Buenos Aires, Argentina, is not the obvious place for a life of incredible sea-faring stories to begin, but Armando Jenik has felt the call of the ocean since he was a child, and each adventure is more incredible than the last.
Early Days
Armando credits swimming with southern right whales in the San Matias Gulf in Patagonia for his lifelong love of adrenalin-filled ocean adventures. “One day I was jogging on the beach. A mother, father and baby whale were very close to shore, so I jumped into the water. The mother surfaced and I reached out and held her tail,” Armando recalls. It was an incredible experience that made an indelible mark on his life.
It was difficult to make a living from the ocean, so as Armando got older, he kept returning to Patagonia to work as a diver searching for oyster beds. After this, his diving career took off. His Patagonian dive training continued in a quarry, where the visibility was almost zero. “We would reach out and feel around until we touched something, and then we had to figure out what it was,” says Armando. “We collected a lot of brass nails and china, and found out they were remains from the Lord Clive shipwreck of 1763.”
First Camera
Armando found his way to Israel and served as an Israeli volunteer during the 1967 Six Day War. Soon after his active service was over, he walked into a local aquarium and met the director, who invited him to dinner and offered him a job collecting fish from the Red Sea for the University of Jerusalem zoology department. The aquarium director would compose ocean “scenes” in a tank, and Armando would capture them on film.
In 1968, Armando’s father came to Israel and and gave him his first underwater camera – a Calypso. It was the first 35mm underwater camera conceived by marine explorer Jacques Cousteau. The ocean not only provided a hobby, but endless adventures, and now career opportunities, too. After gaining his CMAS dive instructor certification in Italy, the warmer waters of the Caribbean called to him.
Virgin Islands Adventures
Armando moved to St. Thomas, USVI in 1970. Soon after, he vividly recalls watching the documentary Blue Water, White Death by filmmakers Peter Gimbel and James Lipscomb, accompanied by Australian shark experts Ron and Valerie Taylor, about their expedition to film the elusive great white shark.
“By the end of the film, I knew I wanted to photograph sharks,” says Armando. “It was easy to find half a blue marlin for bait, but I needed a shark cage. I emerged from the theatre and saw a Coca-Cola machine, protected by a cage. It was perfect,” he continues. He asked the company to borrow the cage and after hearing what he wanted it for, they gave it to him. He added an old 55-gallon drum to the top for floatation – and “Voila!” laughs Armando.
Armando’s late sister Viviana came to visit in 1972. She married and lived on Tortola, over the years becoming a much-loved and respected architect in the BVI community. By this time, without even a dive boat, Armando had opened a dive centre called “Ocean Adventures” at Bolongo Bay. He took the guests by bus to Coki Beach at the east end of the island to teach them how to dive. After leaving Bolongo Bay, Armando purchased a 42-ft dive boat, Goldielocks.
Jacques Cousteau and his crew ventured to St. Thomas to film humpback whales for the movie Singing Whale. Armando jumped at the opportunity to work with Cousteau. Paying close attention to the filming, he knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and that cinematography was in his future.
Desperately wanting to work and dive with Cousteau, who at the time only had European divers on his team, Jenik remembers, “Cousteau was climbing the stairs onto the plane – he turned, threw his red stocking hat at me and said, ‘See you in Marseille in a few weeks!’ However, it was not meant to be. Sadly, just two weeks later, in 1979, Cousteau’s son, Phillippe, died at age 38, when his PBY Catalina flying boat crashed in the Tagus River near Lisbon. Soon after, Armando sold his beloved dive boat and moved to Tortola, where he ran the adventure diving and research vessel, Okeanos.
Film and Future
From adventure diving on the Okeanos, Armando developed his filming career and environmental work. In the early 1980’s, the movie, Weekend at Bernie’s II was filmed in St. Thomas. At first, Armando was hired to teach the actors how to dive, but he looked so much like Terry Kiser, the actor playing Bernie Lomax, that the director decided he should be the stunt man for the underwater scenes.
Many other underwater projects mark Armando’s long and storied career, from filming scenes for soap operas to working on underwater footage for The Magic of David Copperfield, an episode of 20/20 with Hugh Downs and Geraldo Rivera, searching for the wreck of San Ignacio in Anegada, BVI, and even training the great long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad to free dive in Patagonia to prepare her lungs for one of her ultra marathon swims.
Armando’s underwater photography has been published in GEO magazine and GQ, among others. Additionally, his work as both underwater director and cinematographer has been used in commercials of well-known brands, including MasterCard (the “Priceless” campaign), Virgin Islands Tourism, Don Q Cristal, Kent Cigarettes and Jet Tours. In 1990, he was awarded the prestigious Mobius award for best commercial.
“Every one of my pictures tells a story – and there are so many to tell!” exclaims Armando.
To view Armando’s portfolio inquire directly about purchasing one of his stunning images as a print.
