Close your eyes.


You see blue, maybe green, all around you. The visibility is perfect, and you can see all the colors surrounding your body. You hear yourself breathing, it sounds louder than usual and it has a weird echo to it. You can feel yourself being rocked back and forth. It’s peaceful, it’s comfortable, and it’s the perfect way to get away from the world as we know it.


Where are you? Under 60 feet of water, scuba diving in the Florida Keys. Key Largo to be exact. There is beautiful coral all around you. Turtles, eels, fish in too many species and colors to count. A couple sharks swim by. Sting rays go along the bottom, or swim by if you’re lucky. Lobsters and crabs scuttle along the ocean floor. The sand sways with the current. Conchs and Sea Sponges lie around. It’s truly a beautiful place.


I love scuba diving. I like wearing my wetsuit, my blue mask with glass on the sides so I can have peripheral vision, my blue fins, my gloves. I love my BCD (Buoyancy Control Device) that fits me just right. I love my regulator and compass that never fail me. I don’t have my own tanks yet, for now I rent them from the dive shop. I hope to one day add a dive knife to my collection of gear as well.


Personally, I would love to scuba dive all over the world. I have only ever been in Florida. I want to go in Africa the most, because there is warm water there and amazing animals to see. I would love to go cage diving with Great White sharks, which some people say is insane, but I think it would be probably the coolest thing I would ever do. I’d also like to go in the Great Barrier Reef near Australia; I hear the diving there is amazing. Hawaii is another place I want to go diving, it is really beautiful there.

It’s amazing, to be able to breathe under water. You can see things that can’t exist on land. You can see a world completely different from our own. You can see places almost unchanged by human hands for years. You can constantly discover new things. The ocean, right by space, is one of the most unexplored areas in existence, even though water covers about 75% of the Earth. Scuba diving allows you to explore these places and make amazing discoveries. It’s not something many people do, and it is a privilege.

Scuba diving is magical. It is my favorite thing to do and it allows you to explore another world.