As a child growing up in Florida, Douglas Ebersole was fascinated by the ocean. Watching every episode of “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” and Mike Nelson in “Sea Hunt,” he longed to scuba dive and experience the ocean world. At the age of fourteen, Doug signed up for scuba diving lessons and bought his first set of gear – a Scubapro Mark V regulator, an At-Pac BCD, and two 72-cubic-foot steel tanks complete with J valves. His usual buddy at the time was an avid spear fisherman. While Doug loved topside photography and wanted to shoot pictures underwater, he soon discovered spear guns were cheaper than cameras and housings. So his early diving years were spent shooting fish instead of photographs. All through high school, he traveled all over the east and west coasts of Florida as well as the Florida Keys, diving every site he could find.
His college years were spent at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. His diving was then limited to summer vacations in Florida and Mexico. After college, it was off to medical school in Miami, Florida, where he was much closer to great diving, but the time requirements of studying medicine limited his time in the water. After medical school, he and his new bride, Carol, moved to San Antonio, Texas, for his training in internal medicine and then cardiology while she was training in radiology. Between the rigorous hours of residency and fellowship and the pressures of being a new husband and subsequently a new father, scuba diving was again put on hold.
In 1996, Doug and his family returned to Florida to begin private practice. His passion for diving resurfaced, and he began diving again. This time, however, he could afford that camera! He began with a SeaLife ReefMaster, and then moved to an Olympus 4040, then up to a digital SLR. Currently, Doug shoots with a Canon 300D in a Sea & Sea housing with dual Sea & Sea YS-110 strobes. His favorite lenses are the Canon 10-22mm for wide-angle work and the Canon 100mm for macro.
Doug’s wife, Carol, caught the scuba diving “bug” and got certified in 2000, followed shortly thereafter by their daughter Kimberly in 2001, at age 12, and their son Eric in 2003 at age ten. Suddenly, family vacations revolved around where they could find the best diving.
When his children reached the age where they too wanted to learn to scuba dive, Doug became an instructor – not to teach his children himself, but to oversee their training and make sure they were the best divers they could possibly be. His own diving progressed as well, moving through nitrox and trimix and then on to semi-closed and subsequently closed circuit rebreathers. Currently, when he is not taking photographs under water, he is teaching multiple levels of diving from basic open water certification through closed circuit rebreathers.
For his own diving, he prefers his KISS rebreather, and dives it almost exclusively whether above or below recreational depth limits. This applies to his international travel as well. As long as there is oxygen and sorb available, Doug is on his KISS.
When not underwater, Doug works as an interventional cardiologist at the Watson Clinic, and is the director of the Cardiac Catheterization Laboratories at Lakeland Regional Medical Center in Lakeland, Florida.
Perusing his dive log would show about 150 dives per year over the last ten years, from Florida and the Caribbean to Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. Although he has circled the globe to dive, Doug’s favorite spots are “right in his own back yard” in West Palm Beach, Florida. And while he has captured beautiful images of many of God’s wonderful creatures around the world, the images that give him the most joy are those of his wife, their children, and his father enjoying the wonders of the undersea world by his side.
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