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Last January I spent ten days in beautiful Curaçao developing a taste for the life aquatic and scuba diving on a daily basis. Plunging to depths of up to 85 ft. (and destroying my watch in the process), I spent about an hour underwater, twice a day, for seven straight days. Accompanying me were my Stepdad Jack, and two of his buddies from work, Greg and John. All three of them had been scuba diving approximately eleventeen times before, and obviously knew what the hell they were doing. I wasn't so sure I did at first, but apparently I do or right now I'd be fish food somewhere off the coast of Venezuela.

In short, scuba diving is awesome. The only comparative analogy I can come up with is, "birdwatching in outer space." Of course I've never been birdwatching, but the only thing you're really doing while you're scuba diving is looking for stuff. However unlike birdwatching, you're face-to-face with everything you encounter rather than staring through a pair of binoculars at some tree god-knows-how-far-away and asking your spouse (the one next to you also wearing a stupid hat),

Do I see a Whatnow?

Sorry, but birdwatching is dumb.

Anyway, I compare scuba diving to being in outer space because the feeling of knowing that you're a few stories below the ocean surface and being subjected to pressures roughly 3-4 times greater than that of standard atmospheric pressure is pretty cool/eerie. Combine that feeling with sweet visuals and coral structures large enough to park your car on (with color schemes capable of causing epileptic seizures in small children, no less) and an abundance of life so great that you begin to take seeing 500 fish swim across your face for granted, I think it's pretty fucking cool.

To make things even easier on your undersea exploration, you're essentially weightless and exert little energy in getting around. Somehow you still end up exhausted when you're done though... Beats me. There's really no right or wrong way to do anything either. There's only a few rules you need to abide by and you don't have to be a great swimmer to be able to do it. You don't even need to be able to hold your breath for more than a few seconds (although it might help in the case of an emergency). As long as you can keep your composure when/if something goes terribly wrong, say, your equipment fails or if Jaws starts swimming your way, you're fine. Pissing yourself is definitely ok, but racing to the surface to save your ass is probably a bad idea. Having nitrogen bubbles diffuse through your flesh at in insane rate sounds pretty gnarsty to me. It's also pretty interesting and simple to understand, so Wiki "the bends" if you aren't sure what it entails. Okay, I get it. You're lazy. Here.

In any case, I highly recommend enrolling in a scuba course as soon as you can. If the water isn't your thing (Hey, Scott!), buy some lessons for your parents or a friend instead. Not only is scuba diving fun, but it's an awesome excuse to go on vacation somewhere in the tropics next winter. If your parents are into it, they might just bring your freeloading ass along on their next sunshine-infested getaway. Just an idea.

If you're lucky enough, you'll dive with someone that has an underwater camera (you actually only need a case) and you'll have some sweet photos to remember your adventure.

Aforementioned Sweet Photos