Dr Steve Gittings On The Incredible Magic Of Coral Spawning, and Dr Marah Hardt On The Meaning Behind Booking a Dive Trip

SPEAKER_02 0:03

The Deeper Blue podcast is brought to you by Sunto, Finnish Engineering's pioneering adventure from mountaintop to ocean floor since 1936. Sunto. Welcome to the Deeper Blue Podcast, your weekly guide to everything that is happening around the world underwater. My name is Stephen Whelan. I'm the founder of DeeperBlue.com, the world's most popular diving website. Every week, the Deeper Blue Podcast covers everything that's happening in the scuba diving, free diving, diving travel, and ocean advocates world. So join us as we explore the Deeper Blue.

SPEAKER_07 1:00

Hi, welcome to the Deeper Blue Podcast. This is Jason Elias, producer of the podcast. In today's episode, we start off with news of the week underwater with Deeper Blue founder Stephen Whelan and me. Then Deeper Blue co-host and free diving icon Megan Haney Greer speaks with Dr. Steve Giddings, chief scientist for NOAA's National Marine Sanctuary Program, and a fellow at the Explorers Club, who relates an incredible experience he had on the coral banks in the Gulf of Mexico. Then we hear a top tip from Dr. Marl Hart, a free diver and marine scientist who works in the field of sustainable seafood. And Dr. Hart gives what I feel is one of the most valuable tips for anyone who has ever dreamt of traveling to exotic locales to dive. Finally, we continue with the incredible run of stories listeners have submitted with a best dive ever from Carla Mendez, who talks of a free dive she once had in the blue hole of the Bahamas. And as an aside, I have come to see the best dive ever stories that you, our listeners, have been submitting as an incredible archive of the moments that deeply connect this community to the ocean. But first, this week's news. News of the week underwater.

SPEAKER_02 2:03

News of the underwater week news. No, that doesn't work, does it?

SPEAKER_07 2:07

Week of the world underwater with Stephen Wheland and Jason Leis. So what starts us off there, senor Big Papa?

SPEAKER_02 2:14

Senor Smurf. Let's go to the Maldives. Let's get on our little uh virtual plane and a little virtual submarine and go to the Maldives. The Maldives, about 10 years ago, put a ban to stop people fishing and hunting sharks in Maldives waters, which was a fantastic thing. You know, sharks, 100 million of them are killed every year. Every little bit we can do to help save sharks is really important. The problem is that the Maldives fishery ministry has announced in the last couple of weeks that they are contemplating overturning this ban and legalizing the killing of sharks in the waters.

SPEAKER_07 2:47

What's the rationale behind why are they changing it?

SPEAKER_02 2:49

We don't actually know. This is the problem. I've been involved in a number of clubhouse talks, so and I've I've been listening in to people who know a lot who are based in the Maldives who are activists talking about it. And it does seem like there's a lot of politics and money involved somewhere along the lines, but no one really knows the reason behind it. So it's a bit of a mystery. But what it is doing is there's a load of activists that have heard about this now and are trying to get a petition signed to get 10,000 signatures, which they could then present to the Maldives government to oppose such legalization. You know, really important topic. We're trying to get as many people around the world to sign this petition and just make the government pause and think about what they're doing because sharks bring a lot of tourism to the Maldives. Shark diving is really important, like a lot of destinations. And the Maldives relies on tourism as their main industry.

SPEAKER_07 3:39

Yeah, it seems absolutely bonkers that they would do something that is contravening the way the entire ocean environmental awareness seems to be moving. I can't imagine that allowing shark calling to happen there would offset the amount of tourism that they might lose or the bad press they might get around this. And I guess in one way, with these activists raising awareness around this, what they're really doing is they're countermanding the entire reason for doing this. I'm assuming at deeperblue.com we can find a link to how we support this and sign up for it.

SPEAKER_02 4:08

Well, it's like you took the words right out of my mouth, Jason. So uh if you go to deeperblue.com, never been there. Never been there. No. Well, it's the it's the thing that makes this podcast happen. I've heard of it. Yeah, if you go to deeperblue.com and to the news section, you can find a link to the Maldives article.

SPEAKER_07 4:27

That just seems absolutely crazy. It just seems so it's a schism between what is and where we are going. And what's interesting to me as well is that I've done a fair amount of diving in French Polynesia, which has upheld its shark ban, and it's incredible diving there. And it feels so raw and energetic in a way that you just can't experience anywhere else. I just can't believe that the Maldives would do something that is one, would take them off the tourist map, but also two, it's such bad press for them.

