Our Team

Graham Casden

Founder & Chief Visionary Officer

Graham was born in Jackson Hole, WY but moved to California as a child. He soon developed an insatiable love for the ocean and quickly realized his life was intertwined with the sea. In 1995, Graham moved to Boulder to attend the University of Colorado and study marketing and entrepreneurship. His love for traveling and the ocean have led him to dive destinations all over the world. Graham wanted to find a way to continue exploring while also protecting the environment he loves. Over the course of the next 10 years, he’s worked diligently to create a community of ocean enthusiasts who are passionate about experiencing and preserving our marine environments. 

Amy Christopher

Owner, Director of Retail & Travel

Amy has been swimming and snorkeling for as long as she can remember. Her first experience was snorkeling with her family at Playa de los Gatos in Mexico when she was 2. From that point on she was hooked. Amy has been fortunate to have spent the majority of her life traveling around the world with her family. She earned her Open Water certification in 1991 and is now a SSI Master Instructor.

Amy is the Director of Retail & Travel Operations and a videographer at Ocean First.  Her favorite part about diving is coming across the unexpected while diving, observing the behaviors of marine creatures, and exploring new countries. Amy has been with the team since March of 2000.

Kathy Gagliardo

Buyer & Retail Manager

Kathy has always loved and been intrigued by the ocean, all from the first time she was "bitten" by a starfish at the age of 6. She has since learned that starfish can not bite people. Kathy loves learning about the behavior of creatures in the ocean and plans on becoming a vet someday. For now, she volunteers her time at Colorado's Ocean Journey. Kathy joined the team in January of 1998 and became an instructor in 1999.  She is the Retail Buyer for Ocean First.

Mark J Duvall

Director of Service & Facilities, Master Service Technician

Growing up on a ranch in the middle of Montana doesn’t afford many opportunities to spend time in the water, but as a teenager Mark would get out to Flathead Lake in northern Montana. In 1985, Mark moved to Boulder and worked as the IT Director for the Geological Society of America.  Later that year, while at a GSA meeting, a group of managers decided they would go diving in the Caribbean.  Unable to resist the lure of the tropics, Mark followed suit and never looked back.  Since then, he has been diving in the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Hawaii, New Zealand, Roatan, Mexico and all around the Caribbean. In 2007, Mark became an instructor for Ocean First and is now the Director of Service & Facilities and Master Service Technician.

Brennan Bushman

Director of Training

Born and raised in Vermont Brennan moved to Colorado in 2008 to pursue his love for cycling. He has worked in all facets of the bike industry from nonprofit to e-commerce. Scuba diving was always something that was a bucket list adventure and in 2018 he obtained his open water certification. This was a start to a new adventure that quickly turned into a passion. After 50 dives his first year, He endearingly earned the nickname Scuba B from his cycling buddies as well as got a tattoo inspired by the Wes Anderson film "The Life Aquatic". He just could not get enough and decided to pursue a career in diving. Brennan is currently on the path to becoming an Instructor and can't wait to share his love for diving with Colorado and beyond.

Kathryn Foster

Swim School Director

Born and raised in North Carolina, Kathryn spent her summers vacationing  with family along the Carolina and Virginia coast.  She began swimming at the age of three and took her love of the water on to high school to swim competitively.  Kathryn taught swim lessons while an undergrad at UNC Charlotte before traveling around Central America surfing and enjoying SUP Yoga. She recently graduated from graduate school with a degree in Transpersonal Counseling. Maverick, her three-year old pup, is discovering his own fascination of the water and together they are swimming and exploring all parts of Colorado.  

Meghan Quinn

Director of Marketing

Meg’s love for the ocean started at a young age on the east coast beaches. She was a competitive swimmer and played water polo most of her life, can’t get her out of the water! She found herself in Colorado attending CU Denver and falling in love with the mountain life. With a passion for adventure, Meg traveled to Indonesia and ended up getting scuba certified on an island off of Bali. After a hammerhead shark diving experience in the Caribbean, Meghan came back to Colorado manifesting that the ocean be a bigger part of her life again. That’s when she magically found Ocean First and the perfect career mix of the ocean, mountains and marketing!

Caitlin Mahoney

Sustainability Coordinator & B Keeper

Caitlin was born on Nantucket Island and moved to Breckenridge, CO when she was 4 years old. Growing up in Summit County was a wonderful privilege that allowed her to explore skiing, snowboarding and a 15 year long figure skating career. Her parents hail from Florida, so despite being raised in a landlocked state, every family vacation was spent with the sand, sun & salt water. Her love for the ocean inspires a dream of living by the ocean and someday she’ll get there. After graduating from CSU, Caitlin spent 5 years working as a marketing manager for the concert promoter, AEG Presents. Seeking out a change of pace, she was elated to find a new home with Ocean First. This year she is looking forward to getting open water certified and diving into the underwater world of endless adventures.

