U is for Underwater

A class of about 10 are gathered in a high school swimming pool shallow end, each one fiddling around with a variety of vests, clasps and tanks.   Your buddy is next to you giving a helping hand as you were religiously taught in previous classroom portion of your training.  This is a lot more gear than one is used to having on in a swimming pool.  It’s awkward, heavy and clumsy on the surface.   We all inserted our life support mechanisms into our mouths and were instructed to sit down in 4 feet of water, and breath normally.

Bloody Bay Wall, Little Cayman Island, Caribbean Sea

Water was all around you as you studied seeing your classmates, yourself and the features of the pool in this foreign environment.  The clumsy weight disappeared.  Each breath, surprisingly full of air, yet in an oddly familiar circumstance.   It was like returning to an evolutionary time and state of being.

This experience began back in 1993 when I received my scuba certification and we soon began learning about places around the world few have ever heard of.   All premier diving destinations, known widely to this new “club” we were now part of, but not to many others.   It opened up a world that few get to experience first hand, and few appreciate with as much passion as those that have been immersed in it.

In contrast to on land where 80-90% of the nature you see is plant life, in this world the ratio is inverted, with animal life in all sorts of odd shapes and sizes.    It becomes immediately obvious that this place, surrounded by the most basic element of life, is where life begins itself.   It makes you wonder why we ever left.

Schooling Bigeye Jacks and others, Darwin Island, Pacific Ocean, Galapagos

It is for these reasons that people act so passionately in protecting the oceans around us.   Once you see a reef alive and thriving, teeming with life everywhere, turn into a bleached coral wasteland, you cannot escape being deeply wounded.    Our uncontrolled population growth, our wasteful practices, our changing of the climate, and plundering of ocean life will not go without impacts to our very destiny.

The oceans are where life began, and where life will end, if we continue to treat it so carelessly.

Red decorator crab (about the size of your thumbnail) with orange cup corals on a brown sponge – all animal life | Bonaire, Netherland Antilles