SPEAKER_02 4:54

Politics and money somewhere along the lines, unfortunately. And that is what we're fighting with on lots of fronts around ocean conservation.

SPEAKER_07 5:00

This seems like an easy one then for us to all of us to kind of, even if it's just signing petitions.

SPEAKER_02 5:04

Go and sign a petition. They just need 10,000 signatures. They currently have 9,589 as of recording this new section. So they're nearly there. So every single person who goes makes a big difference. So if you're listening to the podcast, it's over.

SPEAKER_07 5:19

And since we get about 1 million listens per episode here, I think this is probably going to take it over the top. I'm pretty sure of that.

SPEAKER_02 5:26

Um that's your mum and my mum, right, Jason?

SPEAKER_07 5:29

They listened a bunch of times. What's next?

SPEAKER_02 5:32

There is a gentleman in the US by the name of Ted Harty, who is a dear friend of deeperblue.com, dear friend of mine as well. He is an amazing free diving instructor based in Florida. He is a performance free diving instructor trainer, and he has been on this mission to help people just be safer in the water around freediving. And he has launched a new podcast, which is all about how you can be a better free diver. So it's called Free Dive Live. So things like, for example, he has anemia. You'd think your body will not be able to transport oxygen around your uh your system very well would make you a pretty terrible free diver. But actually, he's the former US freediving national champion, former US team captain.

SPEAKER_07 6:14

And didn't you also say this podcast is also just for regular Joes? It's it's not for the extreme athletes, it's actually for everyone to kind of access it.

SPEAKER_02 6:22

It is for everyone, absolutely. So it's about it's about tips and takes that he has a body built by beer, bourbon, and barbecue. I like them already. Which I like.

SPEAKER_07 6:32

I I yeah, he's he's fantastic. My kind of instructor.

SPEAKER_02 6:36

When people do courses with him, he does these very like select six student-only courses he does, and he does a lot of cooking on the big green egg, which is a big barbecue.

SPEAKER_07 6:44

Right, yeah, of course. Anyone that's into barbecue knows what big green egg is. Yeah. One of the things I do like about what he's doing, I like his positioning, is that as a scuba diver myself, you're more on the free diving side, or you know free diving much better than I do. Sometimes free diving can seem to me to be the castle on the hill. Like you have to reach a certain plateau of extreme athleticism to be able to do it. And one of the things I like doing is pulling that back to saying, no, free diving is actually available to everyone at almost any kind of level with a little bit of training. And so I like the idea of him positioning his podcast for people like that, for people like me.

SPEAKER_02 7:15

Completely agree. And obviously, what you've never done, Jason, is read the beginner's guide to free diving that we have on deeperblue.com.

SPEAKER_07 7:21

It's funny because I've been through every single page of deeperblue.com about so I'm no, but you're absolutely right.

SPEAKER_02 7:29

Freediving is something that it's an innate ability in all of us. So have a listen to Ted's podcast, I think. It's very, very enlightening and very funny as well. He's a very funny chap.

SPEAKER_07 7:37

So uh, what's next after that?

SPEAKER_02 7:38

Now we are going to the Cayman Islands, uh, Caribbean or the Caribbean, depending on which side of the pond you're on.

SPEAKER_07 7:45

We say Caribbean. I say no, we say Caribbean.

SPEAKER_02 7:47

No, I say Caribbean, you say Caribbean.

SPEAKER_07 7:49

Caribbean, yeah, I like Caribbean.

SPEAKER_02 7:50

Okay, right. So uh it's gonna be a lot of editing on this episode in the news. The Department of Environment in the Cayman Islands is, and I love this story, they're looking for divers who can help them. There's a deadly disease impacting coral called stony coral tissue loss disease. I'd like to have been in the room when they decided that name for that disease. I'd tell you that was just a lot of zing brainstorming. The SC TLD. So the disease is impacting 20 species of reef-building corals on local reefs. And what they're asking for is they're asking for divers who are dive master and above to help come and provide topical antibiotics and remove infected corals where appropriate. It's all short-term work. They're looking for divers in the in the near term. It requires a commitment of three days a week. They will be paid $75 a day. Caymanian dollars.

SPEAKER_07 8:45

I don't know how that translates to $75 a day, Camanian dollars. Is that like four bucks in American?

