Scuba Geek

‘Turtle Lady’ Rouse, female scuba diving pioneer, dies at 80 December 30, 2005

Posted by Andy Carroll in : News, general , trackback

Norine Rouse, one of the America’s first female scuba diving instructors and a champion of sea turtle and reef protection off Palm Beach County’s shores, died Tuesday, reports the Bradenton Herald.

Mrs. Rouse, who didn’t start scuba diving until into her 40’s, became one of the area’s underwater pioneers and a sought-after expert on sea life, becoming known as the ‘turtle’ lady. She was one of a handful of people licensed by the state of Florida to swim with sea turtles and would steadfastly record and photograph their behavior for scientists’ use.

“She loved sea turtles more than people,” said J.D. Duff of the Scuba Club Inc. Duff met Mrs. Rouse in 1977, while in college, and she later hired him to his current job.

She was born in Savannah, Ga., the only child of a housewife and mechanic, on May 9, 1925. After 20 years of marriage, she divorced and took up scuba diving after watching a Jacques Cousteau film. In 1966, Mrs. Rouse moved to Freeport, Bahamas, with $125 she had won on a television game show and became a scuba diving instructor there.

“They hired me to show even a woman could do it,” Mrs. Rouse said in a 2000 interview.

During a 1981 excursion in the Sea of Cortez, she rode a manta ray for the 18 most thrilling minutes of her life, she said. Later that year, she was paralyzed from the waist down from the bends, also known as decompression sickness, a condition afflicting divers who surface too rapidly. Doctors told her to give up diving, but she continued scuba diving for rehabilitation. She was walking on her own after several months.
Mrs. Rouse admitted to being the type of scuba diver who liked to stay down until the last few breaths of air remained in her tank. She always wanted to spend as much time as possible scuba diving.

She hated spearfishing and campaigned against it by either giving free dives in exchange for a spear gun, or by more direct methods. Her zeal grew to mythic proportions. Accounts circulated about her skewering fishermen’s fins with their own spears and pulling the mask off of one fisherman underwater. She said those stories were not true. She recorded every dive, stopping at 7,650 in 1995, when the lingering effects of the bends forced her to stay ashore.

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