Bonnie J. Cardone
I was a wife and mother of small children when I took up scuba diving. It wasn’t something I fell in love with right away. The Pacific Ocean off SoCal is never warm and only rarely really calm. That took a lot of getting used to. But the day came when the sun was bright in a cloudless blue sky and the sea was flat and so clear you could see 75 feet underwater. My apprehension evaporated. For the first time, I wasn’t afraid. For the first time, I enjoyed swimming through the kelp forests — what fun!
That dive off the Northern Channel Island of Santa Cruz was a turning point. In the three decades since then, I have traveled to places I didn’t know existed, seeing things I never dreamed I’d see: great white sharks, manta rays, dolphins, whale sharks, turtles and many, many more, too numerous to list. I was an avid shell collector and an enthusiastic lobster hunter before discovering my true passion, underwater photography. A vocation was born of my avocation: I joined the staff of Skin Diver in 1976 and though I left the magazine in 1999, I have worked as a freelance writer/photographer for scuba publications since then. Most of my time, however, is spent writing mystery novels (unpublished as yet) featuring a scuba diving female photographer.
On the following pages you’ll find the covers of my published books, the Skin Diver covers that featured my photos, and a few of my favorite underwater photos. On the Mystery page there are photos of six well-known writers. See if you can identify them from the brief clues provided.
Welcome to My World
