Valid question! Aruba was just how I could set up the flights so I was only flying during non-office hours, and then I hung out there a few days to check it out and acclimate to the time zone. Then I flew prior to work hours to Curacao on Friday morning, clocked in at 1 pm/aka 9 am Burbank time, and worked to 10 pm (6 pm in California).
All this was so I could do something I saw my friend Lynne do and it looked so cool, I decided to do it too.
Here are some photos of today's submersible journey to 600 feet under the sea! The deepest I ever got with SCUBA was 60 feet, and that was only when I got certified off Roatan in 1998. (Coincidentally, my Roatan trip was part of the Central American overland truck journey where I met Lynne in the first place. She was going from Alaska to Argentina, and I was on for the Guatemala to Panama leg.)
I was lucky that one of the other sub passengers was a Northeastern University marine biologist doing research on Curacao. He told us all about plankton and krill and various corals, as well as a lot about micro-plastics and drug runners setting off in their own submarines from Venezuela. Apparently that's a big problem for Curacao. He also works with Fabien Cousteau, and talked about Jacques Piccard, who voyaged to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in 1960. Added bonus: He was on a panel at San Diego Comic-Con as an expert to talk about Aquaman the year the movie came out. He wasn't allowed to cosplay on the panel, but afterwards, he dressed as a coral polyp and his wife wore a micro-plastics hat.
Most of us know what we know about submersibles from James Cameron, who has himself been to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
This was an incredible day. It's not like there were a million fish and sharks and I got to see mermaids, but it was just such an amazing thing to hop in a submarine with no skill and pop on down to 200 meters under the sea.
1 comment:
Quite an experience!
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