Paul Woyak: Why Am I Alive? Survival, Purpose & Living With Intention

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 627 with Paul Woyak.

Meet Paul Woyak

Paul Woyak: Hello, I'm Paul Woyak, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Tom Rowland: Paul, what's going on today? How are you?

Paul Woyak: Doing great, Tom. How are you doing?

Tom Rowland: I'm doing great. Are you out in California?

Paul Woyak: Yes, I am.

Tom Rowland: Right on. I've been reading up on you a little bit — you have a pretty amazing life. You've really done a lot of things. Why don't you give me a brief history of where you grew up and how you got into commercial diving?

Growing Up in Wisconsin and Discovering the Ocean

Paul Woyak: I was born in Wisconsin, surrounded by lakes, and there wasn't one that was safe. My parents had five kids, so they had to change the whole dynamic — my mom told me one parent would watch the two older kids while the other watched the three younger ones, and eventually they switched to one parent watching me exclusively, since I couldn't get enough of being underwater. I couldn't swim, but I didn't want to give in, so they had to put fluorescent trunks on me just to find me — I was underwater all the time. Then my dad's job moved us out to California, and I saw the biggest lake on the planet. That was it — I never turned back. The first time I saw surfing was a monumental moment. I didn't even see the wave until it came around the corner of the sea bluff, and I watched this perfect, zipping tube. Then all of a sudden someone came out of it, and I thought, what is that, Aquaman? I was ten years old.

Tom Rowland: Ten years old when you first saw surfing? Did that ignite a lifelong passion?

Paul Woyak: Absolutely. I didn't even know what it was — all I knew, once I figured out it was a human being doing it, was that I was going to do it too.

Tom Rowland: Back east, were you water skiing, or skateboarding, or doing any other board sports — anything that resembled surfing?

Paul Woyak: Mostly swimming in lakes. There were five of us kids, and we didn't have a ton of money, so canoeing was the big thing, along with some night fishing for pike. I remember a hole getting blown in the boat one time when we caught one — crazy stuff happening when I was little, but mostly it was just boating. I wasn't allowed to do a whole lot.

From Surfing to Commercial Diving

Tom Rowland: So you start this passion with surfing — how does that lead you to commercial diving?

Paul Woyak: After I realized I didn't want to do anything else with my free time, I'd check the waves two or three times a day and do something else if the surf wasn't cooperating. I figured I might as well get around the ocean somehow, and Santa Barbara City College had, at the time, the best commercial diving training facility in America — the marine tech program. So that's where I went, right into it.

Tom Rowland: What did you expect to do once you got out of that program? We've had a couple of other California commercial divers on the podcast, and there are so many paths you can take — welding, inspection, all kinds of things. Did you have a direction in mind?

Paul Woyak: I did. I thought I had enough connections in the Santa Barbara area to land a job on one of the oil platforms. My friend who went through the program with me had a dad who was a long-renowned name in diving — underwater welding, bell diving, all of it. But as I was getting out of school, ROVs were taking over the industry and a lot of the underwater work, and everybody who could get a job in California did. Everything else was in Louisiana, in the muddy water, doing scrub work and setting up welding operations, and I didn't want to do that. On top of that, I had surfer's ear from so much time in the water — back then they'd cut the ear, flop it over, and drill it out — and that completely washed me out of the commercial diving industry because I was no longer insurable.

Tom Rowland: So once that happens — you could still dive, but you were uninsurable and unhireable. How did you deal with that injury?

Paul Woyak: After the surgery, knowing I couldn't follow the career path I wanted, I was told I could operate ROVs from the surface, but I didn't want to play video games — I wanted to be in the water. So I went down to the harbor and landed a job on a sea urchin vessel.

Diving for Sea Urchins in the Channel Islands

Tom Rowland: Sea urchin diving is still diving, but a different type — how different was the depth or pressure from oil platform work?

Paul Woyak: Definitely shallower. Oil platform work could take you two or three hundred feet down, sometimes deeper with dive bells — all these unknown possibilities. California had enough divers already, so sea urchin diving became the path forward with my condition.

Tom Rowland: We have sea urchins in the Florida Keys, but they're not really harvested commercially. The ones you're harvesting are the kind people see in sushi restaurants — do you know what species those are compared to ours?

