Not long after David Flynn got his driver’s license, he saw a guy in scuba gear at a marina and learned that boat owners would pay a diver to clean boat bottoms and do salvage work. Flynn, who got his scuba certification when he was 12, started plotting his new business. “I drove around to all the marinas in the New York metro area and Connecticut and put up fliers advertising my scuba services,” he says. He’d clean boat bottoms, scrape off barnacles and get rid of algae. He’d also retrieve lost items, such as a dropped winch handle or missing anchor. “I’d crawl around in the mud at the bottom of the Hudson River, finding lost moorings.”
