Write What You Love by Kait Carson

 When E.B. Davis helped me celebrate the release of Death Dive with an interview on Writers Who Kill, several of the questions were about dive gear. And that got me thinking. Things sure have changed!

My First Dive Book

I learned to dive in 1971. In fact, my certification dive was January 14th, 1971. In a sinkhole at Orange Springs, Florida, with manatees. My boyfriend was my dive instructor. I never got the certification card because, well, I was in college. The card cost $15. My monthly allowance was $15! That came back to bite me in later years. But I digress.

 Back in those early days, we used double hose regulators (think Mike Nelson), round masks, fins we called flippers, tanks—not much changed about those—and if we were wearing wet suits, they were rubber. Mine was robin’s egg blue with big yellow daisies. You’d never lose me underwater! That was it. Done. The coursework comprised lots of math. There were gas pressures to consider. Charles’s Law and Boyle’s Law loomed large (they have to do with gas/temperature and pressure). Recreational divers like me did not have pressure gauges, or depth gauges. You figured that out on your own. Nor did we have dive vests, a/k/a BDCs, or buoyancy compensation devices. We did have horse collars that could be inflated, but we laughed at people who dove with life preservers. Go figure. We were young and immortal.

Fast forward ten years. I stopped diving when I graduated from college, married someone other than my instructor, and moved north. When I returned to Florida, a friend and I were sitting over drinks and talking about recreation. The chat turned to diving. She was also a diver, and she asked me what kind of BDC I had. Since I had never heard of one, I didn’t own one. She also told me about dive computers, air integrated pressure gauges, dive skins and other various foreign to my ears and experience items. I wanted to dive again, but what were all these clothes about! To compensate, I took a scuba refresher course. Turned out, since I never got the certification card, I had to take a full dive course.

 It was an eyeopener. They deemed many of the skills we had to learn in 1971 too difficult and dangerous for students. Diving had become a credit card intensive sport. No more science. No more math. No more figuring your own dive tables. You had gadgets and gizmos for that. Yes, I bought them all, and learned to dive in a life preserver. By this time, they had become required gear, and they’d turned into vests. Whew. I nearly flunked the final. I never learned to breathe through a snorkel! It freaked me out. Still does. I carry a folding one in my BCD pocket.

I dove every weekend from the time I recertified (this time I got the card) to when I met my husband. He also dives, but he introduced me to aviation. We were flying around most weekends and flying and diving don’t mix. When we moved to Maine in 2005, my dive days were done. And I missed them.

Corals

While reading through my dive logs, they reminded me of a dive in Marathon on the Thunderbolt. A plastic bag wafted out of the wheelhouse of the wreck. Freaked me out. I thought it was a hand. All of that was in my dive log. So was the time I was on the sand at one hundred and twenty feet below the surface. My first stage blew, and my dive buddy was exploring the other side of the wreck. The first stage is the part of a regulator that attaches to the air tank. If it’s defective, the air simply flows out until you turn off the flow or run out of air. Fortunately, when I first learned to dive, one of the skills was called ‘breathing off the bottle.’ That’s what I did, all one hundred and twenty feet to the surface. Hayden Kent experiences both events in Death by Blue Water.

 I loved scuba diving, and especially wreck diving. It’s a beautiful world under the sea. When it came time to write. I wrote what I loved. I gave my protagonist mad dive skills and shared some of the old-time skills with her. Together we’ve made multiple dives in Marathon, Florida, Grand Cayman Islands, and Belize. I hope my readers learned to share my love of the undersea world, and maybe learned to dive because of Hayden and her friends.

 Writers, do you share any hobbies with your protagonists? Readers, have you ever taken up a hobby because of a book?