Ingrid Hilbink

Marketing Manager

Ingrid was born in Evergreen, CO and grew up in Highlands Ranch, CO. Growing up in Colorado you could find her in the mountains often hiking, snowboarding and skiing, camping, and much more. While from a landlocked state, Ingrid has been visiting the ocean multiple times a year with her family from a very young age. Spending her time in the water surfing, snorkeling, scuba diving, and exploring, she grew up with an appreciation for the marine environment. Her love for all things outdoors gives her a passion for exploration of any environment. Ingrid combined her love for the outdoors and drive to protect and preserve mother nature with her love of communication and interaction with others to become the Marketing Manager at Ocean First. She can’t wait to continue to learn, grow, and explore the world above and below the surface in her job and as a diver with Ocean First!

Kathryn Foster

Swim School Director

Born and raised in North Carolina, Kathryn spent her summers vacationing  with family along the Carolina and Virginia coast.  She began swimming at the age of three and took her love of the water on to high school to swim competitively.  Kathryn taught swim lessons while an undergrad at UNC Charlotte before traveling around Central America surfing and enjoying SUP Yoga. She recently graduated from graduate school with a degree in Transpersonal Counseling. Maverick, her three-year old pup, is discovering his own fascination of the water and together they are swimming and exploring all parts of Colorado.  

Alysha Perrin

Assistant Swim Director

Alysha grew up swimming in the blue waters of Lake Tahoe, Nevada and dreaming of becoming a marine scientist. She began her water career in North Carolina in 2012 as a swim teacher at Charlotte Aquatics and a lifeguard and camp counselor at Camp Spring Creek. As a mountain girl at heart, she was elated to discover a company dedicated to ocean adventure, education, and conservation in landlocked Colorado and is excited to be part of the Ocean First team! Alysha aims to help her students build a strong foundation of swimming skills that will empower them to explore the magic of the water, motivate them to preserve our aquatic environments, and inspire them to seek adventure! In her other career, Alysha is a dance, aerial, and stilt teacher & performer and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in contemporary dance. She enjoys kayaking, alpine skiing, backpacking, and traveling and looks forward to adding more scuba diving to her life!

Kyle Cafourek

Swim Teacher

Kyle’s childhood summers were spent at his family’s lake cabin up in Minnesota. When he was 13, he moved down to Texas and joined the swim team to beat the heat. At age 20, he joined the Navy and was stationed in Yokosuka, Japan. Kyle worked hands on with aviation, its equipment and dealt with the safe completion of launch and recovery of aircrafts aboard CVN 73 George Washington aircraft carrier. Since getting out of the military, he has moved to Colorado and is now studying web & graphic design. Out of the pool, he enjoys messing around with the Adobe Creative Cloud, traveling, and exploring Colorado and everything it has to offer.

Molly Leute

Swim Administrator and Instructor

Molly has been living in Longmont Colorado since she was 11 months old. She has always loved the water and spent a lot of summers playing in Longmont's outdoor pool as well as taking lake vacations with her family. After wanting to be better than her brother she became a lifeguard and eventually a Lifeguard Instructor and she has been around pools ever since. She is passionate about keeping and teaching people how to be safe in the water. Molly graduated from Colorado State University with a degree in marketing. She enjoys spending her free time playing board games, going on motorcycle rides, and swimming.

Josh Rowe

Swim Teacher

Josh is a Denver native and a CU Buff that has a long history with water. Through his competitive swimming career he was a four year state qualifier, achieved All-American status, and was a member of the All-State team for Colorado. His interest in water goes beyond the swimming pool as Josh loves to use his free time to paddle board and go on sailing trips with his family!

Matt Carr

Scuba Instructor (Divemaster Instructor), Service Technician

Matt has been around the water his entire life. At a young age he would swim in his parent’s pool, testing how long he could hold his breath, to see what it was like to be underwater for a long period of time. In high school, he was on the diving team and as he grew older, his passion for the water also grew. In 2001, he took a trip to Cancun where he was introduced to diving with a Try Scuba class. In May 2002, he got Open Water Certificatied and then for the next 7 years volunteered for a dive shop as a Rescue Diver. In 2013, he got certified as a Dive Control Specialist and started working for Ocean First. Matt has worked his way up the Instructor ranks to become a Divemaster Instructor. Matt is also one of the main service techs and helps maintain our facility. Locally, he has logged over 150-175 dives in The Blue Hole in Santa Rosa New Mexico, 75 dives in Homestead Crater in Midway Utah, and 75 dives in Aurora Reservoir. Belize is one of his favorite places to dive!

