A Problem in Scuba Diving by djlevelman

A Problem in Scuba Diving

I wake up at 7:00 at the beach house. The usual T'Kaza Wilson wakeup time. Today is my friend Isiah’s birthday, and he wanted to go scuba diving. He wanted his best friends to come along: me, Malik and Kianna. I'm not the kind of person to go scuba diving. Don’t get me wrong: I love the water, but the last place to be scuba diving is the beach.  The water's so dirty you can’t even see your own reflection, but it’s my friend's birthday today. I'm going to do it for his sake.

I pack my bag of swimming gear with swimming towels, trunks, goggles, my phone and charger. Then I zip up my bag and walk out of the beach house toward Isaiah’s yacht. “C'mon, T’Kaza,” Isaiah calls to me, “The sea waits for no man!”

I run to the bridge to get on the yacht. Malik, Kianna and Isaiah were waiting for me once I got on. “Well, look who's finally up!” Malik said, laughing. I roll my eyes and say, “Just get to the wheel, Malik.” He climbs the stairs to the control room, starts the engine and we’re off. I look at the water behind us and look at the water in front of us. I hope the water that we’re diving in is clean, I thought. After an hour, we stop at a calm spot of clear blue water for miles around, hoping coral reefs are down below. But after we got our gear on, the second we dove in, it was another story.

I get under the water and just couldn’t believe what I saw. We're swimming in what turned out to be a sea of trash. Plastic bags, soda cans, every kind of trash that I can see and think of was everywhere. It's like we were in a sea of assorted junk. I look at a jellyfish thinking a plastic bag is a net. I see fish trying to dodge the junk that’s in their path, basically I look at fish and other kinds of sea creatures trying to adapt to the trash invading their space. Isaiah was looking past the trash, then pointed his finger to the bottom, thinking he saw a coral reef.

While Malik and Kianna follow Isaiah downward, I got back in the yacht and caught my breath. I'm not swimming in dirty water, I thought to myself. But the fish shouldn’t either. I need to do something. So while my friends went sightseeing, ignoring the problem, I went to the kitchen area to get a big trash bag, and back in the water to pick up all the trash that I can get, right up until my oxygen tank ran out. I got out of the water and back in the yacht, catching my breath. I looked at the trash bag and saw it was almost full. I didn’t get it all, but I was proud of myself for what I was able to remove.