Family, community mourn Seattle scuba diving legend

For Jeff Christiansen’s family, only some solace came from learning he died doing what he loved: scuba diving 80 feet under the surface of Puget Sound, searching for signs of sixgill sharks.

Christiansen’s wife, Mary, lost her champion,” favorite storyteller and high school sweetheart. His three adult children lost their infinitely patient teacher, who never missed a soccer game and always put down a science fiction novel to listen to their problems.

The family didn’t know that as they grieved an insurmountable loss, so did hundreds of strangers around the world.

Christiansen, 67, died Aug. 27 after experiencing a medical emergency underwater during a nighttime dive at Des Moines’ Redondo Beach.

Within days, Christiansen’s family and the Seattle Aquarium, where he worked for nearly four decades, including as the head of its diving program, received hundreds of emails, letters and text messages from people in places as far as Tonga and Iceland.

Christiansen’s eldest child, Matt Christiansen, knew his father mentored many and befriended countless others on diving trips around the globe. He was arguably one of the best divers in the world, his son said, and never tired of sharing the sense of awe, wonder and peace he felt while “flying” underwater – a passion he called “bubble therapy.”

The impact his “nerdy goofball” of a father had on the Pacific Northwest’s diving community and beyond still caught his family by surprise, however, Matt Christiansen said.

“The outpouring we’ve gotten has been both heartwarming and little bit shocking,” he said. “To us, he’s always dad.”

Jeff Christiansen and three other divers had submerged themselves in the cold, dark saltwater last month to monitor the movement of sixgill sharks, animals he had spent about 20 years researching.

Two of the divers were swimming dozens of feet below Christiansen when he had a medical emergency. The King County medical examiner still hasn’t told his family exactly what happened, Matt Christiansen said.

The other divers, noticing something was wrong, rushed Jeff Christiansen to the surface, risking their own lives in the process, his son said. Ascending too quickly while scuba diving can be deadly because of the effect of rapid pressure changes on the body.

Nearby passersby who heard the divers calling for help ran toward the water, helping drag Christiansen to shore and performing CPR until firefighters and medics arrived to take over.

The efforts by the group, many of whom were strangers, to help a person in need “reflect the very best of our community,” South King Fire spokesperson Capt. Brad Chaney said.

Matt Christiansen agreed, saying the other divers’ “lives were on the line” when they tried saving his father.

“They put themselves at extreme risk to bring him back, to the point where they all ended up in hyperbaric chamber for over six hours,” he said, referring to a medical device used to treat decompression sickness. “And all of the people on shore doing CPR – they were all heroes.”

Jeff Christiansen was just 4 years old when he fell in love with scuba.

In an interview with the Seattle Aquarium about his March 2021 retirement, Christiansen said he grew up exploring the bottoms of swimming pools in Colorado and dressed as a diver for Halloween, wearing a modified catsuit costume and oxygen tanks made from oatmeal canisters on his back.

Diving, he said, was “the closest you can get to another world without going into space.”

He started taking scuba diving lessons at 12 after his family moved to the Burien area.

His senior year of high school, he met the next great love of his life, Mary.

The pair met working as pages at the Burien public library. Mary, now 67, said she was drawn to his humor, intelligence and knack for storytelling. They married after college and had three children, Matt, Kate and Patrick.

When Mary worked long shifts as an ICU nurse, Jeff took care of the children, playing Legos with them for hours before welcoming her home, she said.

“He was always my champion,” she said. “When I came home, he’d listen to me and have no clue what I was talking about, but he’d listen.”

Christiansen started volunteering at the Seattle Aquarium in 1978, about a year after it opened. The aquarium hired him in 1982 and he worked his way up, from exhibit technician to biologist and eventually lead dive safety officer, the position he held until his retirement.

He was closely involved in the aquarium’s sixgill shark research, often diving late at night to help tag the creatures as they swam below the aquarium’s pier.

In the early 2000s, Christiansen persuaded his longtime colleague and fellow diver Joel Hollander and several others to help him set up a “bait station” with cameras underwater, convinced it would attract the elusive sharks. Like most of his mentor’s ideas, this one worked, Hollander said.

“I just remember being down at 60 feet at dusk and hammering a post in the water to mount a camera when I hear him saying on the (underwater communication system), ‘They’re here,’” he said. “I turned around and saw sixgills for the first time.”

Christiansen was known for his meticulousness and depth of knowledge. He collected rocks and other materials from Puget Sound waters to bring back to the aquarium, so its displays more closely matched their occupants’ natural habitats.

He was also fascinated by audio technology divers used to communicate underwater. He became an expert, and consulted with zoos and aquariums after his retirement on how to improve their divers’ communications systems, Hollander said.

Christiansen brought the same love of learning and teaching into his role as a father. He taught his children they could learn any skill they put their mind to, whether it was sewing his own diving gear like he did or designing elaborate birthday cakes shaped like sharks or trains, according to his daughter, Kate Soderlind, and his eldest son Matt.

Christiansen quoted movies like “The Princess Bride” often and “embraced his weirdness” in ways that make others feel at ease being themselves, Soderlind said.

Their father also “hammered into them” to be careful with their words and to never make anyone feel unwelcome, Matt Christiansen said.

“It didn’t matter who you were or how you described yourself,” he said. “You were an important person to him regardless.”

Jeff Christiansen’s career cemented him as an “icon of the aquatic and dive communities.” But that never overshadowed an accomplishment felt deeply by his family: his hard-won ability to express “love and pride more openly,” his daughter said.

Raised by a family that rarely expressed their emotions, Soderlind said her father overcame his reserved nature. He made it a priority to tell his loved ones “how proud he was of them and that he loved them and who they had become as a person.”

“He may have frequently been under the sea,” Soderlind said. But his heart was always with and for those he loved.”