Paul Woyak: It's a long scientific name — I actually break it all down in the book. But I can tell you why there's a market out there and maybe not in the Keys: it's the water temperature. Our water is colder, and that longshore current carries more nutrients, so the urchins produce a much more abundant, tastier roe — the uni, the eggs, whatever you want to call it. Some people compare it to caviar. When the water got too warm in the summer, the roe would go bad and we'd have to lay off diving.

Tom Rowland: What temperatures were you looking for?

Paul Woyak: We were hoping to keep it in the low fifties. If it bumped into the mid-to-high fifties, the roe would start getting funky, and the urchins would stop spawning and get docile. The big purple ones we harvested were dark purple — I think the light purple ones are what you have in the Keys, and those are actually invasive; they kill the bigger, better-eating urchins by climbing underneath and popping them loose.

Tom Rowland: Are they native to your area? We deal with a lot of invasive species trying to get into our waters — lionfish are a huge problem right now. They eat everything smaller than them and nothing eats them, though we've seen the occasional mutton snapper take one. It doesn't seem to make much of a dent in the population no matter how many tournaments we run. But anyway — what kind of gear were you wearing diving in that cold water?

Paul Woyak: I wore a nine-sixteenths-inch one-piece dive suit. A lot of guys wore a two-piece long john with a jacket — a beavertail setup — using quarter-inch neoprene that layers up to about half an inch, or they'd go three-eighths or even half-inch, depending on the diver.

Tom Rowland: How much time underwater does it take to harvest urchins in a day?

Paul Woyak: We'd do an eight-hour day — four to six, even seven dives, because you're constantly bringing up your bag, resetting, and going back down. Our operation ran two-day trips, so we'd spend the night out there. Diesels move slow but sure, and the skipper saved a lot of money on gas that way. We'd get out there around ten or eleven in the morning, dive until late, eat, sleep, then do a full eight-hour day and head home before sunset — though we'd travel at night.

Tom Rowland: What kind of habitat do the urchins live in?

Paul Woyak: Lots of shale shelves, reefs, and rock formations. Depending on the currents, different nutrients support kelp, moss, or algae growing on the rock, and the urchins crawl around eating that as well as the kelp itself — they don't just eat kelp, a lot of times they eat what grows around it. It was pretty nice scenery. I definitely enjoyed some spots more than others — some of them just lit up.

The Great White Shark Encounter at Shark Park

Tom Rowland: Your book covers three life-changing events, and one of them — with a great white shark — happens during this stretch of commercial diving. Is that right?

Paul Woyak: That's correct. We'd been doing this for about a year, and one day we headed out a day before conditions were advised — there had been a month-long swath of storms. As I say in the book, we were starving, and so was most everything else in that ocean, because nothing's really biting when everything's churning and you can't see. So we went out a day early and paid for it — the visibility was horrible by the time we got there, with fog cover rolling in. San Miguel is the westernmost of the Channel Islands, small and sticking way out past Point Conception, and it was completely socked in. We had to slow to about five knots plunging into the kelp. It was eerie. We went to a spot called Shark Park, aptly named — it's right next to the graveyard of ships, which always makes me wonder about the people who survived their wreck only to experience death before drowning, swimming for the island.

The skipper, acting as hunter, took the scooter out into the Shark Park waters looking for a suitable spot to harvest, and came back frustrated and angry, throwing his gear around and cussing up a storm — we weren't finding anything, getting thrown around ten to fifteen feet down in a big swell, slammed into the rocks, no way it would have worked even if we'd found urchins. I think he was mad at himself as much as anything, spending the money to go out there for nothing. So I got my chance — I said sure, I'll go take a shot at this. I took off with a tank and the scooter, looking for a protected area — what we'd call a cul-de-sac that dives into these huge kelp forests. If you can get into one of those, the current is less, the surge is less, and the visibility is typically better — like a little clearing in the storm. As I found one and made my way back there, that's when my life changed.

Tom Rowland: What did you see?

