Earn Millions of $$$ as a Diver

Meet Glenn Berger

So let’s say you have a chance to make up to a million dollars a year as a diver.

The downside? You’d be diving alone (not usually a good thing) in poor visibility and could come up against an angry alligator.

Would you do it?

Meet Glenn Berger who claims he’s made about $15 million since starting his career. He is one member of a whole industry of divers who do just that, only they dive in golf course lakes and retrieve lost golf balls, which the subsequently clean and resell back to the golf courses for about a dollar per ball.

The following is an excerpt from news.com.au and tells Glenn’s story.

Glenn Berger says he was an out-of-work thief 14 years ago when the idea struck him to start diving for golf balls at the bottom of lakes and selling them back to clubs for use on their driving ranges.

At a minimum of a $1 a ball — some are worth double that — Berger calculated he could make a pretty good living.

But more than a decade on he claims he’s now fishing out anywhere between 1.3 to 1.7 million balls a year across the golf course-rich state of Florida and has pocketed a tidy $15 million since beginning his career.

“I was partially unemployed and I was stealing golf balls out of a golf course lake where I lived and I realised that wasn’t the way to make money … this business just blew up,” Berger says.

“I really don’t like to talk about alligators but they happen and you learn how to deal with them,” he says. “Scuba diving is a dangerous sport as it is. People can usually see. I can’t see. So I have fish, snakes, turtles and all those fun things running into me all the time.”

One of the most frightening experiences came in 2007 when a 2m long alligator crawled on to his back. Berger managed to escape without injury — and about 4000 golf balls…

USA Today attempted to calculate how accurate Berger’s claims were and discovered it was possible to make a million dollars a year retrieving skewed shots.  “A bit of a stretch, but certainly doable.”

One thing that’s not debatable: golfers are very good at hitting golf balls into water hazards.