Business Focus: Divers West has new owners

Hidden in the murky waters of the lakes scattered across North Idaho are hundreds of treasure-troves, unseen except by those who seek an underwater adventure.

The waters’ depths are home to many submerged reminders of the area’s rich history, including countless personal possessions, cargo ferries that hauled timber in the early 1900s and a multitude of motor vehicles that rest on lake bottoms.

New Coeur d’Alene business owners Jim and Melissa Flodin want to help you discover those treasures with the diving equipment and training available at their Divers West shop.

“There is a lot of history out in this lake,” said Jim Flodin, the 45-year-old business owner and diving aficionado of more than 25 years, about the vast diving resource that is Lake Coeur d’Alene.

Though the business isn’t exactly new to the area – the shop has been at its current location for 32 years under the same name – it is under the new ownership of the Flodins.

The diving equipment and resource outlet, which is an official National Association of Underwater Instructors training center with the only on-site training pool in the area, offers open-water courses for beginner scuba divers, who can reach a maximum depth of 60 feet, and advanced scuba divers, who are cleared to dive to 130-foot depths.

The courses for scuba certification start out at the shop and wrap up with weekend classes in Lake Coeur d’Alene or with a trip to Washington coastal waters, depending on the time of year.

Though Divers West isn’t the first business Jim Flodin has operated, it is the one closest to his heart.

“It’s kind of a dream come true for him,” said Melissa Flodin, 42, a school administrator in the Flodins’ hometown of Moses Lake who will be leaving that job to join her husband at the shop soon.

Way before his entrepreneurial jump into the diving business, Jim Flodin was stationed in Turkey in 1982 while serving in the Air Force. With not much else to do in a country largely surrounded by water, diving became a fixture in his life.

“It’s a passion. That’s the reason I got into it and try to share it with other people,” he said.

After becoming certified in Turkey through a series of classes and open-water excursions, Jim Flodin continued his diving education by becoming a scuba-diving instructor and passing his excitement onto others.

“It snowballed after that,” he said. “Once you catch the bug, it’s there forever.”

So what had started as a hobby soon became an addiction, but an opportunity came up and Jim Flodin went to work for his dad’s business manufacturing food-processing equipment.

Although they remained in Moses Lake for 20 years until the Flodins sold the family-owned business in 2006, the thrill of exploring the vast submerged parts of the planet never subsided. Even though she had resisted for a number of years, Melissa Flodin caught the diving bug and became a certified scuba diver in the summer of 2005.

“It absolutely rubbed off,” she said, referring to her husband’s love for exploring underwater environments. Since that fateful first dive, Melissa Flodin said, they have shared many memorable moments while immersed in the submarine world.

Like the time she and Jim were scuba diving at Edmonds Underwater State Park, one of many in the country, near Puget Sound when they startled a hermit crab. The crab bolted out of its shell away from the couple, then stopped, sized up the Flodins, decided they weren’t a threat and leisurely returned to its home.

“My wife and I just laughed underwater,” Jim Flodin recalled, adding that a dive is made even better when those kinds of experiences are shared with other people.

When he saw in a Northwest diving magazine that the Coeur d’Alene shop was for sale, Jim Flodin put his passion to paper and, within a few weeks, had crafted a business plan. With help from Allan Peterson, the Moses Lake Small Business Development Center’s director of the center for business and industry services, they put together an outline of what soon would become Divers West.

“(Jim) started with a really good vision,” said Peterson, who works out of Big Bend Community College in Moses Lake. Though Jim Flodin provided all the necessary statistics and related information for the business plan, Peterson said it was the diving enthusiast’s passion for both the sport and his business that “really pointed to a good possibility.”

Now, as new residents of North Idaho, the Flodins – including 14-year-old daughter, Tiffany – are discovering all that Coeur d’Alene has to offer beyond the business community and bodies of water.

“The community is very friendly – that is one of the first things we learned. We just love it,” said Melissa, a frequent traveler between Washington and Idaho, who is looking forward to making the final move to North Idaho. “We are very much looking forward to it. (Jim and I) have a great time when we work together.”

After just a few months in town, the area already feels like home for Jim Flodin.

“I feel like a member of Coeur d’Alene,” he said, standing at the counter in Divers West, where the walls and entrance display a variety of items found underwater such as tools, outdated diving gear and a giant ship propeller.

As for some of the more than 600 underwater wreckage sites at the bottom of Lake Coeur d’Alene, like the trail of Model T Fords that sank when their drivers attempted to cross the frozen-over lake decades ago, Jim Flodin will be glad to show – but not tell – you where they are. “We like to take our divers out to them,” he laughed.