My wetsuit is at waist-level as I hear the cries for help. Darting across the dirt road towards Half Moon Bay beach, I scan the dock, the beach, and the water for the source of the shouts of distress. A handful of people stand on the dock, pointing excitedly at two figures struggling on the surface some two hundred meters offshore, their bodies bobbing in and out of sight amidst the rolling waves. My coworkers are charging down the dock. This is the real deal. I’ve been here before. With forty-seven PADI Rescue Diver certifications under my belt, I’ve simulated this situation at least as many times, but the level-headedness with which I execute my training scenarios is quickly usurped » read more «

According to this article on Deep-Sea News, I unknowingly filmed the world’s oldest animal a year ago. Sweeping silently along the silty slopes 1400ft under the Caribbean Sea off Roatan, Honduras, Karl Stanley piloted his deep diving submarine Idabel upon a writhing mass of brittle stars entangled around the brilliant golden lattice of gold coral. My meager five megapixel camera did its best to capture the alien bundle of deep sea life, oblivious to the fact that the gold coral I was filming is over 2000 years old. Turn down the audio… I never edited this video, so the white noise of the submarine is a bit blown out. Read more about the amazingly ancient gold corals at Deep-Sea News…

Well this is pretty crazy… The thought floats to the surface of my consciousness as my bubbles cascade against the gnarled ceiling just inches above my head, slipping through invisible porous slivers in the ironshore and cascading through a impossibly interwoven stream of eons-old coral fossils to escape, unnoticed, on the surface twenty feet above my head. Twenty vertical feet, I remind myself. I am wedged forty feet inside a tiny fissure in the fore reef at Hole in the Wall dive site near West End, Roatan, Honduras. An ominous hallway of unexplored darkness looms before me, beckoning me to shed my dive light deeper into the cave. The last inklings of Caribbean sunlight illuminate my hands as I loop » read more «

Given that I’ve been living on Roatan for over four years now, I get the question all the time: “so what’s your story?” Well, here it is: http://www.thescubageek.com/i-am-the-scuba-geek/.