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I began diving nearly eighteen years ago while a stout and daring young man growing up in Panama City, FL. I have always been a water rat, always feeling more at home in the water than on land, almost as if somewhere in the evolutionary chain I was cruelly forced into a direction I was never meant to go. And although I fell in love with diving immediately, and although there is no other place where I feel quite as free as I do while skydiving down on a wreck, hovering weightless in the deep blue, like Scott, diving did not become a true passion for me until a little later in life.
For a number of years I owned a small piano company in Dothan, AL, and while a wonderful customer oriented person, having great rapport with my clients, I was absolutely dismal as a "business man". I soon found that I was spending every weekend, then even adding several trips for night dives during the week, searching out dive spots in the Florida Panhandle. It was very clear that my passions were no where near the ebonies and ivories of a piano keyboard. Then in 1998, on a fateful day in March while diving in Destin, I was offered my first fulltime job as an Instructor with Scubatech. I think it took me about two seconds to say yes, and a week to move. The rest is history, as they say.
Over the next few years I found myself working and traveling a great deal through Central America--working as a diver, resort manager, and freelance travel photographer--until after some unexpected events I landed in Pensacola. I am currently in Nursing School and also work in the Emergency Department at Baptist Hospital. And, without a doubt, have finally found a place to call home.
Beyond diving and the underwater realm, my passions lie in the arts of photography and writing, and, as always, travel. To be of the world and not just in it, to be a traveler and not a tourist, to allow ourselves to be open and to experience how others choose to live, to move well beyond our comfort zone and what we know, to challenge ourselves, pushing aside the boundaries that often trap us, and to come away with so many great friends and once in a lifetime encounters are some of the greatest joys anyone can hope to experience. And I am so grateful to have had so many great things in my life.
If you would like to check out my photography, please do so at:
www.jasongarnerphotography.com |
