More than 25 years ago, Bob Hollis and a partner started a company known as Oceanic. They made camera housings, strobes, strobe housings and various U/W photo accessories, for a budding industry. The company known as Oceanic is aptly named: it is the result of one man's love of the sea. Bob Hollis was born in Orland, California. His fascination with the ocean began when he was working in Standard Oil's engineering services division while earning a degree in mechanical engineering.

His weekends were spent free diving in the Pacific Ocean off the northern California coast. As did most of our diving pioneers, he became an avid hunter, collecting abalone and spearfishing. In 1956 he bought a two hose regulator and began scuba diving. At the same time he became friends with three underwater photographers. This was a brand new art and the men made their own housings because there were none available commercially. Bob made a housing for his camera using Plexiglass. When the first electronic strobes came out in 1958, he made underwater housings for them as well.

Underwater photography soon replaced hunting as a passion and Bob still enjoys it today. In the early '60s he founded the Underwater Photographic Society (UPS) of Northern California. Dewey Bergman, the founder of See & Sea Travel, was a UPS member and Bob was soon running the world's first organized dive trips-to Cozumel-for See & Sea.

In 1966, Bob and Ray Collins opened a sporting goods, surfing, diving and fishing store called the Anchor Shack in Hayward, CA. (There would eventually be three stores.) They also sold a mail order line of Anchor Shack U/W photo equipment. The products, all hand made, included a camera tray and ball joint arms, along with strobe and camera housings. One of the most successful products was an aluminum housing for Nikon and Canon cameras known as the Hydro 35. About 3,500 of these were sold; some are still in use today.

When Anchor Shack's Hydro Strobe was introduced, Skin Diver Magazine wrote an article on this, the first commercially available housing for a strobe. Bob credits this multi-page Skin Diver article with bringing the photo line to the attention of the diving public. About 6,000 of these housings were sold.

In 1972, Oceanic was founded with the Anchor Shack photo line as its product base. Two years later the company's building burned down. When it was being rebuilt in 1974, Bob made a couple of life-changing decisions. He bought out his partner and he decided to purchase machinery and tooling for a plastic housing that could be used for several products. The machine cost $50,000. "It took a big roll of the dice" to make the decision to buy the machine, Bob says, "$50,000 was a lot of money in those days."

The new company was off and running. Bob began adding products to the Oceanic line. There were lights, of course, but in the beginning there were also more photo products: lenses, carrying cases, a lightmeter, camera and strobe housings, extension tubes and framers.

Then, in 1976, Oceanic bought Farallon. That added fins, masks, snorkels, diver propulsion vehicles, knives, BCs and gauges, to the company's product line. It was the beginning of the Oceanic of the future.