News and Features
Diver and Entreprenuer Phil Nuytten: Understanding The Ocean
By Gary Stephen Ross published Sep 1, 2010
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The Ancient Mariner
How Phil Nuytten taught himself to navigate the deep—and changed our understanding of some of the most inhospitable places on Earth
At age 16, Phil Nuytten quit Grade 11 at Kitsilano High to devote himself to the dive shop he’d opened the year before—the first in Western Canada. With a couple of older partners, he moved the business from West Fourth out to Victoria Drive. Mostly, he made custom wetsuits and did diving work. An illegal tugboat radio in the shop helped them get the jump on salvage opportunities, and one Saturday in June of 1958, Nuytten—already in wetsuit bottoms, heading out on a job—was loading air tanks on the truck when his partner yelled at him to come inside. Excited voices were coming over the radio: “It’s coming down! Jesus, the whole bridge is coming down!” They thought it was the Lions Gate until they heard mention of the Second Narrows. As they listened, the partially built structure collapsed, sending mangled steel and heavy equipment and 79 workers into Burrard Inlet. By the time Nuytten and his partner got there, the site was chaos. There were corpses on the dock. Nuytten was the first rescue diver in the water. At one point he tried to save an ironworker whose crushed legs were pinned by a crane, in water up to his chin. The tide was coming in, and it rose over the man’s head as Nuytten worked frantically.
In all, 18 ironworkers died that day and 20 more were gravely injured. It was Phil Nuytten’s first lesson in maritime tragedy. His second came soon afterward, when he himself blacked out 60 feet down on a breath-hold dive. The young captain of the Canadian spearfishing team, he was training at Horseshoe Bay before heading down to the Bahamas for a competition. (“Don’t be afraid of drowning. After the terrible, agonizing desire to breathe, it’s like taking a long, cold draft of lemonade.”) A safety diver spotted his white mask underwater and got him to the surface just in time to bring him back to life. Since then, Nuytten has arguably learned more about the challenges of surviving underwater—especially deep down, in extreme circumstances—than anyone on the planet. Though he has invented or perfected everything from one-man submersibles to two-person “flying” submarines to the Remora submarine escape system used by the U.S. Navy, and though he holds a number of valuable patents, he’s perhaps best known as the inventor of the Newtsuit.
