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Jacques Cousteau admirer dives into life with both feet

Ed Singer of Nanaimo should have webbed feet and gills after spending more than four months of his life underwater for decades.

Ed Singer of Nanaimo should have webbed feet and gills after spending more than four months of his life underwater for decades.

The avid scuba diver has spent a minimum of 139 days underwater every year during the past 30 years as a commercial and recreational diver in the waters off Vancouver Island.

An admiration for Jacques Cousteau and his underwater documentaries and photographs piqued Singer's interest in the deep blue before he was a teenager.

At the age of 15, Singer started his diving career off the shores of Prince Rupert, where his dad worked as a commercial fishermen during the summers. A neighbour took the teenager under his wing and introduced him to the world of commercial diving.

The sport would became his career and lifelong passion.

Singer, 45, has logged more than 5,000 commercial and recreational dives, including training thousands of scuba divers, recovering bodies and doing commercial contract work for several municipalities, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada and B.C. Ferries.

Most of all, Singer has been instrumental in helping create Nanaimo's underwater tourism industry, which attracts more than 10,000 divers every year.

Despite the fact Singer spends most of his working hours underwater, it's still his favourite place to play.

"A lot of people burn themselves out, but that part hasn't changed at all for me," said Singer, owner of Sundown Diving.

Nanaimo's coastal waters offer some of the best scuba diving in the Pacific Northwest, if not the world, Singer said.

The variety of sponges, starfish, nudibranchs, anemones and vegetation in Nanaimo's water is unique. Of course, divers hope to see the native octopus and wolf eels - but it's the smaller forms of sea life that attract the most attention, Singer said.

One 40-minute dive could easily be spent examining the sea life in and around a single rock.

As a former member of the defunct Nanaimo Divers Association, Singer was integral to the creation of Nanaimo's three popular wreck dives: HMCS Saskatchewan off the east side of Snake Island in 1977, the HMCS Cape Breton, sunk in 2001, and the tugboat Rivtow Lion off Newcastle Island in 2004.

The Saskatchewan is a diver's paradise, winning accolades in Rodale's Scuba Diving Magazine as the best artificial reef to dive in the world in 2007.

Three of Singer's favourite dive spots are Dodds Narrows, Gabriola Passage and Orlebar Point, off Gabriola Island.

"I've done that one at least 1,000 times," Singer said of the 45-metre wall dive.

The world of commercial diving is a little less glamorous than the work of Cousteau, but it takes Singer all over Vancouver Island. He does everything from underwater welding, log removals from the propellers of ferries, emergency body recovery from lakes, rivers and the ocean, to biological video surveys for marina proposals.

"I check to see what marine life is in there," he said. "There are always concerns around things like eel grass and clams. We need to know that what they're going to build isn't going to interrupt the habitat that is already existing."