When he is not teaching classes or working on gear, he enjoys being outside, all things relating to baseball, hanging out with family, listening to all kinds of music and going to Beaver Reservoir to camp and fish.

Cathy Christopher

Scuba Instructor

Cathy grew up in northeast Ohio knowing that she loved science - biology specifically - from an early age. While her interest in marine science started with whales, by the time she got to undergrad, she was enamored with the invertebrates. While in grad school at Florida Atlantic University, Cathy earned her Open Water and Nitrox scuba certifications and gained experience with various projects about birds and sea turtles and everything in between.  

Although she has participated in several sea turtle studies, lived and worked on a dolphin research vessel, and has been dropped off by helicopter in the Everglades to count fish, her love and loyalty remain with the invertebrates, which she considers the most fascinatingly diverse group of animals on the planet. She likes to remind anyone who will listen that without invertebrates, there wouldn't be much to see on a reef!

Cathy moved from Florida to Colorado in 2015 to work full time for Ocean First Education (OFE) where she and the rest of the team develop K-12 marine science content. If you've taken any of the SSI Ecology courses, you're already familiar with the work done by OFE – the two companies partnered several years ago to make marine science education more accessible to divers. In 2017, Cathy became a dive instructor for Ocean First and enjoys pointing out the unique invertebrates she comes across on her dives throughout the Caribbean and Indo-Pacific. If you ask nicely, she might even help you ID your fish and invert images. 

Kim Crouch

Scuba Instructor

Kim grew up in an Air Force family and moved around the country every two years until she settled in Colorado to swim for CSU on a swimming scholarship. She started swimming competitively at age six and still competes in Masters swimming. She has always been drawn to water sports and also enjoys water skiing, surfing, windsurfing, sailing, and most of all – scuba diving! She feels at home in the water and likes how diving makes her feel like a part of the ocean environment so she can observe all sea life, big and small. She was certified in 1986 and dabbled with diving over the years while she wrote air traffic control software and raised two kids. She became an instructor in 2016 and is fascinated by all the math and science in diving. 

Her diving travels have taken her to Australia, Tahiti, Philippines, Cayman Islands, Jamaica, St Lucia, St. Croix, Roatan, Belize, Cozumel, and Florida. She also loves riding her road bike and traveling to Europe, New Zealand, and Asia with her family.

Kim's enjoys seeing her scuba students grow their skills by challenging themselves to become open water divers, and loves sharing their experience on their first ocean dive.

Kelly Dananay

Assistant Director of Training

As a Colorado native, Kelly discovered scuba diving when she was certified in high school. She tried a wide variety of jobs and even went to Colorado State University to earn a degree in Biomedical Sciences, but eventually decided to pursue a career in scuba diving.  After a few adventurous years working as a dive instructor in Curacao, Kelly came back home to Colorado to continue her scuba diving career as a dive instructor and Assistant Training Director for Ocean First.  Kelly helps out with marketing, retail, and tends to many of the office plants. When she's not blowing bubbles, you can find Kelly gardening, hanging out with her pets (including chickens), and a hive of honey bees!

Shayna Farnsworth

Scuba Instructor

Shayna has been a fish in water since she was a kid. Her love of scuba came from her mom, who taught scuba in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 80’s. Shayna remembers using her mom’s scuba equipment to sit at the bottom of their pool and felt amazed that she could breath underwater. After a dive trip to the Red Sea with her family, Shayna realized she wanted scuba diving to become more than just a hobby, she wanted to share her love of the ocean with other people and become an instructor. Shayna is passionate about the ocean and conservation and is working towards making a career protecting what she loves!

Dan Goldan

Scuba Instructor

Dan was scuba certified by Ocean First back in 1991 when it was still Scuba Joe.  He had wanted to get his scuba certification for several years, but at the time, couldn’t afford it.  He won a certification course as a door prize at an awards dinner.  At the time, he was a volunteer firefighter with Cherryvale Fire (now Rocky Mtn Fire), and is still a volunteer rescuer with the Boulder Emergency Squad.  He went on to become a public safety diver with the Boulder Emergency Squad, and then a Public Safety Scuba Instructor in 1997.  Dan became a corporate trainer for Dive Rescue Int’l in 1998 and remains active with them today.  In 2008 he became a recreational scuba instructor with SSI, and moved on to becoming a technical diving instructor in 2012.  Dan joined Ocean First as an instructor in 2010 and is currently an Assistant Instructor Trainer with SSI.  His passions in diving include multi-gas and multi-tank, deep, sidemount diving, as well as mentoring new instructors.  He also enjoys biking, swimming and shorter distance triathlons.

