Tye is from a small town on the Great Plains of Colorado where he spent a wonderful childhood catching lizards, fishing, water-skiing, and working construction for his dad. He didn’t see the ocean or fly in an airplane until he was eighteen and he was the first in his family to attend a university. He’s continually surprised by the path his life takes. You could imagine the disbelief his younger self would feel if told he would someday have a PhD in Ocean Engineering, be a diver, work for the Navy, be a professor, and travel the world. He stopped trying to predict and plan life a long time ago. About the time he learned to surf in Australia (poorly), he began practicing a ‘ride the wave’ approach to life. Life seems to craft better and more exciting opportunities than he could ever devise.
Tye is the Chief Engineer for the Expeditionary and Maritime Systems Department of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Panama City, an Associate Graduate Faculty Professor of Ocean & Mechanical Engineering at Florida Atlantic University, and as you now know, an author. His technical publications include patents, journal articles, conference proceedings, technical reports, and a textbook on professional diving. He’s also passionate about writing fiction because it’s an adventure.
If Tye has one true passion, it’s adventure. He has found himself wishing many times that he lived in a time when the world was less explored, that he could set sail or join an expedition to see what’s on the other side of the ocean or over the distant mountains. That draw became exceptionally strong when he left home for college and devised a door-to-door fundraiser to help pay for his first real adventure: a study abroad to Australia. Once that bug bit him, it never let go.
Tye has traveled around the world and his travel tastes are crude, rugged, and cheap. Backpacking on a shoe-string budget to off-the-beaten-path destinations has provided opportunity to see many amazing things with his wife, Christy. Tye proposed at Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe with a rainbow in the background on the fall’s mist. Since then, they’ve watched cheetah cubs in the Serengeti, dived with great white sharks in South Africa, got charged by a rhino and closely chased by an angry hippo in Botswana, and summited Africa’s tallest mountain, Mt. Kilimanjaro. They’ve watched a jaguar bathe in torrential rain in the Amazon jungle, trekked in the Great Indian Desert on camels, and had a remote idyllic Malaysian island all to themselves.
Tye’s travels have also left him sick with internal parasites, getting stitched up in strange hospitals, crawling in bed bugs, puking over boats’ gunwales on rolling endless seas, completely lost in foreign places with no way and no one to call, and swinging wildly to fight off a mob of drunken locals—but hey, you win some, you lose some. It’s always been worth it.
These days, Tye and Christy’s travels are different. Cross-country camper road trips with their children, Zane, Kage, and Myla, and dogs, Shira and Kili, are equally adventurous. They are teaching their children to be explorers. There is no doubt that more epic odysseys lie ahead that will be even more special with them.
Ride the wave.
