Ned DeLoach

Shortly after graduating from Texas Tech University in 1967, Ned DeLoach moved to Florida to dive. During his 20-year teaching career at the high school level in Jacksonville, Florida, Ned became active in the Florida cave diving community, taking photographs and editing educational material for the National Speleological Society’s Cave Diving Section. During the summers he traveled the Caribbean and Bahamas writing dive destination pieces for dive related magazines. In 1972 he founded New World Publications, with the printing of a 48-page booklet Diving and Recreational Guide to Florida Springs by Ned DeLoach. A few years later, Diving Guide to the Florida Keys followed. After several subsequent editions the books were combined and greatly expanded into Ned DeLoach’s Diving Guide to Underwater Florida, which is currently in its 11th edition. In the early 1980’s, Ned was appointed editor-in-chief of Ocean Realm magazine. He invited Paul Humann, to whom he had been introduced by a mutual friend, to join him as co-editor. Their two years of success with the magazine led to their decision to leave the magazine business when Ocean Realm was sold and concentrate on the publication of a series of marine life field guides, including the popular Reef Set trilogy, Reef Fish Identification, Reef Creature Identification, and Reef Coral Identification - Florida, Caribbean, Bahamas. Over the past two decades the pair have co-authored ten field guides to marine life, and co-founded the Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF). During the late-1990s, Ned and his wife Anna lived for an extended period in Bimini, Bahamas where the couple studied and photographed the behavior reef fishes, which in 2000 resulted the seminal work Reef Fish Behavior. Over the years Ned and Anna have written regular columns about marine life for Ocean Realm, Skin Diver, Scuba Diving, Scuba Diver AustralAsia, and Alert Diver. They chronicle their dive travels at marinelifeblog.com.