The Humans
Roger
I had just booked a vacation to Mexico, but the travel agent didn't know whether the resort offered any scuba diving programs. I didn't know that what I was asking about was called the DSD (Discover Scuba Diving) and it's unlikely the agent would know what I was talking about if I had. I didn't know anything about diving other than I had enjoyed it when I had done it for about 20 minutes a few years previous.
So I found a nearby dive shop and figured, instead of that 20 minute packaged experience I could get my "scuba license or whatever."
As the DVD drawer closed and the first e-learning lesson started I felt something, like the world shifting around me, rearranging itself into a better order. I shrugged it off at the time, not knowing or appreciating just how much my life had just changed.
From that moment on diving subsumed my entire life. As I started to feel more passionate about dive training and safety I worked towards becoming an instructor to help create a stronger and more stable community. The hobby became a career as a teacher and as a Dive Safety Officer.
Then I met the love of my life, unsurprisingly, at a dive event.
And now we have moved to this beautiful place so we can dive together, with friends, make new friends, and show people just how awesome life can be when you are diving.
Nelly
Some people think that happiness is achieved by contorting oneself painfully on a yoga mat so that one can see up one’s chakras. Of course, some people reckon it comes from drinking the blood of virgins, so there’s quite a range there. Me, I believe that happiness and inner tranquility is most often experienced unexpectedly. For cave divers, it’s that feeling of utter weightlessness and harmony that comes when we’re suspended motionless in the veins of the earth. Topside, perhaps it’s that first sip of cold beer we take while happily anticipating our dinner, or the sheer bliss of settling into freshly-laundered sheets at night, to sleep the slumber of the exhausted.
Until fairly recently, those moments were few and far between for me – working in New York, I lived for my three weeks of annual vacation, which were invariably spent in the caves of North Florida and Mexico. Then fate intervened, and a whole bunch of us at the office lost our jobs.
Operating on the assumption that life isn’t a dress rehearsal and all that guff, my husband and I decided against my looking for another adult job. Instead, we escaped to bucolic North Florida for ten months to cave dive, and then moved to Mexico to open this bed and breakfast. Our quest is to experience as many moments of happiness as we can, by providing the backdrop for others to experience theirs. Safety aside, all that matters when you’re with us is good food, great companionship, sensational dives - and dreams of your speedy, frequent returns to our home.