About Us

The Professional Association of Stupid Divers (PASD) was formed by John H. Moore in Summer 2005, although the whole Stupid Diver certification had been a standing joke for at least five years before that. The first Stupid Diver t-shirt design was made in 2000, and was a "PADI Stupid Diver" shirt — not to bash PADI, but just to take advantage of their name recognition. Only one t-shirt was printed of that original design, just by iron-on off John's inkjet printer. He wore that shirt around the beach and dive boats for years and got a lot of great comments about it.

Here's the original t-shirt, after many years of wear:
In Summer 2005, John began working on his first professionally done t-shirt, a Fried Egg Jellyfish t-shirt for the San Diego diving information website which John founded and runs, Divebums. Divebums now does one or two marine creature t-shirts and one underwater photo calendar each year. If you're interested in those, please see the Divebums Products page.

Here's the first Divebums t-shirt (and note that the Stupid Diver t-shirts are being printed on the same (heavyweight, all-cotton) t-shirts, using similar high-end silk-screening techniques, and by the same printing company as the jellyfish t-shirt):
At the same time that the jellyfish t-shirt was being planned, John got back to working on the Stupid Diver t-shirt design. He contacted a friend at PADI Corporate to ask about using their name on the t-shirt, just in fun, and PADI's response was essentially, "very funny, we love it, but no!" Thus PASD, the Professional Association of Stupid Divers, was born.

Also in Summer 2005, the design was begun for the Advanced Stupid Diver t-shirt, using Marty Snyderman's great photo of Chip Matheson and a white shark. The story behind that photograph can be found on the Howard Hall Productions website.

PASD was set to debut at the end of 2005, but the first-ever Divebums underwater photo calendar got in the way, so design work continued in Spring 2006. During that design work, one test shirt was printed using a different printing process than that which will be used for the production print run.

Here's that test shirt:
...and that's the story! Divebums is a Southern California thing, but PASD need not be... we hope that those of you who enjoy the humor of it all will spread the word widely.

Finally, one thing that we'd really love to do, just for the sheer fun of it, is to print PASD certification cards — those white, plastic credit-card looking ones with your photo on it. If anyone knows of a way to do that for just a couple dollars each, please contact us.

Thanks!

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