A SCUBA Milestone

In 1983 my mother and I were living in the Oaks Apartments in Gainesville, Florida. I was a latchkey kid. Everyday after school, I let myself in the little second floor apartment, made myself a snack, watched tv, did chores and sometimes played with friends from around the apartment complex. The complex had a pool and I spent a lot of time in the pool. There was a guy who cleaned the pool. He was friendly and knew many of us kids. He also happened to teach SCUBA diving from his apartment and used the pool for training. So I made friends with him, helped him clean the pool, and he taught me to dive. I was just at the cusp of being old enough for a diving license at the time, but on 14 June 1983, I became a certified diver. That changed my life.

I think they changed the pool… I remember a rectangle

I dove a bit with Lloyd Bailey. And then I lost interest. But it came back after university when I was in Turkey for a summer and ended up working on a dive boat and got paid with room and board (barely a room, pretty good board), a leather jacket, and a dive master’s license. From there it was working back in Florida for a dive operation, in Egypt as an instructor and then eventually…. as a marine conservationist. It was a back door, but it worked.

Sometime in 2022, I was playing with a newly downloaded PADI app on my phone and managed to find my account and my original certification and realized that it had been 40 years since my initial certification. Fareea want to plan a big dive trip to celebrate 40 years. She was thinking Palau, Solomon Islands or the Great Barrier Reef. Unfortunately, work pressures and other life events intervened and when the fateful weekend came, we went diving with our local SCUBA club here in Suva and did one dive on the reef off Suva.

But, it as nice to commemorate 40 years of doing something, and something that unexpectedly determined the course of my life….. And it was fun to have Nasreen, Alisha and Sofia on the boat for the 40th anniversary dive.