I never thought of bottom cleaners as environmentalists. The guys I've hired wandered around with hazy eyes and did mediocre work, at best.

Then I found Roland "The Diver"  Salerno, a barrel- shouldered man trained in the law but schooled in the water. I knew I had found my guy when he started telling me, hands wide and flying with great animation, about an encounter with a 700-kilo manatee.

The animal nudged Salerno as he cleaned the bottom of a yacht in South Florida recently. Not one to abandon his work lightly, it took several minutes of nudging for Salerno to stop and realize that this manatee was in serious trouble. He surfaced and asked his partner, Lucrecia Sauze, to find a hose and hook it to fresh water. That manatee proceeded to drink continuously for 20 minutes.

Salerno is known simply as The Diver to his hundreds of satisfied captains. Since starting his company The Diver Underwater Maintenance in Ft. Lauderdale in 1988, he's serviced all manner of yachts, from the 316-foot Lurssen M/Y Limitless and the 230-foot Amels M/Y Boadicea to the 70-foot Delta M/V Thunder (my command).

The Diver takes as much care with boat bottoms as he does animals.

"The use of different cleaning methods is mandatory with very expensive, sophisticated anti-fouling paints," The Diver said. "I often use baby cotton diapers in order to be as careful and delicate as possible. Using the wrong Scotch pad can remove a critical layer of ablative anti-fouling."

He only hires certified commercial divers to work with him. Unfortunately many owners and captains do not realize that it is not a good idea to hire sport divers to perform commercial work. Only when they get to the Bahamas, dive down and find out the hard way that the bottom was poorly cleaned do they accept that it is better to pay a little more money.

The Diver's team is highly organized and flows like a Bach sonata. Dave Shoemaker, a licensed captain and NAUI scuba instructor, is Salerno's dive partner. Sauze or Tender, as Salerno calls her monitors the operation, including notifying any approaching vessels, handing down required tools, and keeping the divers hydrated. (Sauze and Salerno work so smoothly as a team that they were married Nov. 3.)

The Diver's state-of-the-art diving, communications and underwater equipment offer some of the most reliable service available in South Florida. His Rolls Royce Kamewa jet propulsion propeller calibrations against the jet tunnel intake are critical to a ship's vibration-free operations, along with changing the zinc anodes on the jet shafts.

Underwater digital photographs for surveys are one of his specialties. He prefers to photograph yacht bottoms before and after the work, for skeptical owners who deny that a living reef could ever be on the bottom of their boat even though they have not had the bottom cleaned for six months while sitting in the ICW.

The Diver's dad taught him to snorkel at age 5 and pushed him to be a lawyer. After seven years of law and social science school in Argentina, it was obvious that law was not the calling. So he obtained his Argentine commercial diver's license and never looked back.

Moving to Peru, Salerno salvaged a 70-ton crane from the Mantaro River in the Andes as well as fishing trawlers sunk by a tsunami in 1983 off the north coast of Peru. Currently he is on call for work at Lauderdale Marine Center, Derecktor's, Broward Marine, the Broward County Sheriff's Office and the city of Fort Lauderdale's marine patrol.

Combined with the conscientiousness required to do a difficult job perfectly is a determination to treat man and animal with respect. It is not often I have encountered a personality as well-rounded.

On another recent dive, Salerno was startled to find a 2 ½ foot snook coming for him. Not to be ignored, the snook was persistent in seeking assistance. There was a hook, 10 feet of monofilament line and a sinker hanging from its mouth.

"That Snook was not going to take no' for an answer," Salerno said. "That fish stayed directly in front of my mask, begging me for help. I couldn't believe it, and didn't want to talk about this for fear someone would think I was nuts.

"I got pliers off of my belt and that snook stayed still in front of me while I wrestled the hook from its jaws," he said. "I could detect a smile in its eyes when it realized that the hook and weight were history."

To reach Salerno

Call Roland "The Diver" Salerno at 954-522-2524 or (cell) 954-401-9745.

Capt. David Hare runs the 70-foot Delta expedition yacht M/V Thunder and is a regular contributor to The Triton. He is currently looking for a captain's position on a yacht over 100 GRT. Contact him at david@hare.com.