SPEAKER_02 8:50

I don't know. We're gonna have to look this up. And scuba certified dive master above, and those with 500 plus dives are asked to contact the Department of Environment as soon as possible to start in this critical work. So this is great work, I think. Yeah. And if I was in the Caymans, I'd be right down there.

SPEAKER_07 9:05

Me too. And this goes for the the citizen activists, citizen scientists movement that is also so important to kind of what we do as a community, particularly divers, getting out into the ocean and seeing things, being on the front lines of this kind of stuff and actually being able to do something. I just loved this story about that. And if I can get paid to go diving, I mean, I guess I get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to make a podcast about diving, but I don't actually get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to go diving.

SPEAKER_02 9:32

You pay yourself for your podcast hundreds of thousands of dollars you.

SPEAKER_07 9:36

I'm talking about deeper blue.

SPEAKER_02 9:38

Oh, deeper blue. Okay, right. Fair enough. Fair enough. This next story, Jason, I love. So this is about the world's deepest shipwreck that has been discovered. So this shipwreck is at more than 20,000 feet. Incredible. In real depth terms.

SPEAKER_07 10:02

20,000 feet.

SPEAKER_02 10:03

Yeah. Meters, yeah, you're right. 20,000 feet in percent.

SPEAKER_07 10:07

We can all understand 20,000 feet, right?

SPEAKER_02 10:09

Absolutely. It's the deepest shipwreck that's ever been discovered now. So it is the USS Johnston, which was uh lost at the Battle of Samar, which is part of the Battle of the Lighty Gulf in 1944. That was amazing. And I think that the great thing is you can see pictures, there's some stills from the video of them going down the submersible. It's incredible. And it's almost pristine the wreck. And the destroyer number was D D 557, and one of the images you can see is you can see the 557 on the side. Yeah, it's absolutely amazing.

SPEAKER_07 10:43

So there is two ships that sank at the same time: the Johnston and the Howell. Howell? Howell? H-L-E-L. Yeah, basically. Correct.

SPEAKER_02 10:51

D D 533 for the wreck buffs. Um retired US naval officer Victor Vescovo. He is the entrepreneur explorer for the company that's behind searching for this wreck.

SPEAKER_07 11:03

I'm not quite sure how they found it, but the pictures are absolutely incredible. Spooky and beautiful and haunting. The wreck is so pristine that you can feel as if the boat is above water and what might have been happening right before it went down. And this is on the Deeper Blue website, correct? Hard-heating news on the deeper blue website.

SPEAKER_02 11:20

This as non-tabloid news is absolutely on the deeper blue website, Jason.

SPEAKER_07 11:26

Yes. Well, that takes us to um, I think one of our final stories, which is more tabloid-y than that, although it does involve a ship.

SPEAKER_02 11:35

Well, I don't know. So it it involves a super yacht. There's a it's a super yacht, a ship or a boat.

SPEAKER_07 11:40

Uh I would say if you have a yacht, that's a boat. I think if you have a super yacht, that's a ship.

SPEAKER_06 11:45

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_07 11:46

Now, I know that the reach of this podcast is incredible, and we probably have four or five people on super yachts listening right now. And I certainly don't want you to feel that if you have a super yacht that you're lacking anything. Because if you have a super yacht, you've obviously achieved something in life. But there is a new thing available for super yachts. It is called the Hydrosphere. It's a glass elevator that comes out of the bottom of your super yacht and turns your hydrosphere into an underwater aquarium. It drops down, oh, looks like about 15 feet. It has stairs down to some couches, and there's also, oh, there's a little champagne holder there with glass. There's also lights on the bottom of it. So, I mean, it's pretty styly. It looks absolutely beautiful. And what it does is it has 360-degree windows around and then glass on the bottom, so that basically you can chill with your Russian supermodel babe or Greek power fitness man, or you know, I'm not trying to say who you would like to be with down there. You can go down there and watch in luxury as you see apparently giant manorays swimming by, and a dolphin looks like in this picture is coming up to say hello. The reason I bring this up, Stephen, yeah, is because the Deeper Blue yacht, super yacht does not have one of these yet.

SPEAKER_02 13:05

And I would DB one. You forgot. DB1. I can never remember. Is DB one the boat or the private jet? I can never remember. I just it's, you know, DB1 is funny.

