October 25, 2026
People sometimes ask where Ryan Weller came from.
He's a former Navy EOD technician turned commercial diver who spends part of every book underwater. Over the course of the Ryan Weller Maritime Thriller Series, I've sent him diving on wrecks, searching for bodies, working salvage jobs, exploring underwater crime scenes, and getting himself into situations where any sensible person would probably stay on the boat.
I'm not Ryan.
I wasn't Navy EOD.
I wasn't a combat diver.
But I do know what it's like to descend into dark water without knowing exactly what you're going to find.
I'd wanted to learn to dive when I was a kid. I even had things lined up to do it when I was fourteen, but then I traded the lessons for a mountain bike. Stupid. But hindsight is always 20/20. But I learned to dive in 2006, and haven't looked back.
Why Not?
I'd been injured in a motorcycle accident while on active duty in the Navy.
By 2006, I'd been using a wheelchair for five years.
That didn't mean I'd stopped being interested in doing things.
Motorcycles had always been a big part of my life. I'd gone to Motorcycle Mechanics Institute. I'd worked as a mechanic. I'd served in the Navy working around MH-53E Sea Dragons and mine-countermeasures equipment.
I had a Honda Rubicon ATV that I wheeled all over the countryside, flipped over while doing doughnuts in a frozen cornfield, and waited hours for someone to rescue me. I got stuck in a rushing creek and had to be winched out. I loved going with my buddy Richie to West Virginia to ride through the mountains.
And then I added diving to my list. People said I was crazy. I said I wanted no regrets. I didn't want to lie in bed when I got old and think, man, I should have done that.
I was never interested in ball sports. I liked to hunt and fish and would rather work than get run over by a linebacker or dribble in my shorts.
Scuba diving sounded interesting. My uncle used to send me equipment catalogs and books from Vancouver, where the diving was cold but incredibly beautiful. He wasn't a diver, but he knew what I liked.
I decided to finally learn. And I had to find an instructor who would teach a paraplegic.
George was dating my sister-in-law at the time. We decided to get certified together. My sister-in-law tagged along. The three of us went to the YMCA pool for six weeks to learn the basics. My instructor, Twink, was a ballerina underwater. She was willing to learn with me about how to accommodate my disability.
We did our open water dives in a quarry in June. The water was still ice cold. I remember swimming over the ledge for the first time as I descended and my breath catching in my chest. Nerves? Excitement? Afraid of the unknown? I don't know, but I remember it clearly.
George and I were hooked. Sis, not so much. We hit the water every chance we got, bought our equipment, and along the way, I learned to adapt it all to me.
There were problems to solve. Webbed gloves hurt my hands. I found plastic swimmer's training paddles. A jacket-style BCD kept me upright. I switched to a harness and wing. Switching to sidemount kept me from rolling onto my back when my arms weren't spread.
That's something diving and the military have in common.
Figure out what needs to happen.
Then figure out how to make it happen.
Diving Doesn't Care About Your Wheelchair
On land, a wheelchair changes almost everything about how you move through the world.
Underwater?
The equation changes.
You're controlling your position in three dimensions with breathing, buoyancy, trim, propulsion, and equipment. Buoyancy changes everything. I was equal to all the other divers. I'm just a lot slower. Swimming with your arms is not as efficient as propelling yourself with your legs.
There were still practical considerations.
Getting into the water. Getting out. Handling equipment. Equipment configuration.
Boat ladders—which were designed by sadists even for people whose legs work.
You adapt.
Sometimes that means adapting the equipment.
Sometimes it means changing a procedure.
Sometimes it means another diver helping.
That became an important lesson later when I started writing Ryan Weller.
In commercial diving, they say there are no problems, only solutions.
Welcome to Quarry Diving
Some people learn to scuba dive in warm Caribbean water with a hundred feet of visibility and tropical fish swimming around them.
I got quarries. I learned to love quarries. The water was cold and dark, and sometimes visibility was less than arm's length. I remember diving in a quarry that had never been dived before. I hit the bottom quickly, sinking into a thick bed of mud and leaves from decades of them filling the quarry. I had to hold my computer to my face mask just to see the glow of the numbers.
