Today friends are celebrating the life of Bil Phillips in the Yucatan jungle. Many people have sent me photos and recollections of good times spent with our friend and colleague and I thought I would post them on a page [click here] so that everyone can share. If you would like to add to this page, please email me on my contact page.
Bil and I shared many treasured moments exploring in the mid to late 90’s particularly in the Ox Bel Ha cave system. The most memorable of those dives was our first one in cenote Esmeralda on February 3, 1996. What we encountered that day set in motion more than 20 years of continued exploration of what became one of the largest cave systems wet or dry on the planet. Bils impact on cave diving exploration, conservation, cartography and training will always be felt here. Quite simply he is one of the most prolific explorers to have ever existed and he…
It has been a shock indeed about Bil. He will be greatly missed, and my thought goes out to Bil’s family, Sabine of course, and all of his friends. A lot of good memories of diving and exploring together in Ox Bel Ha in the early years for G.E.O (Grupo de Exploracion Ox Bel Ha), and so many fantastic moments shared at base camp especially in the evenings discussing the day of exploration, or all the excitement about the next, and where we would realistically really end up going. For a few years, we worked together, and among other friends…
While Bil was my cave instructor, he also became a dear friend. I struggled to find a story that would do justice to Bil as a dive professional and explorer, because I kept thinking of the stories that meant the most to me… and most of those involved our personal chats above water. However, I thought you might appreciate my insights as a female student, on Bill the cave diving instructor. Before I started my cave course with Bil, I was a PADI open water instructor and I had taken some technical diving courses. When friends would tell me about…
I want to share tiny but great moments me and Patry have from him out of our trip to Cuba. I have to give you those tiny moments for not stating the obvious. Saw him not only dive but drawing the actual cave like he were on a drawing table on the most comfortable conditions was amazing. I have reviewed the videos numerous times and what he does. Tiny manners and movements are amazing. But I want to share really small details that me and Patry lived with him. I was getting really for the first hard working dive of…
This past fall I was planning a dive trip to Cozumel and Tulum for some Cave Diving. Since I am a newbie to the cave diving, I asked and relied on my instructor/friend Brian K to make a recommendation which he kindly did by introducing me to Bil. Our trip was cut short due to the hurricane and because of this, I had to cancel the second half of my trip (cave portion) and return to Fort Lauderdale to buckle down for the storm. My point about Bil is…. We never met, yet he could not have been more accommodating in…
1991. Naharon. It was the days when stages [tanks] did not have DIN [fittings]. Doing a multi-stage dive and did not have as many adaptors as I needed. A Canadian guy walks up and hands me one of his. It was Bil. I asked him when he wanted it back, he said, Oh, whenever.
I knew Bil mainly through my husband, Ross. They used to dive together before I came on the scene and before Bil went to Mexico full time. They did technical stuff together in the ’90’s – typical bunch of stupid deep dives, mostly because they could. I think they called Bil “Mr. O2 Goo” on those dives because of the fluids that came out of his nose like festoons…but I digress. They spent considerable time together over decades, particularly at a mutual friend’s place at Bamfield on the west coast of Vancouver Island. By the time I joined the picture,…
In 2010, I finally made the trip to Mexico to take cave training with my long-time friend Bil Phillips. Almost from the moment I arrived, Bil bombarded me, in the best possible way, with questions about the fishes that lived in the cenotes. This dedicated, passionate cave diver and explorer was as excited and interested in the fishes as I was! At the end of almost every session in the caves during the course, he would take me on a little tour of the cenote pointing at fishes that I would have to identify for him once we surfaced. This…
Bil was a dive instructor at our local shop Capilano Divers in North Vancouver and was always in good cheer. I still remember talking to him one day when he was very enthusiastic about doing a cave diving training course in Florida. He ended up falling in love with cave diving and packed his bags for Mexico. I did run into him from time to time again and heard about his adventures as a cave diving instructor. Unfortunately the opportunity to join him never presented itself, yet I always looked to Bil as a person who followed a dream and…