Scuba - Panama City, Florida

The considerable absence from blogging began with accepting the first world problems presented by living in Salt Lake City, Utah. There is little objectively wrong with Utah or dominate culture besides being boring. The people are nice, but boring. The weather is neither too hot nor too cold. The food is healthy and bland. The outdoors are very nice, but people have such an orgasm over the red rocks and snow that they can frankly shove them. With all those first world problems it is difficult to find expressive inspiration. 

Generally I experience vacation as surmounting a challenge like 6 days backpacking or hitchhiking to Canyonlands, but my employer has asked me to champion a program requiring training in Panama City, Florida. Given that I will likely never return here, I might as well live it to the hilt. On the peninsula across from Shell beach there is a natural preserve complete with sub-tropical flora, alligators, and white sand beaches. White sand, finely crushed and soft from an eon of rattling shells in the warm clear sea. 

Gearing up in the muggy afternoon following hours of heavy rain, my lungs felt thick with the dense air and tight with anticipation. 18 years had elapsed since last diving in the kelp beds of Catalina Island, 60 feet below, confined in 9mils of neoprene compressing all joy out of the event. The kelp was thick as bamboo and closely spaced like those poles of a Viet Cong POW prison. I was terrified of everything and blocked my vision with a rapid consumption of air.

 In entering the aptly named “splash pool” made from a jetty of rock separating the nature park from the shipping lane, the tension slipped away as I eased into the bath temperature water. After a few awkward minutes fooling with the Buoyancy Compensator, everything started to melt away. There was only the regulator rasp, sea bottom, and green water fading away to black. On the shipping lane side of the jetty, the sea floor fell away quickly and the visibility was sub-20ft due to recent storms and an outgoing current. Swimming up current was not difficult and I was careful to control breath rate as to extend the dive length. After a 10 minutes a profound headache developed due oxygen deprivation from under breathing, but this resulted in a dive length of 56 minutes which is good for a rookie. In the jetty rocks, between 25 and 45 feet, there was all the ocean life that might be expected in a Discovery Channel documentary.

I was, infact, not especially impressed by the fishy. Probably I have been spoiled by David Attenborough. It was the weightlessness, the ability to conduct within three dimensions, to move with slight effort, and change direction with the attitude of head or limb position. To be nearly independent of gravity and change depth with inhalation is a sensation of corporeal freedom which I have not found elsewhere. I’m going to next explore FVP drone flying, that might produce a similar sensation. 

In the meantime, I was getting hungry for sushi and mainly octopus. The concept of eating sushi in Utah, a thousand miles from the ocean, has never appealed to me. There are certainly those that speak of refrigeration, but fruit always tastes better the closer to the vine it gets.  On the menu there was an appetizer of raw octopus salad dressed in marinade. The chef took a mass of Cephalopoda larger than my fist and sliced it like pork cutlets into a bowl along with peeled, diced cucumbers, imitation crab, roe and brown sauce.