Diving
Scuba diving was our first passion, well before it even occurred to us to purchase our first sloop, Moondance. We became dive junkies, connected ourselves to a dive shop in Rockville, helped out with classes at night and spent every weekend either at a quarry in PA or diving wrecks off the Atlantic coast. Our addiction to compressed air lead us to quit our jobs in 1989 and move to Grand Cayman, BWI where we worked as dive instructors for just under a year before backpacking around the world. We've dived warm waters from Central America to the Caribbean, Australia, and Thailand, numerous Atlantic wrecks from North Carolina to New York, and even a kelp forest off California. Alas, passions change and its been quite a while since we've "gotten wet".
"In most of the diving training during the 1950s and 1960s, there was a consistent 50% failure rate in professional diving courses. This meant that some sort of standard was being applied. In comparison, there is little or no failure rate in many of the recreational diving courses now being held - suggesting that few or no standards are really being applied, other than the ability to pay."
-- Diving and Subaquatic Medicine: Edmonds, Lowry, and Pennefeather
