Our Story
Dive Outdoors began with a backyard project and an unexpected business idea.
When Scott Putnam asked a local garden store to recommend the best landscaper, the answer was simple: “Tyler.” Scott hired him to transform his backyard, and the two got to know each other. Knowing Scott’s love of scuba diving and involvement in coral reef restoration, Tyler eventually posed a different question: Would Scott join him in buying Howell’s Dive Shop?
For Scott, it was a chance to try something new—becoming a business owner while investing in a hobby that had brought him years of joy. In August 2023, Scott and Tyler took over the shop together.
They inherited a piece of Redding history. Howell’s began as a paint store in 1952 and evolved over the decades to include art supplies, gold mining equipment, and scuba diving. Its eclectic character reflected the interests of its owners and the community around it.
Scott and Tyler wanted to carry that spirit forward while making room for new adventures. Working with a local marketer, they explored names that would reflect both diving and Redding’s great outdoors. Dive Outdoors fit their vision: a shop for discovering what’s beneath the water and enjoying what’s beyond it.
Owning the shop meant diving deep into the industry, from masks and fins to regulators, BCDs, and dive computers. Expanding into electric bikes helped support the shop through quieter winter months and introduced them to new customers.
Today, Dive Outdoors is a PADI 5 Star Dive Center in downtown Redding. But their proudest achievement isn’t a product or a business milestone. It’s getting to know the people who walk through the door—experienced divers, curious beginners, and neighbors simply exploring the shop.
That’s the heart of Dive Outdoors: sharing adventures, building friendships, and helping people enjoy the outdoors.
Scott Putnam
Co-Owner
For Scott Putnam, Dive Outdoors is about sharing the underwater world—and making friends along the way. You’ll find him helping customers choose gear, planning and leading dive trips, or swapping stories at the shop.
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Scott’s love of the ocean began with childhood episodes of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and a family snorkeling trip to Hawaii. In college, he studied oceanography and marine biology, including coral degradation in Kaneohe Bay on Oahu. He became scuba certified in 1997 after his graduate school classmates spotted a certification special at Costco and decided to learn together.
His first dive trip after certification took him to Fiji. At “Still Waters” off Qamea Island, Scott and his sister Lisa descended into a world filled with dazzling fish and coral. Within minutes, he was seeing everything he had ever dreamed of keeping in a saltwater aquarium, swimming freely around him. He returned home, took down his aquarium, and started putting that energy into dive trips instead.
More than 500 dives later, Scott still finds plenty to amaze him. He loves Fiji’s people and reefs, the Philippines’ diversity, Indonesia’s underwater surprises, and the challenges of the Galápagos—where, witnesses will confirm, a sea turtle once wrapped its flippers around his neck. Locally, his favorite spot is Whiskeytown Lake’s fish curtain, among curious bass and trout.
Scott holds Open Water, Advanced Open Water, Nitrox, and Rescue Diver certifications and is working toward Divemaster. His approach with new divers is simple: kindness, patience, understanding, and plenty of enthusiasm for marine life. Hearing customers’ excitement after a dive is his favorite reward.
A Redding native, Scott returned in the early 2000s. Outside diving, he enjoys playing and teaching cello and spending time with friends and his family, all divers, including his sister Lisa.
Tyler Hoffman
Co-Owner
Chandler Arellano
Instructor
Chandler Arellano is the primary dive instructor at Dive Outdoors. Born and raised in Redding, he has been diving since 2013, teaching since 2018, and has certified nearly 500 divers.
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My first professional dive job was as a Snuba guide in Maui, where I took hundreds of people into the ocean. From there I moved to Seattle and attended the Divers Institute of Technology, where I learned chamber operations, salvage, rigging and underwater welding. I then moved to the Florida Keys for scuba instructor school, where I learned rebreather and technical diving.
Some of my favorite places to dive are the tropics: Cozumel, Belize and Hawaii. Diving and teaching are my passion, and I will never quit.