Diver Ed in his ddry suit near Eagle Lake in Acadia National Park. (Rhiannon Johnston/Friends of Acadia)

It’s a rare person who scans the shallow waters spilling out of Mount Desert Island’s culverts on a chilly spring morning and thinks, “I’d like to snorkel that.”

But Ed Monat is a rare person.

Known as Diver Ed by locals and the thousands of Mount Desert Island visitors who’ve boarded his boat, Starfish Enterprise, to learn about what lies beneath the surface of our coastal waters, Monat is a singular blend of boisterous curiosity, underwater expertise, and straight-up silliness. He’s a dedicated community builder and sea-life advocate.

He also likes to fill his dry suit with air until he’s swelled up like Veruca Salt from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

His enthusiasm for Maine’s waters (and those further afield) is contagious.

Monat makes lugging muck-covered debris from a harbor feel like a spectacular time. In fact, he’s got a cadre of fellow divers and shore support who delight in the escapades he comes up with, be it a harbor cleanup in Manset, diving for ghost traps off Sutton Island, ice diving in Echo Lake, or explorations in Hall Quarry.

And when he shares his excitement for exploring the area’s culverts, you bet other divers want to join him.

“There’s always something about every dive,” said Monat. “I love it. I like diving around here, but I also love seeing other places and seeing different sea creatures and environments. There’s always something that’s awe inspiring.”

Monat’s life is dedicated to the water. His career is a mix of marine education and mooring repair. He champions a dive club and leads underwater cleanups. And he has a darn good time while he’s at it.

“Growing up fishing and learning to dive and realizing how amazing everything is underwater, I enjoyed learning about what’s there,” Monat said. “I’ve been doing that my whole life, trying to get people excited about sea creatures and hoping that some people will eventually work their way into trying to help.”

He does that expertly with his popular Dive-in Theater, where he and his wife Edna (aka Captain Evil) welcome visitors aboard Starfish Enterprise to regale them with lobster lore, anemones, urchins, and the possible opportunity to kiss a sea cucumber.

He’s also the ringleader of the League of Underwater Superheroes, a dive club he started decades ago.

The name “League of Underwater Superheroes” is a reference first used to describe Monat in the early 2000s by writer Francesca Robinson, author of “Song of the Seal,” a children’s book about the “adventures and wholesome fun of underwater superhero Diver Ed.”

League members don patches and are given superhero names like Rocket Man or The Walrus. They dive for the pure enjoyment of it, of course, but they also do underwater cleanups in the harbors of Mount Desert Island.

Divers pull a range of debris from the water-lost lobster traps and sunken lines, overboard sunglasses and cellphones, and errant household trash. On shore, volunteers schlep trash from the water and pick up more buoys and bottles, food wrappers, and footwear.

League of Underwater Superheroes and community members gather after a cleanup at the Bar Harbor town dock. (Courtesy photo)

Diver Ed, as seen underwater in full
scuba gear. (Courtesy photo)

“When we do cleanups in Bar Harbor, we have tons of families with their kids down at the shore,” Monat said. “It’s fun for the kids who show up. They get to see all the cool stuff, and they get to help with the dive. We get a lot of people who just come and hang out because they’re interested in what we’re doing, even if they don’t dive.”

For League divers, it’s an opportunity to do good for the community (both human and marine). They also relish the prospect of underwater treasures.

“It is exciting for us because we wouldn’t just find all junk; we also find a lot of cool artifacts like clay pipes and glass bottles and stuff like that,” said Monat, who also has a penchant for finding a particular kind of porcelain sculpture: “For some reason, I’m the only one that finds toilets,” he said. “I don’t know why. I’m used to working commercially, so I usually end up gravitating to stuff that’s more challenging.”

Last fall, the League of Underwater Superheroes did a cleanup dive at Eagle Lake – a large freshwater lake within the boundaries of Acadia National Park. Visitors on the Eagle Lake Carriage Road know its early morning reflectiveness and midday glint. They might also know that swimming or paddleboarding are not allowed (nor is scuba diving, ordinarily, although that sport isn’t included on the lakeside sign).

That’s because Eagle Lake is the source of Bar Harbor’s drinking water and requires strict watershed protection.

The town of Bar Harbor works with the National Park Service to protect the Eagle Lake watershed to maintain water quality. Similar partnerships exist for Jordan Pond, Bubble Pond, Long Pond, and Upper and Lower Hadlock Ponds, which are all drinking water sources for towns and villages on Mount Desert Island. Thus, the sight of a dozen or so geared-up divers making their masked way into the waters of Eagle Lake is an exception (read: please don’t dive in Eagle Lake).