SPEAKER_07 13:14

When I say DB1, I usually mean you. So I'm not quite sure. Oh, right. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 13:19

I really do wish Deeper Blue had a s had a super yacht. Being in the content business online is not really the hiding to you don't hear of many online content producers that have super yachts, if I'm being honest. Uh particularly not in the diving realm. The thing that I find amusing about this story, though, Jason, is you've just spent several hundred million on your super yacht. Or let's say you have spent and you decide this hydrosphere thingy sounds like a good idea. They're gonna have to take this yacht, put it in dry dock, and then cut a great big hole in the bottom of your super expensive super yacht to install this thing.

SPEAKER_07 13:53

That's right. That's one aspect of it I think that they didn't think about. I think the other thing to recommend is that so they don't list a price for this, or I wasn't able to find one. So, you know, when you go to a restaurant and you see on the menu market price, just be careful because that could be much more than you anticipated. And if you own a super yacht, you're obviously cost conscious to begin with. So I just want to say ask before you buy here because we can't. I would highly recommend this, except I don't know the price. So I give it four out of five stars because it I can't I don't know the price.

SPEAKER_02 14:25

Well, I think that says it all, Jason. If you're the person who needs to know the price for one of these things, you're probably not the target market, unfortunately. I'm sorry. We'll discuss the pay rise at the next the next team meeting.

SPEAKER_07 14:38

These are the stories that Stephen, when Stephen and I get together to talk about the news stories, and he has all of these really interesting things that are about relevant to people in the world, and then I have these kind of stories. He just kind of rolls his eyes and he lets me do them. So thank you for that. Well, that brings us to the end of the news for the week. Just as a reminder, this is the second to last episode of this season. Next episode will be our last episode of the season.

SPEAKER_02 15:02

I think what you mean to say in true British terms is the penultimate episode.

SPEAKER_07 15:05

Penultimate. Yes, that's what I wrote you in the notes.

SPEAKER_02 15:07

It is coming to the end of season two of the podcast. So next week will be the final episode, and then we'll take a short break, and then we'll be back with more Jason and Stephen show. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, everyone. Cheers.

SPEAKER_06 15:25

Hi, I'm Kirk Kroc of Performance Free Diving International. And you're listening to the best 30 minutes about diving. The Deeper Blue Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 15:41

Hey, this is Megan Heaney Greer, co-host here on the Deeper Blue Podcast. In today's episode, I'm speaking with Dr. Steve Giddings, chief scientist for NOAA's National Marine Sanctuary Program and a fellow in the Explorers Club. He's also a conservationist at heart, calls himself a garage in here, and recently invented a trap to catch the invasive lionfish in deep water. Dr. Giddings is a dear friend of mine and is truly one of the most fun and interesting guys to swap dive stories with. In our conversation today, Steve talks about his life as a scientist, where he developed his passion for being in the ocean, and an incredible experience he had one moonlit night on a reef system way out in the Gulf of Mexico.

SPEAKER_05 16:25

My name is Dr. Steve Giddings, and I'm chief scientist for NOAA's National Marine Sanctuary System, which is a series of marine protected areas around the U.S. And I'm a coral reef scientist by training. And I did that for quite a few years down in Texas mostly in the Florida Keys as well, studying reefs that are down there. And then I came up to headquarters about 22 years ago now to be the chief scientist for the system of marine sanctuaries all across the country.

SPEAKER_01 16:51

Hey Steve, how are you doing today?

SPEAKER_05 16:53

I'm doing just great. Thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

How did you originally get into diving?

SPEAKER_05 17:00

I was a water kid like a lot of us in this field. I grew up on Lake Erie back in high school, 1973. I decided I was going to be a diver. I had already done everything you could do on the swimming side of things. I swam through high school and college and decided I need to learn to dive too. So I took a YMCA certification course. And that's what got me started in this field of diving.

SPEAKER_01 17:23

In all that time, what is it that you love about diving? What do you connect with the most?

SPEAKER_05 17:31

Well, as a kid, and probably even later, I used to have dreams all the time of being able to breathe underwater. You know, everybody's always asked, what are your superpowers that you'd like to have? Invisibility or being able to fly? That's always the two choices. But for me, it was always breathing underwater. Scuba diving actually allowed me to do that, not just wish that I could do it. And, you know, it carried on. It just stuck with me. And being able to dive was just a freedom like nothing else.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

Over the course of your underwater career, I am sure you have so many incredible experiences. But is there any particular dive that stands out to you?

