CAPE GIRARDEAU SCUBA INSTRUCTOR DELIGHTS IN SHARING UNDERWATER FUN

CAPE GIRARDEAU -- As a professional scuba diver, Wayne Hughes has swam with manatees in Florida. But ask him what's pleasing about his career choice, and he starts talking about dealing with a different kind of inquisitive mammal.

The mammal isn't anything like a dolphin or a small breed of whale; it's your average diving student.

Hughes has owned and operated the Academy of Scuba Training Inc., 437 Broadway, with his wife, Lynn, since 1975. Each year the couple both master instructors with the International Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) teach various aspects of scuba diving to about 200 people from 12 to 72 years of age.

The academy is one of about 70 facilities throughout the world that are rated as five-star PADI training facilities, Hughes said. Students not only come from Cape Girardeau, Sikeston, Poplar Bluff or Carbondale to attend, but even cities like Kansas City.

The 42-year-old Hughes said he feels the most exciting part of his work is getting people involved in scuba diving. It's pleasing to watch other people take part in a recreational activity that's so fulfilling on a personal level, he said.

"Watching people get so turned on about (scuba diving) is one of the additional rewards aside from the every day type of things," said Hughes. "It helps people to be aware of their own surroundings; of the activity of the underwater world."

Hughes began teaching scuba diving for extra money in 1973, three years after he began diving himself. Then he was a student at Southeast Missouri State University and planned to go on to dental school. Scuba diving changed all that when Hughes began spending more and more time training people and found he enjoyed it.

Through his work Hughes has the opportunity to visit various tropical places with his students. Students may dive in the Caribbean Sea in places like Grand Cayman, the Dutch Antilles and the British West Indies.

When the types of tropical fishes that can be seen through diving are first described to people, they just kind of shake their heads and act suspect, said Hughes, who dabbles in underwater photography. For instance, he said there is a black-and-white species of drum fish with polka dots and horizontal and vertical stripes.

"Really, it's there; I have evidence to prove it," he said, explaining he has a photograph of the fish.

There are also fish with bright yellow heads and blue tails, he said, and fish that glow after a light is turned on them.

"It's really hard to imagine some of the colors until you actually see them," Hughes said. "We find it's interesting to see somebody when they're experiencing this for the first or second time or even the one-hundredth time. It's still new and different" for them.

Occasionally the academy will schedule dives with porpoises, he said. Manatees, a coastal aquatic animal also known as the "sea cow," are another species of sea life that Hughes has cohabited with on dives.

"We organize a lot of trips where we can take people where they'll be able to encounter different types of life," Hughes said, "and manatees are one of them."

Manatees Hughes has swum with them in such places as Florida's Crystal River are very tame and friendly, he said. His statement is given credence by a framed, color photograph on a wall of the academy that pictures a whiskered manatee close-up.

Still, Hughes described manatees as also being wary. "The thing is you can't chase after them; they will come up to you."

Chasing a manatee could cause the animal to swim out to colder water, catch pneumonia and die, he said. Also, Hughes said, steep fines exist for harassing a manatee, which is considered an endangered species.

Hughes has done some less glamorous work through scuba diving, too. He's cleaned out Union Electric's water intake here on the Mississippi River, installed pipelines at the power plant in Grand Tower, Ill., salvaged barges in such places as Owensboro, Ky., and inspected lake beaches before their spring openings for the Army Corps of Engineers, he said.

Along with those jobs, Hughes said he's done fish counts and photographs for the Missouri Conservation Department.