Stan Waterman’s eye patch has been worn since as early as 2007. The Shark Week star is known for winning multiple Emmys and gaining his first international fame in the iconic 1971 release of Blue Water, White Death. He is also recognized for always wearing an eye patch, leaving fans curious about if he has an eye injury.
So, what happened to Stan Waterman? He’s 100 years old, and in 1994, the Discovery Channel honored him with a feature two-hour special aptly named The Man Who Loves Sharks. To this day, he’s still as passionate about diving as he was at the age of 11 but only began wearing an eye patch in the 2000s.
Stan Waterman’s eye patch
Stan has worn an eye patch since as far back as 2007. Pictures of the Shark Week star in 1998 show his eyes without a patch over either of them, but he began to wear one regularly as he got closer to reaching 100 years old.
In March 2007, Stan was honored as a “Diving Legend” at the Beneath the Sea diving show, with an entire weekend dedicated to his long, impressive career. The selection board even donned eye patches in his honor.
During an interview on Talking Scuba by Bob Shoemakers back in 2011, Stan said that his daughter actually gives him new eye patches every Christmas and even paints them. Stan explains that he has octopuses, sharks, and fish patches!
Fans ask what happened to Stan
Stan took his last dive on the Cayman Islands at the age of 90 and recently had his 100 birthday. Since 2012, the Discovery star has faced questions of why he wears an eye patch but left it as a mystery.
One viewer said: “Anyone else want to know how Stan Waterman lost his eye? Shark dive gone wrong?? #SharkWeek.”
Another penned: “Where’s Stan Waterman’s eye? Did a shark eat his eye?” Several others are curious, with one writing: “Am I the only one that wants to know how Stan Waterman lost his eye, and if it has anything to do with sharks?”
He ‘escaped alive’ from a school of fish
Stan, the first cameraman to take film underwater, revealed on Shark Week in 2012: “The idea of adventure was so synonymous with sharks, I thought that maybe you have to take a chance.”
He also said, as per TDisdi, that he was once surrounded by a “great school of silver jacks” during a dive. When he was on an outing off Corsica in 1950, when the motivation for many early underwater explorers was to hunt fish, Stan said:
I entered the Mediterranean with mask, fins, snorkel and Arbalete speargun, my first dive on the old world side of the Atlantic. The recollection is so clear that it might have been yesterday. I was immediately surrounded by a great school of silver jacks. They flashed in the sun as they turned in unison, circling around me. They were friendly, curious, beautiful ambassadors of the Mediterranean world.
Stan added: “Such was my fear of sharks and the unknown in the deep blue water beyond my reach that I nervously swam for the jetty and scrambled out of the water, happy to have escaped alive from this daring adventure.”
“I was rather proud of myself for having at least winged a fish. Yet the memory of that violent, thoughtless act still evokes an unpleasant sense of shame today,” the underwater cameraman added.
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