, the Yucatan Peninsula and the Galapagos. He additionally led excursions to Papua New Guinea, the place he later constructed a household house and vacation spot dive resort.
Over his storied profession, Bob obtained many awards and achievements, together with the NOGI Award, the DEMA Reaching Out Award, and was an inductee of the Scuba Diving Corridor of Fame.
All through all his skilled success, Bob’s best achievement was his household, together with his kids Debbie (Jon), Mike (Molly), Nick (Brittany) and Zach (Danica), grandchildren Heather, Elizabeth, Jonathan, Caitlin, Robert, Seth, Preston, Olivia and Sloane, and great-grandchildren Benjamin, Natalie, Henry, Eleanor, Samuel, Ian and Colin. Bob shared his ardour of the ocean and touring the world with them, together with abalone diving journeys on the California coast, household liveaboard dive journeys, motorbike adventures, and creating recollections for a lot of lifetimes. He will likely be deeply missed by his household and associates.
The household will maintain personal companies in Orland, California and asks for these serious about honoring Bob to share your story and photographs by way of social media. If you want to additionally share these with the household, they are often despatched to [email protected]. In lieu of flowers, please donate to an ocean conservation charity in Bob’s reminiscence.
