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Robert J. Shourot, past owner of "The Dive Shop," "Undersea Systems," and "Coastal Diving Academy," was presented with a portrait montage highlighting events from his impressive career. The portrait was a gift from past employees, students, and friends to honor Shourot's years of dedication to the diving industry and its people.
Bob is shown in the portrait wearing a Viking suit and gear which he designed and used for the first nuclear reactor dives ever made. To contrast this, the portrait also shows Shourot wearing the traditional Mark V dive suit while welding underwater. This dress was the standard during the early years of his long commercial career.
The portrait includes representations of the Research Vessel Black Coral and the Sea Salvor. Both of these vessels were used to train his commercial diver students. The R/V Black Coral also transported sport divers to dive sites off the Long Island Coast and the Caribbean and was used as a base for many research projects. The Sea Salvor, a 104' crane vessel with tremendous lifting capacity, salvaged many a treasure from the floor of the ocean.
Another part of the montage depicts large container ships and the Navy's Spruance class of destroyers. Shourot led a team of divers who performed a series of hydrodynamic flow studies on both of these ships. Photos taken by these teams determined erosion and sound patterns and were instrumental in correcting problems with the ship's original design. More than a dozen war ships were photographed at flank speeds, resulting in the quietest submarine hunters in the world.
Shourot is also seen in the painting taking underwater photos with one of the many underwater camera housings he designed and manufactured.
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