A few years into my huge hobby of scuba diving, my buddy’s and my proficiency in diving had taken to higher levels and our dives were going deeper and had more extended bottom times, more different gasses and more equipment was hauled with us. In other words our diving oftentimes was no longer the leisurely recreational diving of just a little scuba tank on the back and off you go.
So my buddy felt it was time for us to step up to the plate and seek real thorough dive training by the best in the world. Scouring the internet we found that beyond a doubt the very best team of divers were located in High Springs near Gainsville in Florida and fortunately enough they actually also had their own teaching and training available.
Their school of thought was somewhat provocatively called DIR which was an acronym for Doing It Right, meaning basically that everyone else who are not following this school of thought and their way of diving are blatantly doing it wrong. Provocative or not, let me assure you that to my knowledge this is bar none the best dive training you can get anywhere in the world and if you profess to this kind of diving along with your buddy and/or team then you can be sure to have loads of great dives that are no only fun, but you will also enjoy possibly the safest kind of diving even when the dives are pretty challenging.
Anyway, the DIR school demands very specific ways of setting up among other things your equipment and also utilizes some specific types of equipment. Since much of this type of equipment was not readily available or not exactly the way the school had wanted it, they had commenced production of their own equipment line and now some years later had some beautiful and highly professional top quality gear on offer.
Since I got to know them all and kept coming back for more diving in the caves of High Springs and off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, it did not take long before I was offered to take over the distribution of their equipment to Denmark. I happily accepted and within a few months of servicing Denmark I had doubled their sales into Denmark of their equipment. Their gear brand was called Halcyon so I naturally just called this business which I founded for Halcyon Denmark.
About two years later, Halcyon’s distribution was sought to be centralized and it seemed a good idea to do so with the much larger distributor of Germany who also already had distribution into some other countries such as Poland and France and a few others, I believe. Denmark was just a small market and gathering all the distribution into a single distributor made a lot of sense, so I sold off the activities of Halcyon Denmark to the German distributor and soon after Sweden and Norway and pretty much everyone else in Europe (with only a few exceptions) followed suit. That was the end of my scuba diving equipment distributorship. It was fun, but unless you were to expand your footprint beyond Denmark, then the business opportunities and potentials were very limited.
Halcyon still makes by far the best scuba diving equipment there is and I still only want to dive with their equipment. They run a great factory in High Springs in the Northern part of Florida, near the many great caves in which they still explore to extent where no other has gone before.
