[Coral-List] Passing of Peter Gayle

[Jim Hendee]

William,

I am very sorry to hear of this.  Peter helped us put up our ICON/CREWS 
station at Discovery Bay, and one of my all time favorite underwater 
photos was of him and me shaking hands underwater at the completion of 
that installation.  He was a great big guy with a great big heart, and 
always eager to help.  They'll have a hard time replacing him at 
Discovery Bay.  The place just won't seem the same without him.

Jim

> Subject:  Passing of Peter Gayle
> From:
> William Precht <william.precht at gmail.com>
> Date:
> 4/22/20, 10:24 AM
>
> To:
> Coral Listserver <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
>
>
> To all.
>
> With deep sorrow I wanted to inform the coral reef and scientific dive 
> community of the passing of Peter Gayle from Discovery Bay Marine 
> Laboratory.
>
> Peter was a dear friend of mine. I first met Peter at Discovery Bay in 
> the mid-1980s and we have been friends ever since.
>
> We took a tri-mix tech diving course together, we did a bunch of dives 
> off the north coast of Jamaica to depths I shouldn’t talk about - when 
> he was working on his graduate thesis at UWI, and he got me to play on 
> a local cricket team in St Anne’s Parrish when I was in town.
>
> Over the past decade or so he got actively engaged in coral 
> restoration and relocation projects and would constantly pick my brain 
> to learn all that he could about the subject.  We stayed close via 
> email over the last few years. The last time I saw him was at the 
> Coral Reef Futures meeting in Key Largo in December 2018. Although his 
> health was not great and he was confined to a wheelchair at the 
> meeting he still had a very positive outlook towards the future.
>
> I have enclosed below the text from a UWI press release that I 
> received from a friend this week.
> ———————————
>
> The University of the West Indies, Mona, regrets to inform you that 
> one of our colleagues, Mr Peter Hope Marshal Gayle, passed away on 
> Friday April 17, 2020.
>
> Mr. Gayle was employed as the Principal Scientific Officer at the 
> UWI’s Discovery Bay Marine Laboratory (DBML), having assumed 
> responsibilities there in 1985. In addition to overseeing scientific 
> operations, Peter ran the DBML’s SCUBA diving programme, operated and 
> maintained the lab’s ageing “Perry” Recompression Chamber and oversaw 
> the treatment of more than 380 dive accident patients between 1985 to 
> 2012 and led the effort to install and commission the new HYTECH 
> Hyperbaric Chamber which was opened in 2013. He was the UWI’s 
> representative on the Board of the Association of the Marine 
> Laboratories of the Caribbean (AMLC) for over 15 years.
>
> Peter served with the Jamaica Defence Force National Reserve in the 
> Coast Guard for 20 years where he achieved the rank of Lieutenant 
> (senior grade). In his spare time he sang bass with the St. Ann’s Bay 
> Singers and as a soloist.
>
>
> ————-
>
>
> Respectfully
>
>
> Bill Precht
>
>
> -- 
> William F. Precht
>
> “You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only 
> choice you have”
>
> Bob Marley
>
>
> confirm a80d553aaf790b5868e6633154305cdaca9c49db.eml
>
> Subject:
> confirm a80d553aaf790b5868e6633154305cdaca9c49db
> From:
> coral-list-request at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
> Date:
> 4/22/20, 10:24 AM
>
>
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