In a recent interview, I was asked about my career as a diver as it relates to Clemency.  I started diving a little over fifteen years ago, and at that time concentrated on shallow reefs as I built my experience and interest in the sport.  But as time passed and my experience grew, I succumbed to the allure of the sea.  For some it is above the waves, but for me it would be beneath them.

It is simple physics that dictates the world underwater.  Every twenty feet in-depth doubles the atmospheric pressure exerted on our body and the things around us.  As a result, our volume is compressed while our weight remains the same.  The result?  Under the law of displacement, we become smaller with the same relative weight so we sink.  As a matter of fact, the deeper we go, the faster we sink!

Don’t worry!  They make equipment for this!  Yes we wear a lead belt, but we also have a Buoyancy Compensator (BC) that we wear like a jacket.  We add air to it to increase our displacement and slow or stop our descent.  So why am I going through this mini SCUBA lesson?  Because when I learned to dive, I was the one who always WANTED to go deeper.  I WANTED to get down there into the black just to see what was there!  People had to come GET ME OUT!  Most people liked to stay up in the shallows where the pretty fish were and the water was eighty-seven degrees.  Me?  FORGET THAT!!!!  I wanted to penetrate the darkness and rip open the oceans secrets!  Deep? BAH!  Cold?  NAH!!! Bring it on!

We all make friends in dive class, and I have a best friend and buddy that I dive with whenever I can, even though our basic diving desires are a little different.  While I like the deep and the cold and the black, he prefers the warm and the colorful.  He also owns my home dive shop now too, so there may be something to his plan.  Nevertheless, I am destined to fool with Nitrox, and rebreathers, and every technical aspect of diving I can conjure up while my buddy is well above me in the warm sun counting beautiful fish.  I guess it’s just my nature to want to seek out discoveries in places that are hard to get to and uncomfortable once you arrive.

So I ask you:  Isn’t the Ocean our last earthbound frontier?  Couldn’t your next dive be a dive of discovery?  Are we not finding things down there all the time?  Treasures?  Medical breakthroughs?  New forms of life?  With most of Earth’s surface covered by the Oceans, and while we wait for time travel to come of age, shouldn’t we do all we can to understand a universe that is right in our own back yards?

I think so.