Portrait of a Sponge Diver
Anastasios Karistinos, 65, has been diving for sponges off Tarpon Springs since he was a teenager. This is his story.
As I paid $3.50 for a small sponge at Sponge Diver Supply in Tarpon Springs, Florida, this afternoon, I asked the guy at the register if it was local.
“My Dad gets them,” he replied, gesturing out the door toward a gleaming white boat tied up at the dock.
The boat’s name is Anastasi. Its owner, Anastasios “Taso” Karistinos, told me the name means resurrection in Greek. It is 46 feet long with classic lines — a curved bow jutting up over the water, a cabin and wheelhouse toward the stern, and white masts fore and aft.
Taso will be 65 in July of this year. He wore new, baggy jeans, a light blue Sponge Diver Supply t-shirt, running shoes, and amber dark glasses. His curly gray hair and thick gray beard gave him the look of handsome old salt. He was moving sponges around on his boat, so I wasn’t sure if he would have time to talk with a tourist.
“I’m writing about Florida for the Internet,” I offered by way of introduction. Without hesitation, he agreed to answer my questions. I will quote him verbatim, because his Greek-inflected English turned out to be a big part of his story.
I was hoping I might come aboard, but Taso motioned for me to stay on the dock while he spoke to me from the port side of Anastasi. This meant I had to hold my iPhone over my head to capture his words with Voice Recorder.
“What do you like best about this work?” I asked him.
“Hmph,” he laughed. “Money,” he said, quickly adding:
I’m in love with the sea since little kid. Because I was born and raised in island in Greece. And I was a spear fisherman, free diver. That what puts me in the water. If it wasn’t the spear gun, probably I do something else these days.
It’s a beautiful, big island named Evia that Taso left when he was 19 years old to work as a sponge diver in Tarpon Springs. He joined a long line of Greek divers who came to Florida, starting in the 1880s and extending through ups and downs of the sponge industry. For 30 years in the early 20th century, sponge harvesting was Florida’s biggest business, larger than citrus or tourism.
The waves of Greek immigrants to Tarpon Springs brought Greek restaurants and shops to the community. At the Hellas Bakery & Restaurant, I had a cup of thick, sweet Greek coffee, the perfect complement to a piece of honey-soaked baklava.
When he arrived in Florida, Taso did various work in Tarpon Springs and for a while painted houses in Maine, saving money for his first sponge diving boat, still at the dock in front of Anastasi. After a setback involving back taxes owed to the IRS, he had to sell that one. He got back on his feet and ordered a new, custom boat that took three years to build.
“It’s the only one in the United States, fiberglas Greek design boat,” Taso said. “Every other boat is a wood boat.” Anastasi was built from a mold based on a wooden Tarpon Springs boat, but after completion the mold was damaged and unusable — thus the uniqueness of his vessel, which was launched in 1991.
“It’s an ancient Greek design,” he said with pride. “It can take any waves, any seas. You can go anywhere with it. The design of the boat doesn’t fight the water. It goes with the water. You might get a little bit rough, but you’re not going to sink.”
Taso’s son, Anesti, who sold me my sponge in the store, worked on the boat for 25 years. The sponge diver wears a heavy suit, tethered to the boat with an air hose as he walks along the sea floor at a depth of 30 to 40 feet harvesting sponges. Anesti and his wife have three boys, so being away on the boat for a month at a time grew old.
“The diving’s the easy part,” his father told me. “The cleaning part is the worst part. They don’t look like this under water.” The sponge we buy in a store is actually the skeleton of the original organism, which regenerates itself after the harvesting. The skin has to be removed, with a mucus that stinks. It takes days to wash them out with powerful water hoses on the boat.
I learned a lot about sponges as I stood on the dock at Tarpon Springs this afternoon. They don’t have roots, they hug rocks. They filter the ocean, helping to keep the sea clean.
“It’s a live organism that pumps the water constantly and it collects plankton. You can call them animal, but they never move, they never have no feelings, or blood or heart or anything like that, so you don’t hurt anything like this.”
I asked Taso when he plans to retire.
“When I can’t stand up no more. This job right here is very hard job, brother. Already my knees hurt. I’m going to do it, because I like it.”
As for the sponge that I bought for bathing, it is called a wool sponge, the most popular type.
Its soft, natural texture is even more compelling now that I know the story of the rugged sponger who brought it up from the sea at Tarpon Springs.