Bruce Goodwin

Scuba Instructor

Bruce's love for the water started with snorkeling the lakes in New Jersey. Thirty years later he earned his certification and was hooked. He was a school teacher for thirty years and has been retired since 2006. Because of his love for teaching, it seemed a natural progression to teach scuba diving. He has been helping or teaching professionally since 1995 and is a Master Scuba Diver Trainer. Bruce also works a few days a week at Ocean First as a service technician.

He has escorted divers to Cozumel, Roatan, Dominica and to Key Largo in the Florida Keys. His many dive trips have taken him to Micronesia and Indonesia, Chuuk (Truk), Bali and the Banda Sea, Palau, Yap, the Channel Islands, Flower Gardens in the Gulf of Mexico, Tobago, Curacao, Cayman Brac, Costa Rica, The Socorro Islands, Egypt, the Red Sea, and Dominica.  Bruce enjoys sharing his love of the oceans with divers including the many interesting land excursions the islands have to offer, such as zip line tours, hot spring and waterfalls, hikes through the rainforest, interesting restaurants and meeting the locals.

Drew Herrick

Freediving Instructor, Retail Specialist

As Florida native, Drew has been exploring underwater as early as he can remember.  He took his first scuba class in 2008 and became a divemaster in 2010. Eventually, the mountains lured him to Durango, Colorado where he earned a degree in Adventure Education and spent several years working in the outdoor industry. Still, the ocean called and he moved to southeast Asia to continue developing his water skills. He became a Freediving Instructor in 2016 and taught courses in Thailand and the Philippines. To date, Drew has achieved breath holds over six minutes and depths of 200ft. He recently moved back to Colorado and is looking forward to training at altitude and supporting the growth of apnea enthusiasts around the front range.

Danny Knoll

Scuba Instructor

Danny, a native of Washington DC, moved to Colorado in the pursuit of outdoor adventures. Oddly enough, this is where he found his love for scuba diving. He became open water certified in 2012 in the high mountains near Vail, Colorado. After gaining his instructor rating in 2013, he headed for warmer waters and taught scuba diving in the Cayman Islands and aboard an 80 foot liveaboard in Hawaii. When not diving, Danny is an avid thru-hiker, having completed the Appalachian, Pacific Crest, and Continental Divide trails.

Mike Pivacek

Scuba Instructor

Mike grew up in upstate New York where he fished and snorkeled around cold, dark lakes as often as possible. His dream was to work at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and spend time in and around the ocean. When his family moved to Colorado, he was forced to put his oceanic career on hold; Mike spent eight years in the military and graduated from Regis College with honors, beginning a career in technology where he became a Chief Information Officer and eventually the General Manager for a large data company in Denver. He has traveled extensively for business and pleasure – his favorite land destination was Zimbabwe, and his favorite diving trip was to the Socorro Islands. 

Mike lives in Broomfield and now splits his time now between management consulting, training students in his self-defense business, traveling and diving with his wife Erin and teaching scuba at Ocean First including middle and high school students in the TIDES program. 

He has been diving since 2009 and has been instructing since 2017 – all of his certifications and professional training were completed at Ocean First. Mike’s dive travels have taken him to Key Largo, Cozumel, Fiji, the Caymans, Roatan, the Socorro Islands, and Guadalupe Island where he got to see great white sharks up close and personal! 

Dave Sturtz

Retail Associate, Scuba Instructor

Dave was scuba certified at Ocean First in 2002 when it was still called Scuba Joe, and went on to become a scuba instructor in 2011. He has dived in Costa Rica, Maui, Bonaire, Roatan, Cozumel, Baja, Grenada, the Caymans, the Virgin Islands, Fiji and Thailand, mostly with his wife and dive buddy Anita.  He began working on the retail end of Ocean First in 2016 and loves giving customer the care and attention he would expect to receive.  Dave also enjoys camping, rafting, skiing, biking and motorcycling, and is a volunteer firefighter with the Gold Hill FD.

Roger Young

Director of Sales, TIDES

Roger first became interested in scuba diving while watching the 50's television program "Sea Hunt," however growing up on a small farm in Oklahoma didn't provide many opportunities to experience the sport. He never lost interest, though, and in 1985 while on vacation in the Caribbean he had the opportunity to take a resort course. From that  point on he knew diving was the passion of his life. While he enjoys all aspects of diving, he has a special interest in helping others learn this exciting sport. In addition to teaching scuba, Roger is also a certified SSI Instructor Trainer, certified Alpine Ski Instructor and avid high altitude mountaineer.