scuba-diving

Something, most certainly, happens to a diver__ emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one__ point of view starts to lose its __efts_ and __own_ and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. It is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. It is not solely exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. It is not a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one__ feet_it is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror.

The thing about the ocean is that the surface won__ always tell you what is going on underneath.

Every time you dive, you hope you'll see something new - some new species. Sometimes the ocean gives you a gift, sometimes it doesn't.

It isn__ always the treasure that drives men down deep into the sea; it__ something else, something unexplainable, even to them.