Paul Woyak: I saw the thing that made the change. It's hard to describe. Ralph Collier — he's known as the number one shark expert in the world — has read the manuscript in the book, every detail, and he says it's in the top five escapes of all time. I keep pressing him on where exactly it lands, and he won't tell me — but he also hasn't said it's not number one. So I still have a number two shark story, if you want to hear it.

Bob Kirby and the Conveyor Belt of White Sharks

Paul Woyak: Have you ever heard of a guy named Bob Kirby — of Kirby Morgan dive masks? They're used all over the world, including in Florida. Bob was a pioneer in the diving industry who invented all kinds of things that kept getting stolen from him — someone would throw money at it, put their name on it, and run over whoever actually thought of it first. One of the things he was working on was surface-to-subsurface communication. Around 1960, he was harvesting abalone in heavy gear — the old hard-hat rig, with a breastplate like football shoulder pads and a helmet with four ports screwed on. He was testing his communication setup while working abalone at Anacapa Island in about thirty feet of water.

Back then abalone grew in large slabs stacked on top of each other, and Bob was working a big circle, five or six feet across and three or four feet tall, telling the topside crew he was getting close to loading it onto the net they'd lower down — no float bags, it was that plentiful back then. As they're coordinating this, topside calls down: "Bob, we've got a fish up here — a big fish." Bob's thinking, what fish? He checks both ports, and the second time he looks over his left shoulder, this thing starts swimming by — a conveyor belt of white sharks, one after another. Bob went from "I can take on anything" to a whimpering child at the sight of it, screaming that he was coming up. And these animals are never full — they'll practice taking something even when they're not hungry, once they get to that size.

Tom Rowland: That's a massive animal. A full-grown great white can be sixteen to twenty-five feet. We do have great whites in the Keys — I haven't seen one myself, but people are spotting them more and more. The biggest shark we regularly see is the hammerhead, coming in to eat tarpon — those can run thirteen or fourteen feet and as big around as the boat, easily a thousand pounds. But a great white — I can't even imagine being in the water with something that size. It's like facing down a grizzly bear or a lion, where you realize there's nothing you can do.

Paul Woyak: That's exactly how Bob felt — he went from "I can do anything" to "I have absolutely nothing to offer here," because that thing was too massive and far too carnivorous to put a dent in. In that heavy gear, divers tie themselves to the bottom and pound in pitons, because if you fall over you sometimes can't get back up.

Tom Rowland: So now you're in the great white's territory, staked to the ground like a chum bag.

Paul Woyak: That's it exactly. And he hadn't even come up yet — he still had to detach from the bottom. So he's screaming that he's coming up, and in beautiful hundred-foot visibility, this monstrous shark does a massive U-turn about seventy feet away and glides up with no tail thrust at all, just coasting on momentum, right up to him. It stopped about three and a half feet away — close enough that he could have reached out and touched its five- or six-inch teeth, with bits of seal skin still stuffed between them, just waiting to end his life. Then out of nowhere it blasted off to his right. He's screaming again, trying to get his other attachment point loose and can't, and then he gets this eerie feeling, turns around, and looks through the back port — and there's the shark again, the exact same distance away, just staring at this thing it had never seen before.

Then it blasted off again, over his left shoulder, and he yelled to pull up on the slack — he was coming up. He turned the exhaust valve off and the intake all the way on, started blowing up like the Pillsbury Doughboy, grabbed his dive knife, cut the line tying him to the bottom, and blasted upward while three or four guys topside reeled in the slack and hauled him aboard. That was the end of his diving career. He never went back in the water again.

Tom Rowland: Was he deep enough to get the bends coming up like that?

Paul Woyak: He was only thirty feet down — you need at least one atmosphere of pressure sustained a while to start building up nitrogen, and at thirty-five or forty feet it takes all day. So no, he wasn't hurt at all.

Tom Rowland: But it was enough to shake a veteran diver into never diving again.

Paul Woyak: Never again. We tried to get him back in — he was my instructor at Santa Barbara City College for mixed-gas and advanced diving, stuff he understood completely — but we couldn't get him diving again for anything. Had a blast with him, though.

Paul's Own Encounter and Decades of Suppressed Trauma

Tom Rowland: What about your encounter — did the shark bite you?