SPEAKER_05 18:09

One stands out above the rest, both professionally and personally for me. And it was really something that was a year in the making after I got a phone call. In the 1980s, I had been working on the flower garden banks, some reefs off the coast of Texas, some of the healthiest reefs you'll find anywhere in the world, even today. And they're about 100 miles offshore. When I was in charge of the monitoring program at the Flower Gardens, I got a call from a recreational dive charter that operated out there saying that divers had been reporting something odd on a night dive that looked like floating BBs in the water coming up off the bottom. You know, my first thought was sound like maybe eggs from a coral or some other animal floating up into the water column. And we were really hopeful that the corals were spawning, much like we'd heard happens in the Pacific. Nobody had really seen it in the Atlantic. And so I called the leader in the Atlantic on coral reproduction, a lady named Dr. Alina Simant. She agreed that it sounded like coral spawning. So we ought to consider going out there next year and see if the same thing happens. She had seen some coral spawning in the lab in the Atlantic corals, and as well as a little bit in the field. So she recommended we go out the same month and maybe even the same moon phase, because that seemed to be in the Pacific, what corals keyed in on. So we sleuth the date and the time of when full moon happened next August in 1991, and we scheduled a trip. But finally the time comes, and then we jump into the water at about 9 p.m. at night, about the same time they jumped in the year before, with our lights and cameras, and we descend about 65-70 feet down to the reefs at the flower gardens. And they look strange. The coral tentacles were retracted, unlike what they are usually at night when the tentacles are out feeding. So it looked like daytime corals, with the exception that the mouth area of the polyp, which is the central part of each little coral animal, was white and sort of puffed up. So it looked like thousands of little pencil erasers on the dome of the coral. We hovered, we waited to see if anything was going to happen, nothing was going on for 10-15 minutes, and we wondered if we missed whatever the divers had seen the previous year. But then all of a sudden, at 9:15, the same time they saw it the year before, out of the mouths of each of these polyps pops these BB-sized bundles coming off the coral by the thousands and start drifting up into the water column. And we look at each other with eyes the size of saucers, and we start screaming through our regulators. And we look around and we see dozens of other colonies doing the exact same thing. And within about 10 minutes, there's so many bundles in the water column, and each one with hundreds of eggs and sperm as well coming up. We can barely see each other. People call it an upside-down underwater snowstorm. And what we're seeing there is for the first time in the Atlantic Ocean in 1991 was mass spawning of multiple species of reef corals. And it's how a healthy coral system stays healthy. And it was a great sign for me that the reefs I had fallen in love with out there over the last decade or so still had secrets to tell. When we get back onto the boat a few minutes later, the people are laughing and cheering, and every one of them saying they've never seen anything like it in their lives, and I was no different. For me professionally, this was hard to match. Nature at its very best showing off was a magic moment for me. Being a person who got to see something documented for the first time is a really special thing for a scientist. But personally, just seeing The magic of nature and knowing that because you cared enough to go see things and travel around and do what we do as divers, nature let you in on a secret that hardly anybody else ever gets to see.

SPEAKER_03 22:35

This is Sarah Richard, founder of Girls at Steba. And you're listening to the Deeper Blue Podcast.

SPEAKER_07 22:50

And Rudy and Diction. The Deeper Blue Podcast is brought to you by Sunto.

SPEAKER_02 22:58

Massive thanks to Cinto for sponsoring the season of the podcast. So today we want to have a quick chat about a Cunto app. So the Cunto app is pretty cool. Yeah, everyone's going to have an app these days, right? Even Deeper Blue's got an app. I don't know if we can add that in just as the podcast. We can do it anyway we want. So you're wearing this fine piece of finish engineering from Cinto on your wrist. And you can now download stuff onto an app and it gets all your details. So it's not just about dive stuff, depth, time, where you were, those sorts of things, but you can share it with other people. So other people on the app, but you can also share it to social media.

SPEAKER_07 23:34

I spoke about this last season. I don't record any of my dives in my dialogue. I don't do any of that. I have no idea really where I've dived. I couldn't tell you really into the dive sites. And one of the things I like about this app is that it can actually record all that for you. It can do your profile, key facts like temperature, depth, dive time. You can add pictures. I'm sure there's a location thing to it as well. And as they say, sharing this on social media makes your friends jealous, which is, yeah, that's okay. I think more of the point is that the less I have to do in my life, the better I feel. So if I can go diving and just have this computer do everything for me, I can literally just get on board and have a beer. I think that then that sounds so much more interesting to me than actually writing in my dive log.

