Phil has been diving professionally and exploring for over 30 years and has logging thousands of dives in caves and open water using both open and closed circuit equipment.
He learnt to dive in 1990, from a background of dry caving, to pass short flooded sections of dry caves. He then continued his diver training through the PADI system with Course Director Steve Axtell and in 1991 he qualified as a PADI instructor and began teaching full time, working his way up to Master Instructor.
During this period Phil continued cave diving and began developing his Technical Diving skills through training with Kevin Gurr and in 1993 was involved in forming one of the first Trimix wreck diving teams in the UK and working as a CCR Diver of shipwreck search projects in the Gulf of Mexico & Guam. He is one of the foremost IANTD Instructor Trainer Trainers and the Training director of IANTD UK in addition to being a member of the IANTD HQ Board of Advisors.
Having developed his Technical skills, Phil began to use them for cave diving, his true passion, on expeditions to Mallorca, France, Spain, Canada, Russia, Greece and Mexico. At the same time, he began teaching first open, then closed circuit, technical and cave diving full time.
Phil has been involved in film projects for ITV, BBC, Discovery, Channel 4 and NOVA. On projects such as ‘The M1 submarine’, ‘The shipwrecks from the battle of Jutland’, ‘The Last B-24’, ‘Oceans’, and cave diving projects in Spain ‘The Road to Certain Death’, the UK ‘Secret Underground’ and Mexico ‘Curiosity The Cave’.
