Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease the transition, every Monday we feature a 90 Second Escape — essentially, a 90-second video of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s not under a fluorescent bulb.
Today’s 90-Second Escape: Six-Foot Vis
Our instructor was trying to put a positive spin on the situation. “It’s going to feel good when you get in the water today,” he told us at the start of our two-day open water scuba diving certification course. “The water temperature is between 80 and 84 down to 33 feet, and the air temperature” — he stopped to consult his multi-functional dive computer — “is 68.”
What’s the visibility? a classmate asked. This is where Dennis Zullig with Gypsy Divers of Raleigh put on his dancing shoes. After a long pause, he came clean.
“It’s between zero and six feet,” he said, then without adding a beat, added, “But you know, if you embrace the etherial aspect of it, with the swirly green and milkiness, it’s pretty cool.”
In scuba diving, it’s all about visibility — the distance you can roughly see before things start getting cloudy. 40-60 feet is considered good offshore North Carolina, visibility in the Caribbean can top 100 feet. The greater the vis, the more there is to see.
But as it turns out, our tap-dancing instructor was right. Seeing stuff up to 40 feet away is great. But not seeing it until it’s right on top of you is pretty cool, too, as today’s 90-second escape illustrates.
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