Carl Roessler Biography

Carl Roessler never knew he would work in international dive travel until fifteen years after he began his business career.

Carl worked for General Electric and IBM after graduating from Yale University. His work at IBM led to his appointment as Director of Computation at Yale. During his tenure at the university, Carl led a design team to develop a pioneering management information system.

After five years in his Yale post, Carl realized a long-held dream and moved with his wife and children to the Caribbean islands of Curacao and Bonaire. During 1969-72, Carl hosted dive groups organized by See & Sea Travel, Inc. of San Francisco.

In 1972, Carl was approached by Dewey Bergman of See & Sea to forsake the Caribbean and travel the world. For the next twenty-five years, Carl organized permanent dive programs in over thirty of what are now the world’s best-loved dive destinations. For twenty of those twenty-five years, Carl was president of See & Sea, the world’s first and largest travel agency exclusively devoted to dive travel.

In his long career in dive travel, Carl was the leading popularizer of expeditionary live-aboard dive cruisers that offered good food and comfort while diving reefs far distant from hotels, airports and population centers. Carl’s favorite dive sites were often hundreds of miles from any shore base.

Beginning in 1967, Carl began taking underwater pictures during his overseas dive trips. Gradually he amassed an enormous collection of over 300,000 images from all around the tropical world. Hundreds of his photos and articles have appeared in major magazines and textbooks in the U.S. and Europe. His specialties are fish portraits, model photos and especially sharks feeding.

Carl’s book The Underwater Wilderness was a best-seller, and an alternate selection of the Book-of the-Month Club in 1977. In 1984, three of Carl’s books (The Undersea Predators, Mastering Underwater Photography, and Divers Guide to the Cayman Islands) were published to rave reviews. In 1986 Carl’s book, Coral Kingdoms, published by Harry N. Abrams Co. of New York, was his second Book-of-the Month Club selection. 1991 saw the publication of Carl’s Diver’s Guide to Australia, and 1992’s book was Great Reefs of the World. Throughout the years, Carl has also run an active business selling his images to magazines, book publishers and stock photo companies.

Carl’s adventures over the past three decades have brought the very first American divers or live-aboard programs to such well-known places as the Cayman Islands, The Galapagos, Australia’s Coral Sea, Fiji, Jordan, the Sudan, Ethiopia, the Maldives, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Palau, Truk Lagoon, Malpelo, as well as the great white shark and whale shark diving adventures that are now so popular. Many divers have experienced their very first shark encounters on live-aboard programs Carl offered through See & Sea.

After twenty-five years running See & Sea Travel, Inc., Carl now acts as an adviser to divers looking for great diving expeditions on well-run live-aboard cruisers around the world.

Carl serves on the Board of Directors of the Historical Diving Society and on January 25, 2007 was elected to the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame.