Bonnie J. Cardone
 

Welcome to My World

Giant kelp and garibaldi

Barnacle amid club-tipped anemones

Spiny lobster peers out of its den, surrounded by club-tipped anemones

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 some getting used to. But the day came when the sun shone down in a bright blue sky and the water was flat and so clear you could see 75 feet. Jumping into it and feeling it seep into my wetsuit felt good after gearing up in the heat on the boat deck. My buddy and I descended. It was like being in a huge aquarium. Sunlight sparkled down through lush kelp stands, the undersea equivalent of giant redwood trees. Bright orange garibaldi flitted here and there. Everywhere I looked there was something new to see. On the underside of a big boulder, a barnacle surrounded by tiny pink anemones periodically thrust its feet into the water searching for food. That dive was the first one that ended before I was ready to return to the surface. Made off the Northern Channel Island of Santa Cruz. it was a turning point. In the decades since then, I have visited the world underwater, seeing things I never dreamed I’d see upclose: great white sharks, manta rays, dolphins, whale sharks, turtles and many, many more, too numerous to list. I was an avid sea shell collector who became an enthusiastic lobster hunter before discovering my true passion, underwater photography. A vocation was born of my avocation: I became the editor of a scuba diving magazine and still freelance for scuba publications. I also write mystery novels (unpublished as yet) featuring a scuba diving female photographer.      Today, dual passions — scuba diving and mystery writing — define my life. Welcome to my world! Copyright © 2012 Bonnie J. Cardone All rights reserved