Marlin: "Now, what’s the one thing we have to remember about the ocean?"

Nemo: “It’s not safe.”

I can barely swim and I have a fear of being underwater, but I went scuba diving in Kauai, near Poipu Beach. It was an amazing (and tiring!) experience to get a glimpse of what ocean life is like down under. There is a lot of land on Earth, but the oceans far surpass the surface area of land. It is really another world down there, with an abundance of life that we rarely get to witness. We only went several hundred feet off the shore…
…but it was enough to see some fascinating creatures. The ocean is needless to say, massive. It can also be dark and mysterious. And it’s super salty (with me being a novice, I got to taste ocean salt water by accident). Unfortunately I did not bring an underwater camera with me, but sometimes memories are better!

It’s funny to think about all the steps and equipment needed to begin scuba diving. There’s the wet suit, boots, fins, mask, regulator, air tank, weight belt, and buoyancy compensator. That’s a lot of doohickeys involved for a human to experience the ocean as the fish do! Without all these fancy gadgets though, it would be nearly impossible to learn about aquatic life and capture great footage for shows on Discovery Channel. I certainly appreciate nature shows in that regard. It took me 5+ minutes to even get my wet suit on, and I could barely walk once I got everything else on. The hardest part was training myself to repeatedly breathe in with my mouth and exhale out through my nose. Once that cycle gets off track, water gets in either my nose or mouth — not very pleasant.

We heard whales sing underwater during our first dive, which was very cool. Their sounds were surprisingly loud, even though it was difficult to hear anything underwater. You have to momentarily pause your breathing in order to hear it. We also saw schools of tropical fish, eels, sea urchins, coral, and the best part of all…on our second dive, we saw three sea turtles (called Honu in Hawaiian)! They are amazing creatures that gracefully swim the ocean, coming up for air every 3-4 hours. Supposedly they have existed even before the dinosaur times, over 100 million years ago. One of the female turtles we saw was sleeping, and our instructor gently stroked her front arm and she slowly awakened, not alarmed by our presence at all (but still swam away).

While all these sights were incredible, I couldn’t help but feel like an alien in the ocean. We obviously don’t belong underwater, yet we came up with ways to temporarily immerse ourselves in the ocean’s world in order to see and try to understand the way of life there, an hour at a time. I asked a silly question to our scuba instructor: “Are the fish bothered by us humans exploring their territory? Obviously we can never understand their thoughts or feelings…” She replied that they usually ignore us because we are usually larger. If only we knew their inner thoughts…Pixar was quite creative with that

Dory: “This is the Ocean silly, we’re not the only two in here.”