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"Dive Safe, Dive Smart." That's always been Sean "Stody" Stodelle's motto.

As a former rescue diver who earned numerous medals for his valor in lifesaving, Stody saw too much of what he calls "the dark side of diving," and he vowed to make the dive community safer and smarter. For the past seven years, he's been teaching freedivers on Maui and Oahu about the dangers of shallow water blackout, lecturing on safe diving practices, and showing new divers the ropes. As moderator of Hawaii Skin Diver's online forum, he constantly hammers the rules of safety, saying, "If I can save even one life, it's all worthwhile."

Now it's his own life that needs saving.

The threat to Stody's life didn't happen when he was freediving down to 100 feet on a single breath. Or when he and his dive buddy were 14 miles out, in water two miles deep, chumming buckets of anchovies and waiting for the big ahi and mahi.

It socked him on an ordinary Monday evening, Sept. 22, taking his daughter home from soccer practice.

"I started having a really bad headache," he said. "When we got home, I went to sleep, but I woke up the next morning vomiting with a killer headache, and my poor wife rushed me to Maui Memorial. The next thing I know, I'm waking up on the tarmac in Honolulu. They had medivaced me over, and they tell me there's a tumor in my brain."

One week later, Stody underwent a cranial lobectomy in which the surgeons removed one-sixth of his brain.

Before the surgery, he was scared. "They say, 'We're going to remove chunks of your brain, and you might lose your motor skills, your ability to talk, your memory.' The worst part was trying to tell my daughter what's going on." So he handled it in typical Stody fashion: with humor. "I told her, 'Daddy might be your new little brother after this!' "

Although the surgery to remove the tumor was successful, a biopsy revealed the worst possible news: it was a Grade 4 glioblastoma - even with aggressive treatment, malignant and terminal. The doctors gave Stody 13 months to live.

Stody is not the kind of guy to roll over and surrender. He's way too stubborn - and he's got way too much to live for. "I refuse to have a timeline put on my life," he said. "Especially with my wife and daughter - that's my fuel."

He and Melany have been married for 15 years, together for almost 19. Their 10-year-old daughter Jordyn has "her daddy's gills," partnering with him in spearfishing tournaments, and being active in a conservation group at school called Honu Heroes.

"Stody has two big priorities in life: his family and diving," said his friend and dive partner, Chris Llanes. "We're both 36, but I always say when I grow up I want to be just like Stody: a great husband, a great father."

Llanes met him at Maui Ocean Center, where Stody was formerly food and beverage director and an active proponent of the Seafood Watch program. Stody loved to educate people about sustainable seafood, recently lecturing on the topic at Pacific Whale Foundation. "(Visitors) can go back to Arizona and make decisions that still impact the ocean in a responsible way," he said.

Stody's love of the ocean and his passion for conservation was bred into him at a young age, spearfishing off Kaanapali Beach in the early '80s. "My stepdad gave me my first speech of 'we only shoot what we eat,' so I always had that mentality," he said.

He remembers being surrounded on dives by vivid schools of many different fish. That's not the case today.

Witnessing firsthand the decline in the fish population spurred Stody to take an active role in reef conservation. Aside from teaching classes in dive safety, he is a regular speaker at expos and "fun dives," and testifies on ocean-related issues such as the laynet ban, bag limits and the Superferry. His past work as a deputy sheriff/dive rescue and recovery operations technician in California led him to speak out for more DOCARE enforcement on Maui with the governor's Maui Community Advisory Council.

Stody also shares his mana'o as Hawaii Skin Diver's webmaster. HSD owner Sterling Kaya calls Stody "an influential spokesman" for the sport of freedive/spearfishing, praising his commitment to conservation and safety.

"Stody has transformed the online forum into a thriving community that can best be described as 'family,' " Kaya said. "We all owe him a debt of gratitude for his work to promote responsibility and save lives."

After four years at Maui Ocean Center, Stody was recruited this year by Garrett and Melanie Marrerro, owners of Maui Brewing Company, to be the newly reopened restaurant's general manager.