Paul Woyak: No, I was never bitten. But talking to Bob, I realized it could have been the same shark, twenty years later, in that same situation — it was a massive shark. It's tough to go into it further without giving away the book. I'll say this: forty years later, writing about it, I started having nightmares and acting them out in bed, and my wife would smack me, harder each time, and in the dream she'd turn into the shark. It got radical enough that she kicked me out of the bedroom, and that's part of why I had to write this book — the heaviness of it all, after suppressing it for so long.

Tom Rowland: That's basically PTSD — you were carrying post-traumatic stress from an incident forty years in your past. When you got out of the water that day, how did it change your life?

Paul Woyak: That night I couldn't sleep more than about ten minutes at a stretch. On the boat we had two bunks and a little walkway where the topside tender would sleep on the floor, and you had to be careful getting in and out at night to use the facilities. Within ten or fifteen minutes I'd erupt into a nightmare, feeling like I was being eaten, running back and forth and waking up my friend James Smith.

Tom Rowland: Did you actually commercial dive that day — were you productive out there?

Paul Woyak: I can't even remember what I gathered. All I remember is jolting at every shift in the current, every kelp fluctuation, every fish out of the corner of my eye turning into that shark — like a stadium's worth of electricity switching on over and over. I was forever changed, but I kept surfing with a determination that I wasn't going to let it take the ocean away from me. The fight went on for years. I never put a label of PTSD on it, because I always associated that with military veterans — until I met one, told him what I was working through in the book, and he said, "Dude, you've got it."

Tom Rowland: With full respect to the military and everyone who's fought for our freedom, PTSD is PTSD — you have it because of what happened. That's a near-death experience, whether or not the shark was as close as it felt at the time. In your mind, it was right there. I've had something similar with a bear — looking back, maybe it wasn't going to attack, but in the moment it freaked me out, and I still think about it.

The Career-Ending Shoulder Injury

Tom Rowland: You got back in the water and kept diving for another couple of years. What made you change professions?

Paul Woyak: The final career-ending injury was my shoulder. I'd dislocated it several times before, then once or twice diving, and then I had a really bad one. We got it back in, but it tore up so badly that at just one atmosphere of pressure it was turning into a wet noodle. That scared me. It came back working slowly, but that was it — I wasn't going to be productive anymore, so it was time to hang up the wetsuit, get on land, and give up that life.

Tom Rowland: It's interesting that you were afraid to get back in the water, and even when you did you were seeing that shark everywhere, but you still wouldn't let it take surfing away from you. You must really love surfing.

Why Surfing Endures

Paul Woyak: I do. Name me another activity where you're riding a moving surface. I've thought hard about it — skydiving, but you can't really see what's happening and can't react the way you can on a wave. Whitewater rafting is close, and I've done it, but whitewater is the most boring part of surfing. What I keep coming back to is the creativity of a moving surface — you never know what's going to happen from wave to wave, and that thrill had me, big time, back then. Now I get much less of it, because I had to get out of the water to write this book — it was too overwhelming, and I knew I wouldn't be able to write well otherwise.

Tom Rowland: You couldn't enjoy surfing while you were writing about it?

Paul Woyak: Right — bringing back all those memories and reliving them well enough to document what happened, I had to get out of the water. There was no way to enjoy surfing while sitting there thinking through the details of the thing that almost took me out. I first tried writing the book back in 2012. I happened to be at Surf Beach, California, for a shark attack, and I actually helped the victim out of the water and was there with him when he died. That was deeply traumatic, and it made me feel like now was the time, given everything else in my life, to get the book going. But I didn't back up my computer carefully enough — this was before backups were as automatic as they are now — and a good chunk of it vanished in one afternoon. I said, that's it, this will have to wait. Four years ago, the time showed up bigger than ever, and I knew it was time.

Tom Rowland: What made it time?

Paul Woyak: Life kept bumping me toward a point where I'd have to give up surfing, or change my lifestyle, because of responsibilities piling up. We had a child late — she's twenty now, but back when I committed to the book she was turning fifteen or sixteen, and family responsibilities were keeping me out of the water anyway. It turned into, I'm basically dry-docked already, so let's go. That's when Why Am I Alive finally came together and got finished.