That cleanup dive was approved by the town of Bar Harbor because of Monat’s longstanding work relationship with the town – he’s hired
to dive on the drinking water intake pipe, cleaning it and doing whatever maintenance is needed. The League’s cleanup dive in Eagle Lake was permitted with the stipulation that they’d wear dry suits and stay in an agreed-upon area of the lake near the boat launch.

The League of Underwater Superheroes enters Eagle Lake for a cleanup dive in fall 2024. (Shannon Bryan/Friends of Acadia)

Underwater invertebrates captured on video during a recent Underwater Superheroes dive trip to Les Escoumins, Quebec. (Courtesy photo)

Diver Ed kisses a Jonah crab after a dive. (Courtesy photo)

Monat’s culvert snorkeling started a decade ago during a bitterly cold winter, the same winter he committed to dive every day during the month of February.

Some days, Monat said, open water close to shore was hard to come by. “The only open water I could find was in these culverts,” he said. So he pulled on a snorkel and mask and began exploring.

He jokingly called them “culvert operations,” a riff on “covert operations.”

“It was cool crawling around underneath roads and going down through these waterways where people have never been,” he said.

This spring, he turned the League of Underwater Superheroes on to the idea.

They snorkeled through the cement culvert under Route 102. They snorkeled Otter Cove, from the Fish House Road parking area, riding the tide under all three arches of the causeway, then onto Otter Creek landing and through the Grover Avenue culverts. They “snorkeled and crawled” Stanley Brook, through 10 culverts, and eventually ended up in the ocean.

On a “culvert operation.” (Courtesy photo)

“I love that it’s not just a diving club. We are a community club; everyone is invited,” said John Bench, a member of the League of Underwater Superheroes who is also Friends of Acadia’s office and facilities manager. “We need people topside, too, and Eddie tries to get other people involved to see what we’re doing; he’s so community-minded that way.”

For Bench, who first started diving in warmer waters with his wife while they were traveling, the League has given him opportunities to explore the underwater worlds of his own backyard.

“For me, it’s the stories and seeing everything that’s under there: the sea cucumbers, crabs, lobsters, and sculpin,” he said. Bench
also appreciates all the cool underwater formations, like one near Sand Beach. “There’s a cave under water, a giant crack that goes into the granite. There’s a sandy bottom and these boulders that are perfectly round like bowling balls, from rolling in and out of the cave.”

“Eddie does an amazing job. He sets up meetings, monthly dinners; he’s setting up dives almost every two weeks,” said Bench. “He’s
generous with his time and equipment. He’s super generous with his boat, so we don’t always have to do shore dives. We’re going out to Egg Rock, Mount Desert Rock.”

Ed “Diver Ed” Monat (right) and his wife, Edna. (Courtesy photo)

Monat is quick to recognize that, while he’s the gregarious and goofy personality people recognize, his wife Edna is an invaluable “fixer” for all of it.

“She’s captain on the Dive-In Theater. She does the narration,” said Monat. “She’s the dive supervisor on all my commercial dives. She’s on all our recreational dives. She runs everything when we do dive charters. She organizes stuff when we’re doing trips. She’s really the powerhouse.”

The group also travels around the state – and the world – to dive in other locations. Last winter they traveled to St. Eustatius, a small Dutch island in the Caribbean.

Monat has plenty of underwater work keeping him busy, too. In addition to water intake maintenance, he does salvage dives and mooring inspections. He cleans the pontoons on the Bar Harbor ferry terminal and does work on a tidal turbine in Cobscook Bay. He’s also a scallop fisherman.

“There’s nothing like being in the water,” he said. “It’s not just the weightless part of it, but it’s a completely different environment and world. It’s not silent; it’s loud because of your bubbles and stuff like that. But it’s what you want to hear. It’s not like the world around us now. We’re down there, there’s no Facebook, there are no phones, there’s no nothing. It’s just you.”

SHANNON BRYAN is Friends of Acadia’s Content and Website Manager.

This story was originally published in the fall 2025 issue of Acadia magazine.

Acadia magazine is published three times a year and features stories of Acadia National Park and the local community, from behind-the-scenes work to the impact of donor dollars. To receive Acadia magazine, become a member/donor!