‘Tomorrow I might get a call to go to Jamaica again to run another instructor course.’

Ken Loyst lives much of his life on and under the water, traveling the world as a scuba diving instructor and publisher of scuba maps and magazines. With his windblown red hair and neatly cut beard, Loyst looks the part of one whose occupation is an adventure. But as he tells Times photographer Dave Gatley, it’s an enjoyable and unusual way of life but is not without its price.

My Mom used to give me flak about either growing up and getting a real job, or settling down and getting a real job. Last year I made over $70,000 not working a “real” job, and I tease other people about real jobs.

I enjoy turning people on to scuba diving. First of all, you’re intruding upon an alien environment, you’re on a different part of the planet that’s quiet and you have no one talking at you. It shows . . . another world where there’s serenity and that peacefulness you find on top of some mountain in the Sierra or out in the middle of a desert. It’s one of the most indescribably different sports that you’ll ever do, safer than traveling into space, in fact safer than snow skiing.

Dreams develop as you grow, changing, redeveloping as you continue in life. In college, I wanted to become a medical doctor, a general practitioner. But the more I found out about the medical field and the AMA, the more I found that it was almost (financially) prohibitive to have an attitude of helping people. After about the third year of college, it was boring to me. It wasn’t inspirational enough for me to continue. My father was a doctor, and that was probably one of the reasons why I didn’t want to become a doctor.

I took a scuba diving class, which got me interested in the underwater world. The following semester at San Jose State, I took an advanced class, and also got into management at some pizza parlors and restaurants in that area, and became so interested in the scuba diving aspects that I turned it into a vocation. I attended an instructor’s certification course, became a scuba instructor, and started working in one of the local dive stores in the Bay Area.

I made money managing scuba stores and learned management techniques. I bought my sailboat, moved to Santa Cruz and onto my sailboat. . . . In 1977, I sailed to Hawaii and cruised around the islands for about six months, doing a lot of diving.

I started my own business at 25, and later, when I moved to San Diego, I started the dive travel business and started doing instructor courses for the National Assn. for Underwater Instructors. They sent me all over. I would go to Kentucky, Jamaica, New Mexico, Arizona and several dive shops in California. Tomorrow I might get a call to go to Jamaica again to run another instructor course, and Haiti the next month.

I saw a need for local or regional publications for the diving market. That’s when I started Discovering Diving in Southern California, which is a semi-annual tabloid publication, and I started publishing my own dive-site location maps.

I live on a sailboat and enjoy sailing. I have a house in Mexico, down in Bahia de Los Angeles on the Sea of Cortez. I like the ocean, the big outdoors, and I like to create products that other people can use.

I can still go scuba diving and have fun. I take students out on the inflatable (boat) to Point Loma after they are certified. We’ll go get some abalone and some lobsters and we’ll have them for supper that night.

I think what I’m doing is hard on relationships I’ve been in, married and nonmarried. There is a general fear in women of where the money’s going to come from. It can be feast or famine, and I’ll come up with an idea and spend $6,000 on it. I might make some money on it, and I might not make some on it.

I have difficulty explaining to people what I do, because I do more than one thing. Limitations are only within the framework of your own mind, and I found it easier to work for myself, so I had to come up with ways of working for myself and being successful.