Then, there are the thermoclines that hang like thick gray lines between water layers of different temperatures.
You'd descend through one layer of water and suddenly hit another that felt like somebody had opened the refrigerator door. We used to dive Gilboa Quarry. I probably have a hundred dives there. The spring water is 42 degrees at 60 feet year-round. At 130', it was 33 degrees. Dropping through the last thermocline was like getting punched in the face with a block of ice. Everything was gloomy green and covered in slime, but it was still cool to be there.
Quarries taught me something about diving that eventually became important to the Ryan Weller books.
You don't need a coral reef to make underwater exploration interesting.
Sometimes the attraction is simply asking, what's down there?
I liked to go to a pile of riprap in the old Portage Quarry and flip little rocks over to watch the bass chase the crawfish that shot out from under the rocks. Once you turned over a rock, you'd have a giant school of bass surrounding you, cheering you on and dueling for the treat. In Gilboa, you could stand on top of the school bus and open a bag of fish food. The fish would form a ball that completely surrounded the diver. I have a photo of George feeding the fish, and all you can see are his feet.
A submerged object barely visible at the edge of your light can pull you forward.
A wreck isn't simply a wreck.
It has structure, openings, compartments, machinery, history, and darkness.
You want to know what's inside.
Then Came the Dry Suit
Cold-water diving eventually introduced me to dry suits.
A dry suit is exactly what the name suggests in theory.
Reality occasionally has other ideas. Poke a hole in it, and everything is wet by the time you finish your dive.
It's also another air space to manage.
Now you're not simply controlling the gas in your buoyancy compensator and your lungs. You've got gas moving around inside the suit.
For a paraplegic diver who can't simply kick his legs down when gas migrates toward his feet, it introduces some additional considerations. I wore boots, gaiters, and long wrestling knee pads to keep the gas from reaching my feet. Turning upside down and shooting to the surface isn't fun. It's downright scary. I was only at 20 feet, but the thought of getting decompression sickness was very real. I righted myself and went back down to recompress. I lived, but I don't recommend shooting to the surface feet first.
I met the owner of the dive shop where I now work when he lived in Ohio. We dove at Portage Quarry together. Our first meeting was just after I rolled into the water. He walked up and said, "You need a scooter." He fetched his son's, but every time I tried to grab the controls, I would start to roll. I had to keep my arms spread to maintain balance. I handed the scooter back, and he said, "You need to sidemount." I was like, "Who the heck is this guy?"
We became good friends.
I also learned to sidemount. Like most things in life, I said, "I can figure this out." I'm sure a class would have cut the learning curve, but I wouldn't have all that experience or the stories that ended up in the books.
Experience usually begins with screwing something up.
That's one of the things I eventually carried into my fiction.
Competent characters shouldn't be magically competent.
They make mistakes.
They figure things out.
Eventually the unusual becomes routine.
The St. Lawrence Was Different
Quarry diving was one thing.
The St. Lawrence River was another.
Strong current changes diving.
Suddenly the water itself is going somewhere, and it would be perfectly happy to take you along.
You plan around it. You respect it.
And you discover very quickly that being underwater doesn't mean you've escaped geography.
Rivers have structure.
Currents accelerate around wrecks and obstructions.
Your descent matters. Your ascent matters. You stay on the freaking line! If you get swept into the shipping lane, you'll get a bill from the government for the hundreds of thousands of dollars they spent rescuing you while they shut down the shipping lane.
Water isn't empty space.
Big ships passing overhead sound like they're right on top of you no matter how far away they are. Those props will chew you up and spit you out. It's a crazy sound to hear as you're deep underwater.
It's part of the environment. It moves. It pushes. It limits visibility. It changes temperature. It affects sound. It changes how quickly you can solve a problem.
And sometimes it decides where you're going, whether you agree or not.
The Spiegel Grove
Then there were wrecks.
The USS Spiegel Grove is enormous.
You can know the dimensions of a ship before you dive it.
That doesn't prepare you for seeing one underwater.
A wreck emerges gradually.
At first, there may be nothing.
Blue water.
Your bubbles.
