I swore that in my lifetime I would never do it.
I have it in my childhood memory bank that my dad took my sisters and me to see Jaws at the theater when it first came out in June of 1975, which would have made me almost two years old. When I ask him if he brought me along, he says he probably took my older sisters. Perhaps he was right and I had just been caught up in childhood fantasy, but I never could understand why I couldn’t swim alone in a pool, or swim to the deep end. I couldn’t explain why I wore water wings and held my nose to jump off a diving board until the age of twelve. And where did I get the crazy notion that a shark could swim from the ocean, into my town sewer system, and pop up through the toilet to bite my little butt while I was sitting on it?
Jaws. It came from all one hundred and thirty minutes of deep ocean terror on film. Its surface-level bobbing water shots scared me well into adulthood to any time that I swam deeper than my toes could touch and my eyes could see. Suffice to say, whether it was in the movie theater with Dad or at home with my sisters, the Betamax machine, and our lax babysitter of the seventies, the TV, I saw Jaws at too young of an age and swore that scuba diving would never be my right of passage.
I prepared for my summer adventure two weeks ago and knew that I wanted to bask in clear cerulean waters with waist-high sand bars. I had grown to love the Caribbean back when I had visited during the Millennium New Year. A group of us had chartered our own sailboat, which we sailed from Puerto Rico through the Spanish, British, and U.S. Virgin Islands for two weeks. It wasn’t until later that my dad told me that my grandfather was one of the first persons to offer crewed yacht charters in the Virgin Islands back in the sixties. He told me how my grandfather had written a column for five years for Yachting magazine, called Caribbean Jottings, which solidified the fact that I had obviously inherited my love of turquoise waters, adventure travel, and the written word from my namesake. So when my travel mate and neighbor, Nayomi, and I discovered Roatan Island, one of the Bay Islands off Honduras’ North coast in the Caribbean, we knew we had found our idyllic destination. It wasn’t until I flipped through the Honduras and Bay Islands Lonely Planet, which my friend who worked for them had graciously gifted me, that I realized Honduras was one of the easiest and cheapest places in the world to learn how to dive. Nayomi’s eyes bulged, while I turned the page to find the best beach to stay ashore.
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