Robert F. Burgess, who grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, worked as a teenager on a railroad section gang to get in shape for the better paying job of painting high-tension wire towers. Then he lived and worked aboard the Milwaukee Clipper, a large passenger and car ferry that daily sailed back and forth across Lake Michigan. In 1944, ten years before Jacques Cousteau brought scuba to America, Burgess built his first diving gear from an old WWII gas mask, gas station air hose, and a gasoline-powered air compressor, to dive down to an old shipwreck near Lake Michigan. After a year of Pre-Medicine at Michigan State University he joined the army to serve with the 88th Blue Devil Division Ski Troops in the Italian Alps, bringing German prisoners out of mountain fortifications. Later his outfit became the TRUST Garrison in Trieste, Italy, on the Adriatic. After discharge he returned to Europe to study foreign languages in Italy and at the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland on the GI Bill. As part of his athletic activities with the university he skied the top resorts in Switzerland. The following summer after selling his German amphibious jeep in Trieste he bought a Lambretta motor scooter on which he and a companion entered Switzerland by crossing three Alpine mountain ranges one July night in a snowstorm. Later, on a trip to North Africa with a fighter pilot buddy they stopped at the Isle of Capri and found life so fantastic there that they rented a seaside villa for $7 a week and never left for the next three months. Finally returning to the United States he completed his schooling in Journalism at Michigan State University. An active scuba diver and underwater photographer, Robert Burgess has spent his life writing about his adventures above and below water. By interviewing treasure hunters, mountain climbers, cave divers and scientists, he gained material for writing hundreds of magazine articles and over twenty factual and fictional books on these subjects. The winter of 1956 he and his wife motor-scootered across the Rivieras to live half-way to Africa on the island of Majorca where he wrote the book Moving to Majorca now also available as a Kindle e-book titled To Majorca with Love. Later, from Madrid, he and a companion hiked to North Africa, crossing the Mediterranean with members of the French Foreign Legion to backpack through Tunisia for a magazine assignment to find and explore Hill 609, a honeycombed German mountain fortress. Returning from North Africa and learning that he had just missed Hemingway in Madrid, he motor-scootered into Spain's Guadarama Mountains to meet Ernest Hemingway in Pamplona. In 1998 he returned to Europe to back-track Hemingway through his old Paris haunts and into the Spanish Pyrenees for his book titled, Hemingway's Paris and Pamplona, Then and Now, and its footnoted e-book edition titled Meeting Hemingway in Pamplona. This author's books about sailing, shipwrecks, sharks, treasure diving, cave diving, and underwater archaeology are acclaimed for the author's ability to put the reader in the midst of the action. Between trips, Mr. Burgess dives, sails and resides in north Florida.

Take a look at Bob's PhotoArt