"It's not often you meet a person like Sean," Garrett said. "On both a personal and aworking level, my wife and I have the utmost respect and admirationfor him.His integrity, honesty and fearless nature (and love ofbeer!) put him in a category of his own."

Stody is also known for his indefatigable sense of humor. "That's a guy that never stops making me laugh," Llanes said. "Even right now, when people would say the odds are against him, the first thing out of his mouth is always something funny. I called him up this morning, and he says, 'I got this headache, I can't figure out why.' That's Stody- he'll try to make everyone else around him laugh so they feel better."

Stody was in the hospital on Oahu for two weeks. That's where "Save Stody's Brain" got started.

He was scheduled to teach a dive safety class for elementary school kids, and when the class was cancelled, the kids made him get well cards. They said things like: "I hope your surgery is as safe as your diving," and "I hope your brain will be saved."

Melany hung the colorful cards around his room, and his sister Melissa started a Web site called www.savestodysbrain.com with photos and updates.

Meanwhile, word spread rapidly through the diving community as postings streamed into HSD's online forum. Expressions of sorrow and hope and testimonies to Stody's character filled page after page: "One of the kindest guys with pure aloha built in his heart"; "I'm sure all of us on Maui are proud to say he's from here"; "You have given and will continue to give so much to everyone in our dive 'ohana"; and "It takes more than a surgery to keep a skindiver down."

On Oct. 7, Stody returned home to Maui to start a yearlong, five-day-a-week regimen of chemotherapy and radiation. At their home in Kahului, Melany is his round-the-clock nurse, making sure he takes his 26 pills a day.

"The hardest part in all of this is trying to offer some semblance of normalcy for Jordyn to keep her aware of what's going on, without outright scaring her or forcing her to grow up too fast," Stody said. "This is why we are trying so hard to fight and to show her that we do not give up She's a trooper, which helps me tremendously since she and Melany are my biggest concerns in all of this."

As someone who's had a job since he was 13, it's tough for Stody to just "lie around." Even tougher is the fact that he doesn't know when he'll be able to dive again.

He remembers his last dive, with spearfisher and reef advocate Darrell Tanaka in South Maui waters, just a week before his world fell apart. "It was a perfect day, the safest dive I've been on," Stody said. "We grabbed an octopus and a couple fish that day."

Not long before that, he got to dive with one of his heroes, Brian Yoshikawa of Maui Sporting Goods, who is renowned in the diving community for his stewardship of Hawaii's reefs. Yoshikawa coordinates an annual Father's Day spearfishing tournament in honor of 2-year-old Daniel Perreira, who lost his battle with cancer.

Little did Yoshikawa know he would soon be coordinating a tournament for Stody. "Cancer does not know a vacation or leave, or how rich or poor you are, or good or bad," Yoshikawa said."It just steamrolls you despite whatever else is going on in your life - it takes over your life and takes it away if you allow it to We as the dive community will try to help one of our own, and not let it pass without a fight."

Next Sunday's Roi Roundup 2008 targets three invasive fish: roi, taape and toau. Roi was introduced to Hawaii in 1956, and has become the dominant predator on coral reefs in the Hawaiian Islands, eating an average of 146 fish per year, especially uhu and surgeon fish.

Tournaments like this one help protect the reefs by trying to control the invasive species population. According to Yoshikawa, "All the fish taken will be utilized for scientific/ciguatera studies and/or consumed by whoever wants them or the sharks at the Maui Ocean Center. Nothing will be wasted."

Before his diagnosis, Stody was helping to organize the tournament. Now the funds from the raffle will go to help pay the medical bills that are piling up, despite the health insurance the Stodelles have through Melany's work at Kihei Charter School.

It's the beginning of a long, hard fight for a man who has spent his whole life fighting to save others. But Stody is ready.

"I believe in the power of positive thinking," he said. "I believe everybody has an important job in this world."

For Stody, that job now is to see his daughter grow up.

Contact freelance writer Sky Barnhart at sky@skywritemaui. com.