Other divers.
Maybe a line disappearing below you.
Then something materializes underneath.
A shadow.
A shape.
A piece of structure.
And suddenly there's a ship down there.
That feeling slams me in the chest just writing about it.
There's something about wreck diving that combines machinery, history, exploration, and just enough danger to make everything interesting to me. Forget caves. I love deep wrecks, and I cannot lie. They really satisfy.
Ships weren't designed to be underwater.
Doors become openings.
Passageways become overhead environments.
Decks and bulkheads change orientation.
Corrosion works on everything.
Lines snag.
Sediment waits for somebody to kick it up.
The deeper you go, the less forgiving mistakes become.
Going Deeper
Eventually, recreational diving wasn't enough.
I moved into technical diving.
Technical diving adds equipment, redundancy, decompression, gas planning, procedures, and a much smaller margin for stupidity.
But honestly, it's not just going beyond recreational limits. It's any time you exceed the no-decompression limits. You can go into deco at thirty feet. Tech diving is more complicated, but it has the same constraints as recreational diving.
You can't just go up when you have a problem.
You've accumulated a decompression obligation. Even recreational diving requires a three-minute stop at fifteen feet.
You have to solve the problem where you are.
Technical diving is partly about equipment, but it's really about managing problems before they become emergencies.
What gas do I have?
How much do I need?
What's my backup?
What happens if I lose this regulator?
What happens if my buddy loses his gas?
What happens if we lose visibility?
What happens if we lose the line?
What happens if something fails at the worst possible moment?
You don't make yourself invulnerable.
You build options. And if you're not worried about the same things while recreational diving, then you should rethink your diving strategy.
That's thriller material.
Learning From Someone Who Had Done It for Real
My buddy, Kary, was also a combat diver in the My Ass Rides In Navy Equipment Corps. He also worked as a commercial diver. He also owns the dive shop where I work, and he has taught a lot of people to scuba dive.
There's a difference between somebody who knows a skill recreationally and somebody who has used it professionally when the consequences mattered.
The equipment may overlap.
The fundamentals may overlap.
The mentality can be very different.
That's something I've carried throughout my writing career.
Talk to people.
Listen.
Ask questions.
And when somebody has actually walked the walk—or, in this case, swum the swim—shut up long enough to hear what they're telling you.
Those experiences eventually gave me pieces of Ryan Weller.
Then Ryan Showed Up
When I created Ryan, I didn't sit down and decide to write myself as an action hero.
That would have been a very different book.
Ryan had a background I found interesting.
Navy EOD.
Then he moved into commercial diving.
That opened an enormous world.
Underwater construction.
Inspection.
Salvage.
Ships.
Wrecks.
Ports.
Crime.
The Caribbean.
All of it gave me a protagonist who could plausibly go places most thriller characters couldn't.
Underwater.
And that changed the kinds of stories I could tell. One of the books—I won't tell you which one—doesn't have any diving in it. A friend who reads my books said he was disappointed. He liked that Ryan revolved around diving. I made sure every book from then on has Ryan underwater at some point.
Ryan's Sense of Exploration Is Mine
Ryan isn't me.
But there is one piece of him that's probably closer to me than anything else.
He wants to know what's down there.
That's mine.
Drop beneath the surface and the normal world disappears.
The boat becomes a distorted shape above you.
Sound changes.
Light changes.
Gravity seems to loosen its grip.
The cares of the world slip away, and you're alone in the moment. You think of nothing but survival. We're not meant to be underwater, but when we are, it's mentally freeing.
I love that moment.
So does Ryan. He always says the ocean welcomes him back with her salty embrace, but cross her and she'll kill you, literally.
The Wheelchair Was Never the Story
Learning to dive as a paraplegic obviously required adaptations.
I had to do things differently, just like on land.
When I think about those dives, the wheelchair isn't usually what I remember.
I remember the water.
The cold.
The thermocline.
The current.
The wreck.
The equipment.
The people.
The things that went wrong.
The things that worked.
And that darkness just beyond the range of my light?
That's where I end, and Ryan Weller begins.
© 2026 Evan Graver. All rights reserved.