Tom Rowland: How long did the whole process take, discounting the time you lost restarting?

Paul Woyak: The total process was four years.

Tom Rowland: What kind of feeling do you have coming out the other side, having relived these traumatic events?

Paul Woyak: It's somewhat surreal — even just talking to you about it now. I thought I'd keep it suppressed and just keep surfing, not deal with what it would take to do this. But you get to a point where you feel it's festering too deep, and it's time to rip the bandage off and heal properly, like pouring hydrogen peroxide into a wound and watching it foam.

Tom Rowland: Was it worth it? You'd decided not to deal with this for years so you could keep surfing — did finishing the book reignite your passion for it, or where are you now?

Paul Woyak: I am really glad I did this, because I'm getting so much feedback from people who've been through their own traumatic experiences, and it's helped them grab hold of their situation in a similar way — not that they've had the same experience, but it gives them confidence to handle theirs. I surf what we call heavy water — I like to ride it big. There's a funny phenomenon: when you're young you don't have the wisdom to do it safely, and by the time you've survived enough giant surf to have that wisdom, your body's aging out from under you. I started noticing twenty-eight- and thirty-five-year-olds looking surprised when I paddled into the lineup with only four or five guys out and fifty people watching from the beach, and I realized maybe I was pushing too much into this level of heavy-water riding at this stage of my life. After a while you try to size down, but the crowds get thicker and the thrill goes down, and you're left wondering how to keep going because it's too risky — just like you could outrun a bear a lot better at thirty than at fifty.

Tom Rowland: There are so many parallels there. When you're young you don't have the wisdom to see what the ocean — or the bear — is really delivering, and you can get yourself into a bad spot. Then you gain the wisdom, and for a while that's your window, your jam. But then your body can't handle what you're dishing out anymore. You see it in CrossFit, in football — aging athletes who finally know exactly what they're doing, right as their bodies stop cooperating. People say if you have the wisdom of an old man and the body of a young man, that's what you're really looking for — not to be young again, but to be an old man in a young man's body.

Paul Woyak: That's real. That's what you get to be — a mighty man of the sea.

Tom Rowland: Because now you know there are limits and what they are, and you might ride right up against them, but you won't go over. A young man goes over the limits constantly because his body can absorb it — he gets hit in the face and keeps going. An old man's been hit in the face plenty of times already, so there's no reason to keep doing that.

Paul Woyak: He's figured it out a little bit.

Tom Rowland: A little bit — because when you do get hit now, it hurts, and the recovery isn't what it used to be.

The Audiobook and Facing the Material Again

Tom Rowland: So are you happy you wrote the book? Did you do an audiobook — I like audiobooks.

Paul Woyak: I did, and I read it myself. I'd built a sound booth originally, but ended up doing it differently for the visual side of things.

Tom Rowland: What was it like rereading the book out loud — had you already purged these feelings, or did they all come back up?

Paul Woyak: They came back. I think the audiobook is going to be pretty powerful, honestly, because I break down a few times recording it — I'm blown away thinking about it even now. It's amazing that I was able to keep a lid on it for so long, which is exactly why I'm glad I wrote the book, because I know I was supposed to get this out. It's funny — going back to that idea of the old, wise guy: I was one of the few people at our public pool able to swim two lengths underwater, working on breath control the way Laird Hamilton's XPT crowd trains, expanding my lungs so that when I do get in a bad situation, I won't drown from it. But as I got older and more tired training for that, the doubts started creeping in — what happens if I'm a little bit down on a really bad day? And if you have doubt at the wrong time, you're done.

Tom Rowland: That's where the wisdom is — deciding not to ride certain waves or conditions anymore, because you know you can handle it as long as your head is clear and you're confident, but the moment you have doubt, it's time to get out of the water. It's the same with lifting — a heavy back squat is fine when you're confident, but the second you're not, and you're about to step under a weight you've never handled, that's not the day for it. That's wisdom saying, not today — maybe another day, but not today.

