Yesterday I drifted on the ocean bottom in a field of sea urchins and sand dollars. The day before that I faced spiny lobster. The day before that giant grouper, sharks, snapper, eels, parrot fish, and angel fish. I looked up at the glimmering surface to see that world I came from just a breath before. But now I drift in the world that we escaped from some 300+ million years ago. With twenty feet visibility, the sun shines through and illuminates the bottom. Weights on my hips keep me neutrally buoyant at the surface, but the compression of the pressure on my lungs drops me like a rock on the ocean bottom.

With my record under water just under three minutes, free diving is the most refreshing thing I have done in a long time. When the sun is near ninety degrees, a whole world that we rarely get to experience, a world that we know so little about, is available for exploration. It is beautiful, exotic, and still littered with the fierce predators that have been all but eliminated from the world above the water. I get to experience it on one breath, and swim down the like I’m a local in the watery world.

I’ve been in Florida keys for nearly two weeks and am absolutely loving the freedom. The ocean is forgiving of my sprained ankle and broken patella. My dad owns a small center console Boston Whaler that I can take out in the waves. I don the wetsuit and the mask and abandon ship for the separate world. Drifting alongside the vessel, I drop below the waves for a couple minutes to explore, coming back up only for a few breaths.

It is an amazing world below he waves, a beautiful adventure and one that is going to be tough to abandon for a return to the civilized working world.