My wife told me I would love scuba diving. Makes sense, if you ask me. Snorkeling is chill, and scuba diving is basically super snorkeling, so by the transitive property – guessing, haven’t taken a math class since I tested out of everything before college, if not oh well – I’d love scuba diving. You follow, I’m sure.

Plus, when you think about the way she described it – “It’s so awesome when you’re down there and you look up at all the water above you” – you kind of get an excitement boner. Humans aren’t supposed to be able to swim underwater for that long, so this is kind of a big deal. (The concept, in general. Not specifically me doing it. Anyway.) So I was onboard with the whole scuba expedition from the jump.

We get to Scubaville, or whatever the place is called. Probably something with “Shack” in the name, since that’s what all scuba places are called. So, we’re at Steve’s Scuba Shack and the first thing we have to do is get wetsuits, something I wasn’t counting on but should have been because I have seen pictures of people scuba diving and now that I really think about it they were all wearing wetsuits. We get our wetsuits, and I obviously get the biggest available, what with the being enormous and all.

As it turns out, wetsuits are basically impossible to put on when they’re dry but if you put them on when you’re wet it’s pointless. Great job, wetsuit manufacturers. To complicate matters, the “changing room” is really just the surf shop, meaning I’m fighting with a life-sized neoprene exoskeleton amidst a collection of Ron Jon shirts and different things that will hold your keys. Fun times. Great pictures. Laughs are had and I’m in a wetsuit that I’m sure looks great because of my swimsuit bunching up underneath. Wetsuits are not for the style conscious, let me tell you.

Wetsuited up, feeling great, we head to the practice pool where we’ll be learning the basics of scuba diving. How to go up, how to go down, breathing out of a mouthpiece, how to not swim so hard so that you don’t use all your air – all those things that are important for keeping you alive while you’re underneath four stories of water. As a former lifeguard – word to the Fox Valley Family YMCA – I’m good in the pool. I can get you up from the bottom with or without a backboard, even from the deep end. My stride jump is textbook. I can tread water for two minutes while holding a brick over my head, should such a situation ever occur. The instructor tells us all of the controls, mentions that if you’re not sinking they have extra ballast but that shouldn’t be necessary, and then we hit the ocean. Very cool, very excited, very “Deep Blue Sea.”

Things are going great. We’re flippering out to sea, I’m going down, going up, breathing through the thing and just generally enjoying this trip over a gigantic coral reef. It’s not far underwater and we’re only cruising just beneath the surface, but I am very much in agreement that scuba diving is legit at this point.

Then we hit the drop off.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Oh snap, this guy had some serious scuba diving mishaps that he’s going to tell us about.” I wish. (Not really.) This is worse. (Not really.)

We hit this drop off, where the coral reef ends and we’re supposed to dive down to get to the good stuff. This is great news. I’d very much like to peep a barracuda or something wacky to tell people about. My wife spots a piece of coral that looks like a brain and signals that by pointing to her head. We share a silent underwater laugh. Things are great. Then it’s dive time.

I hit the button, start to sink and just keep on doing my scuba duties. My wife goes flying down, since she’s basically a scuba expert. She’s down there, pointing at an eel that I am barely close enough to see. I try to go down to check out this green head, but it disappears as I slowly drift deeper and deeper. We’re pretty far out right now, seeing some weird stuff, so I figure now is the time to check out what she was talking about, that crazy feeling when you look up and see an amazing amount of water above you. Seeing cool stuff is great, but this is the thing that I’ve been looking forward to the most. It’s just so unnatural that experiencing it is going to really make the trip for me. So I look up.

Above me was not a terrific column of water. Above me was not an array of aquatic life. Above me was not other scuba divers or those people who were too freaked out and decided to snorkel instead. No, above me were the sky and my scuba tank two-thirds above the water’s surface. I’d just spent 30 minutes scuba diving at a depth of nine inches. Great.

Realizing that I’ve basically been swimming, I freak out. Not in a bad way, just in a “get me to the bottom” way. I start pressing my dive button, exhaling deeply and angling myself down to where the scuba action is happening. One problem, though – apparently, the harder you try to get to the bottom, the harder it is. Your legs are pumping, you’re breathing more, your lungs are filling with air. All these things make you more buoyant. Great. Again.

Oh, by the way, we’re supposed to be scubaing – better term needed, please – for about 45 minutes, which is about how much oxygen we’ve all been given. Except, as you can probably tell, when you breathe harder, you use more oxygen. Meaning, during my futile quest to get any further than six feet below the surface, I’ve been burning through the oxygen like a California forest fire. My gauge is getting low, I’m not, everyone else is enjoying themselves and the 15-20 minutes they get to have at the bottom where all the real cool stuff is. Best of all, my wife is down there, meaning I can’t let her know that I’m basically just a scout now. For the third time, great.

Finally, I catch one of our guides and tell him I need more ballast or something because I’m not sinking. He has one cube, which does nothing but drop me another two feet. At this point, I’m essentially sitting at the bottom of the deep end of your uncle’s pool, while everyone else is in a Planet Earth documentary. Dejected, I decide I might as well just make sure I know where the guide rope is so I don’t get lost at sea which is the only thing that could make this worse. I spot the rope, look around for a few minutes to try and see anything interesting, then turn back with the rest to go to the dock.

We get up and get out and change out of our wetsuits and my wife asks if I had fun. I tell her that it would have been better if I could have sunk. She agrees and we go eat some sandwiches.