Dateline: Key Largo, FL Dive trip, part one.

Dateline:  Key Largo, FL  Dive trip, part one.

Greetings gentle readers.  This Intrepid Traveler Report comes to you from sunny south Florida, the home of skimpy bathing suits and tanned bodies.  The population here has such dark leathery skin that it looks like they are wearing Manatee costumes.  Skin cancer is the new normal here.  If you can’t flake off a pound of scabs in a day, the locals think you are just not trying.

I am traveling with Andrew and “Ben” (yes, the same two fellows mentioned in a previous blog post).  Andrew and his wife, my daughter Ali, are expert divers.  They have logged nearly 50 dives, which qualifies them to be on the cover of “Prune Fingers” magazine.  Andrew graciously allowed me to tag along on this dive trip, which will be the first actual dive for me in clear water.  Up to now, all I have practiced diving in was murky, cloudy water.  Now that I see what a difference clear water makes to the diving experience I promise I will start cleaning my swimming pool.

A few nights before I left for this trip Andrew texted me and suggested I trim my mustache in order to have my swim mask seal better against my face.  It is a bit annoying to have seawater fill up your mask when you are trying to survive under water. And having 40 pounds of gear strapped to your body like an anchor does not help either. To demonstrate my commitment to this dive trip, I shaved it off completely. 

It is interesting to hear the reactions to me shaving my mustache.  Andrew snapped a photo of me as we departed for our dive trip and sent it to Ali.  She was 40 miles away at the time, but I swear I heard her gasp in agony when she saw it.  I have had a mustache my entire “adult” life, so neither of my daughters have ever seen me without it.  Ok, there was that time in Anchorage where I had to barter it for whale blubber when we ran out of food, but other than that, I have sported some sort of facial hair for 30 years. 

The reactions created a larger firestorm when the photo got posted by Micah, my other daughter, to her Facebook page.  Many of my girl’s friends, who oddly enough, are also grown adults now, made a flurry of comments about it, like:  “EEEUUUGHH!”,  “Oh my gawd”,  “Put it back! Put it back! Put it back!", ”My mind is still blown. I can't wrap my head around this!! What is happening?!”, "Won't somebody please, think of the CHILDREN!!!",  “Isn’t there a law against that?”, and “Doesn’t he know that the more his face is covered the better?”  The reaction from my wife, the fetching Mrs. Intrepid Traveler, was a bit more subdued….like:  “I didn’t notice”.  At least she didn’t say “Bill who?”