I really don’t like anything that could possibly hurt me, even remotely, even if a loved one (like an annoyed Dad) is urging me to do it. I was extremely scared when I was told to swing a rope that looked as if it was going to crash straight into the wall, just for fun. Not even life or death.

So maybe when the dive instructor told me to flip straight backwards, tumble out of the boat, and possibly bonk my head on the vessel and possibly get my arm broken in the motor, I tried to think that it wasn’t half as bad as the situation where I was crashing into the wall.

The dive instructor went first. He put his hand over his regulator (mouthpiece), and his feet gave a mighty kick. He flew straight in backwards. For a second, I thought he was gone, but then he popped up onto the surface and gave us a thumbs up.

“You comin’?”

My dad grinned. He wasn’t scared. He sat down and tumbled in. He popped up a second later grinning. Now it was my turn. The last man (the camera man) looked at me. “Don’t think,” he said, grabbing my hand and lifting it so that it was over my regulator.

“Hold,” he commanded, and I grabbed it. I was just about to ask him if it was painful or not when I realized all I felt was water.

He had pushed me in.

I didn’t really care though. I had seen a long rope with a lot of interesting things growing on it. I touched it experimentally. It was squishy. I drew back my hand. Eeuuuurrrgggh…

“Okay, folks, we be going down this rope here,” our guide said, sounding like he had a stuffy nose (it was the mask). He pointed and grinned at the rope I had poked earlier.

And that was how I started the descent to the bottom of the ocean. Forty feet deep.

Water rushed past my face. Bubbles flew up to the surface as I breathed in and out. My mouth became increasingly dry as the air that came in felt like desert air, minus the sand.

The water became a bit darker. Something fuzzy underneath started sharpening. And sharpening. Until I was about three inches from it. It was the bottom of the ocean.

I had arrived.

It was a vast spread of coral, some fish bigger than my palm, some smaller than my little finger. There were plants that looked like the seaweed I loved to eat. And there were creepy caves.

It was a different world.

Fish soared past me. Huge turtles poked their heads out of their caves, took a look, and slowly crept back in. Coral flapped around in the water. Fish ducked out of sight.

I took it all in, eyes wide. The world was amazing. We shot past hundreds of things. The camera man followed, once handing me a sea cucumber and taking a picture.

It wasn’t a different world. It was a totally different, entirely changed world.

The camera man handed me a disk containing videos of our diving trip. I eventually made it into three separate videos, each different in some way. The first is here, a two minute overview. The second is here, a longer video of our trip with subtitles, and the third took me two days. It has been carefully edited. It is below.