SPEAKER_02 24:15

So I haven't written a dive log in about 25 years. So uh yeah, yeah, yeah. No. So I I usually these days is just to tell how much weight I need to use, because I've often put on weight since my last dive. So uh so I need to figure out how much weight I need to wear again. Right. Yeah, the Centre app can help with that sort of stuff. And I think the other cool thing, the Centro app also tracks things like your smartwatch activity. So if you go jogging or running, if you do other activities in sports, it's not just about like the D5 is a smartwatch, it's not just a dive computer.

SPEAKER_07 24:45

Actually, the deeper thing that this thing's about to me, which I really like, is that Cinto is actually thinking ahead. I like that. I think that they're forward thinking around this kind of stuff. We are gone past the days of like giant metal tanks with an analog gauge on the side. Now we actually have these people that are actually building these things that are moving, pushing it forward, which I really appreciate. I really like that. And honestly, there's a lot of people that could say that the more information you have, the worse things are. But I would say it's particularly around a technical sport like diving, free diving, regular diving, more information a lot of times is better. Having some records of all this kind of stuff, that's good. I applaud them for them. And if you allow me to post a Facebook and Instagram as a bonus and make all my friends jealous, then that's a that's an added bonus. So thank you. Today's top tip comes from Dr. Mona Hart, free diver and marine scientist. Dr. Hart has received wide attention for a TEDx talk, written a book called Sex in the Sea, and works on bringing attention to managing fishing around the world with the nonprofit future of fish. And Dr. Hart's top tip today takes a slightly wider view on what it means when you start booking a trip to go diving.

SPEAKER_00 25:58

One of the things that I've been trying to do myself and also encourage for others who are divers is when they think about going diving, if they are traveling, which most of us need to do, to really think about supporting countries and regions where there is good marine conservation and good marine management in place. So we can use those experiences and that opportunity to go to a beautiful place to also be directly supporting the efforts of often small governments that are trying to do the right thing. And some places do it better than others. And many of them rely on tax dollars through tourism. So by choosing carefully to spend your money in countries that have good conservation laws, that have good fisheries laws, places that have strong marine parks, and also places where they are charging for eco-tourism, where you pay a fee to enter a park. And they have enforcement in place for that. Means that they are they are reinforcing those protections on paper with actual enforcement on the water. There's some good websites where you can look at where marine protected areas exist and where there are good conventions on fisheries management as well. You can be supporting and reinforcing those activities as a diver. And often those are the places with really good dives too. So it's kind of a win-win.

SPEAKER_04 27:43

My name is Carla Mendes, and in Florida, US, I was in the Blue Hole, Bahamas, in 2015 in Vertica Blue. I was doing my no things dive. It was a national record dive, and it was really special because I was just diving with an outspit and just with a swingsuit, total freedom. The sensation to be just with the water and going deeper in the blue hole, no wetsuit in a swimsuit and feeling the water, feeling the dead, nice temperature is really nice, amazing sensation. When a one came back to the surface, it was super easy and relaxing dive. That is one of my favorite dives. The blue hole have just amazing conditions, temperature, water, flare. I think it's the perfect place to dive.

SPEAKER_02 28:43

We'd love to hear your story about diving. So at the end of the show, you'll find out all the info you need to submit your best dive ever. Thanks for listening to the Deeper Blue Podcast. Find out more on all the stories you've heard this week, plus connect to the world's largest online dive community at deeperblue.com. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe, like, and comment wherever you hear your podcasts. These comments and subscribes really make a difference. Before we go, I want to give a big shout out to Jason Elias, our producer. In case you didn't know, he has an amazing podcast about people who have a deep connection to our world's oceans. Connections strong enough that they have dedicated some part of their lives to being and or working on behalf of the water. Take a listen when you get a moment to Jason's show, the Big Deep Podcast. Every week, we want to hear your stories and share them with the world. So please record and send in your short story of your best dive ever. Keep it brief, no longer than two minutes, please. And in it, tell us your name and location, where you were on the dive, what happened that make it so great, and why it's meant so much to you. You can get that over to us at best dive ever at deeper blue dot com or head to our website podcast.deeperblue dot com forward slash best dive ever. Join us again next week and explore much more of the deeper blue