being a scuba diver means that you are self-sufficient and self-reliant because you know under the water you have your tank of breathing gas and your gear and a buddy and that's it and um things rarely go wrong but when they do you need to be able to deal with that there's no guard rails under the ocean and then I felt that especially in the College of Agriculture food environment how could we realistically say we're training the next generation of citizens especially in terms of the environment
if we're not talking about the water which is 70 percent of our planet and allowing our students to go underneath it to look at what happens under the surface the only prerequisite for the class is that students have to have an open water scuba diving certification so that's if you were to go to any dive shop in the country and say I want to be a certified scuba diver whatever program they would put you into will get you the certifications you need to join this trip so it was a half of I guess
October and went all the way and we met once a week and we essentially um went over everything that we learned per se online we have to take so many quizzes through SSI scuba schools International and Dr Hirsch went more in depth about everything just to make sure we really had it ingrained before we made the trip because obviously if we can't do it in the classroom or in the pool they're not going to put us in a risky situation once we get there we decided on Cozumel Mexico for a couple differe
nt reasons one it is one of the top five dive locations in the world five or ten it's it's it's it's extremely awesome um the dive shop that I work with diventures uh here in Lexington uh has run dive trips uh to Cozumel and to a specific Resort the Iberostar Resort in Cozumel for almost 30 years we know the resort is of high quality and the dive company attached to the resort dressle divers is world class and we knew that we would have an excellent experience with them as customers and that we
would be well taken care of and very safe diving with them so the three or four Dives a day were incredibly fun but also incredibly tiring my favorite dive I mean I want to say all of them I think are deep water Dives were really cool I think it was more of just um being able to be like oh my goodness I'm 130 feet underwater water and you look up at the surface and it's almost not even visible is just a surreal experience that not very many people have but I also think you know the cleaning Cora
l was I mean a once in a lifetime opportunity we actually traveled to their Nursery their Coral nursery and we went down and there is Big concrete slabs with some pillars on them and we had like wire brushes like bottle brushes and we were cleaning all the sand and algae off of those and then we had waterproof epoxy that we would take and put onto the coral slabs and then just stick the core on them foreign was probably one of my favorites if not the favorites um the to do a night dive you have
a flashlight and that's really just it and you would do a night dive to see the life that is not out during the day we were able to see a giant Lobster and giant crabs nothing like I've ever seen before and also I think we saw five different octopus and it was just an amazing experience everything is so calm at night time you know my favorite part of a night dive and this is always every night I've ever done is that after the dive is over you y'all kind of pop up as a group you turn off your fla
shlights and you're just floating there on the surface of the ocean but you're just sitting there and it's quiet and you can see the stars and just talk about everything you saw and it says five or six minutes before the boat rolls in and people start chattering where it's just I don't know really peaceful and very nice that was super cool [Laughter] I was kind of getting tired of seeing octopuses what I really wanted the students to get out of this my sort of you know is this a successful exper
ience or not is the fact that they care more about the world around them for the students to have this experience certainly in college under my supervision which I was so lucky to be able to provide them but just to be there in the water to see the world around them and to remember that this is special and that there's still special things that exist out there and are worth protecting foreign
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