Paul Woyak: Definitely. What's different about surfing, I think, more than almost anything else, is that you can pull it off over and over — until that one set that's bigger than it was supposed to be, and you don't have the right board, and the current and tide and everything else shifts and ratchets the exertion up past what you planned and had the wisdom for. And now you're in it, and as ocean people say in the book, you're in it good, because you don't know what's going to happen. If that big set didn't come, I could have pulled off fine — but if it did, I could have been done, and I've got kids and grandkids. It just didn't add up anymore. But that's where the book is — writing it, I still got that thrill. Living those things again, as hard as it was, was a thrill to have it so real and powerful after suppressing it for years — like, I'm not riding the waves anymore, I'm riding the words.

The Big Takeaway: Why Am I Alive

Tom Rowland: So what's the big takeaway — whether it's suppressing something and letting it out in a book, or facing your demons? What's the biggest thing you took from this?

Paul Woyak: Anything's possible. Don't put limits on things, don't draw lines, because there really aren't any — there are too many coincidences that are really just incidences. See where your life takes you when you take the limits off. Nothing's impossible, and these escapes spell that out in a lot of ways I don't want to ruin by explaining here — it's in the book.

Where to Find "Why Am I Alive"

Tom Rowland: Where can somebody find the book?

Paul Woyak: Right now we're taking preorders at whyamialivebook.com — there's a box to check for the preorder, and another if you just want to be notified when it's for sale. We're aiming to launch at the end of the month; we're finishing up the final edits and the last few details now.

Tom Rowland: How long is the audiobook?

Paul Woyak: It's a 265-page book, so figure around two to two and a half hours — I did everything I could to keep it under three hundred pages, but it has twenty-five pages of illustrations.

Tom Rowland: Did you draw those yourself?

Paul Woyak: My wife and I teamed up on the cover, and she did a lot of the illustrations — those four-in-the-morning nightmares were part of why I got kicked out of the bedroom in the first place. When I had one of those dreams while working on the text, I'd wake up and rush through a rough draft, which she'd help turn into a detailed picture, and we'd work it out together. After the third year she told me to finish the last couple myself, so I did — but she's the better artist, by far.

Tom Rowland: Edgar Allan Poe used to do something similar — wake up from horrible nightmares and write them down immediately, which became stories like The Raven. Your brain does incredible things while you're asleep, and if you're conscious enough to catch it, you write it down before it's gone. Is that what you were doing with the illustrations?

Paul Woyak: I wasn't trying to have the nightmares, but when they came while I was working on the text, I'd wake from the dream and hurry to do a rough draft, which became the detailed picture after spending time on it with my wife.

Tom Rowland: Has your wife noticed a difference in you since finishing the book?

Paul Woyak: Yeah, definitely. We've never been closer — back then I didn't tell her a lot of what I was carrying, because I didn't want her lying awake at home, alone, worrying, essentially having to sleep with this shark swimming around the bedroom too. She had enough going on. Now we've become as close as we've ever been — there's almost a renewing of youth going on between us. It's rad.

Tom Rowland: A renewed marriage and a huge weight off your shoulders — that's fantastic. Is that why you're alive? Is that what it's all about?

Paul Woyak: That's a huge reason — that's what I'm talking to you about right now, man.

Tom Rowland: I can't wait to read it, or more likely listen to it — I do a lot of driving. It sounds like an incredible story, one that a lot of people will identify with whether they've seen a shark or not, just from having some kind of traumatic experience in their own life. Kudos to you for facing this thing after suppressing it for so long — and now look at you and your wife, closer than ever.

Paul Woyak: Amen. Thanks, man. I'm looking forward to doing this again sometime — I was telling my nephew, who helps me with all this, that the next one is going to be Mighty Man of the Sea Meets Ocean Gladiator.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome. Paul, thanks for sharing all of this with us — I really appreciate it. Give us that address one more time.

Paul Woyak: Whyamialivebook.com — lowercase, all one word.

Tom Rowland: That's where you can preorder it — it should be out soon. Thanks, I appreciate it, and I look forward to reading the book.

Paul Woyak: Right on, Tom. One more thing — it's going to be on Amazon too, hopefully sometime in June.

Tom Rowland: Perfect. Alright, Paul, thanks again.

Paul Woyak: Thanks again.

Tom Rowland: Thank you, man. I hope you have a great day.

Paul Woyak: You too. See you.