Scuba Diving Ad

This post is dedicated to telling you how gosh darn LIT scuba diving is. Now, I’ll tell you my tale where scuba diving came into my life. 

Majoring in marine science, everyone I talked to outside of school would ask me if I got scuba certified yet. The answer was always no, and here I was at the end of my senior year with no scuba certification. I guess since we live in New Jersey where the waters are basically freezing and green-brown colored, it wasn’t all that appealing. 

In my spring semester of senior year, I took this lovely tropical marine biology course in preparation for our trip to the Florida Keys. We spent the semester memorizing tons of reef fish species, coral species, plant species, and the mechanisms affecting the ecosystems found there, so I was eager to dive in the water to see these neon colored species myself. 

At the very end of the year, there was an Earth Day Festival where my table happened to be right next to the scuba diving table. I told the nice lady about our trip and how I wish I’d gotten certified, and she told me we could get it done in the 4 weeks before the trip! She told me it was about one-third of the cost that it actually turned out to be, so my gullible a** agreed to it!

I found a buddy in our class crazy enough to get certified last minute with me, Kendall. We had so much fun getting certified together. When it came to our checkout dives at Maclearie Park in Belmar, NJ, the current was strong, the water was thick with sediment, and it was so cold that our suits cut off all circulation. Sounds pleasant, right?

Well, Kendall and I suffered through our checkouts and kind of enjoyed the underwater blindness! We saw some cute, fragile bottom creatures. But this experience was NOTHING compared to Florida, which changed my life. 

The water in Florida was 84 degrees, the currents and waves were very chill compared to Jersey, and the waters were teeming with life. We saw huge schools of white grunt, some Spanish hogfish, green moray eels, nurse sharks, several kinds of rays, trunkfish, filefish, blue parrotfish, one lionfish hiding below the reef, and plenty of coral. I found my favorite type of fish, which was the stoplight parrotfish. Its' colors popped out to me like no other, and I immediately became fascinated with the species. 

End of story: get scuba certified. You discover a whole new, beautiful underwater world. 

Pro tip: save your money and only dive in beautiful tropical environments, like the coral reefs of the Florida Keys. You should probably do your checkout dives there too. You get more bang for your buck!