Why Everyone Should Scuba Dive
The following is a recollection of a recent dive I made in Turks and Caicos.
“Ready? Take one giant step to clear the boat.”
Feeling like Neil Armstrong, I held my regulator and mask with my right hand and took one big leap into the ocean water. A cloud of white bubbles exploded around me, and my vision was clouded as my inflated BCD (buoyancy control device, essentially a vest you can inflate and deflate) brought me quickly back up to the surface. I switched from my regulator to my snorkel, and swam over to hold onto the trailing line off the back of the boat, where about ten other divers were clutched onto the thick rope anchored in the gentle current.
With one hand on the rope, I looked down at my surroundings for the first time, just to pop out a split second later. “Holy crap,” I called at Craig, my dive buddy. “Look down!”
We were suspended 6 stories above the sea floor on translucent turquoise glass. For a brief moment I had a slight sense of vertigo as we stayed suspended at the surface. Below us was a massive reef, sprawling away from the sea wall, which dropped off steeply to a deep, impenetrable dark blue. An assortment of dark Caribbean fish, curious of our dive boat and the strange black figures flailing at the surface, gathered below us and were swimming in tight circles in the shade of the boat.
