I ran out this morning to get new laces for my hiking boots. I had to get them ready because I am heading back out into the field on Monday.

I’ve been home for a couple months now—since July. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to get on the road, and life has certainly been interesting in the interim, but sometimes after you have traveled to the places, conducted the interviews and taken the photographs, you have to compile all that information and tell the story. That has been my focus lately.

The trip to Isla Natividad and the two trips to Honduras (see earlier blog posts) this year were part of what we are calling the Harvesting Diver Project. Around the world there are divers who harvest lobster, conch and other invertebrates from the sea using scuba or surface supplied air systems. They pay a terrible price for this work, often ending up paralyzed or dead. Their incidence of injury is at least 100 times greater than recreational divers and where severe injuries are rare for the average diver, they are the norm for harvesting divers.

When I made those trips, I could only allude to the situation in this blog because I didn’t want to jeopardize my ability to publish this story. Last week, National Geographic chose to spotlight the Harvesting Diver Project on its website. Next month, Alert Diver Magazine and AlertDiver.com will have an even more complete version of the story. In the meantime, you can see a short video I prepared from those three trips.

The harvesting diver examples in Honduras and Mexico are not the only high-risk harvesting diving that goes on, unfortunately. Dr. Matias Nochetto and I are heading to northeastern Brazil to meet with divers doing similar work, using a third style of harvesting techniques. I am sure it will be interesting and heartbreaking all at the same time. I invite you to follow along next week. I am not sure about my access to the internet, but assuming I can get online I will be posting next week and into the following week about what we see and encounter on this journey. The attached .kmz file will activate GoogleEarth and show you where we are headed.

I will freely admit that I am fortunate to be able to travel like I do and find adventure around the world. But there is adventure just down the street, too. So, my simple question before I pull out my passport and head to the airport is this:

Are your boots ready?.

If you ever wanted to define the concepts of bone-jarring and butt-numbing it would be the van ride I just finished.

There are regular airplane flights to Isla Cedros, a small island just north of Isla Natividad. But, those are booked up weeks in advance since the plane only holds a dozen or so people. To get us back and forth, we hopped in the shuttle van run by the fishing cooperative that runs between Bahia Tortuga and Ensenada. On the way down to the island this was great, there were just four of us in a 12 passenger van. I got to stretch out across an entire seat by myself and sleep. The way back was a different story. We had 11 people in the same van with all of our luggage. Much tighter fit and much less sleep.

Including stops to stretch, food breaks and such, the ride took a total of 14 hours. And the first couple hours worth of driving is little more than dirt road—and occasionally the dirt road that was carved out beside the “pavement” was more acceptable since the latter was so full of potholes we couldn’t see straight and were worried about dental integrity.

When the three of us got back to Ensenada where we left Mary’s car, we planned to grab a hotel room and get a few hours of sleep before heading back to San Diego. Arriving back in Ensenada around 2:30 in the morning on Saturday night threw a wrench into our plans though. We couldn’t find a room. After trying several places, we decided to just head for the border.

Crossing the border back into the US was a bit more interesting than the drive down, but not significantly. Although even at 4 am there were lines of cars. I can only imagine what it is like later in the day. We had to wait about 15 minutes until it was our turn. We duly handed over our passports, answered a couple questions from the Border Agent and we were on our way. The most interesting thing about the entire process was the people running around between cars and the food cart set up in the road between the lines. An industry has developed of street vendors selling food and drinks to people waiting to cross the border. I guess the wait can get pretty long at times.

All together, the trip back to San Diego took us 20 hours. Exhausting. But still worth it.

This entire project is shaping up to be an interesting, powerful and moving story about what human beings can and will do themselves and the risks they will take to feed their families. Overfishing and the depletion of their natural resources is driving them deeper and making it more and more likely that these divers—in Mexico, Honduras and elsewhere around the world—are going to continue to get hurt and die so we can have lobster, conch and other food from the sea. But, at what price? Matias has said several times “Everyone got upset when we realized how many dolphins were dying in tuna nets? Where is the outrage when men are dying and becoming paralyzed for lobster?”

I’ve only alluded to what this project is all about in this blog, in my posts from Honduras and now Isla Natividad as I didn’t want to interfere with my options for telling the story to a wider audience. It will ultimately end up in print, online and as a live presentation. Stay tuned..

To quote the sage of the age, Bruce Springsteen, “the poets down here don’t write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be.”

As a photographer, my first instinct is to grab my camera whenever something catches my attention. But, sometimes I just have to tell myself to sit and enjoy something. The last night on the island I watched an incredible sunset. The sun was already below the horizon, but the last strains of orange were still in the sky. It turned from violent to purple to black. There was a small home in foreground lit up against the night. It was very striking, calming and moving all at the same time. And I left my camera in the bag. I guess I could have captured it to share, but this time I just wanted to enjoy it.

There is a small but classic lighthouse on the far end of the island. It was built in 1935 and enjoys a view from just about the highest spot on the island—about 400 feet above sea level. It’s still operational, although the light keeper quarters below it are abandoned—as is true with most lighthouses. As we were talking about alternative sources of income for the island, eco-tourism being one of the most obvious, we all agreed that the light house would make an amazing bed and breakfast or lodge. The views are breathtaking and it’s just a cool structure. And the better surfing spots are just down the hill.

It became a running joke all week about the “conveniences” on the island. Giving someone directions “Do you turn left or right at the Starbucks?” or “Just take a taxi if you need to get over there.” Neither of which exist on the island of course. With a total population of 400 or so people, you don’t need them. And everyone we met was willing and happy to help out as much as they could. There was never any hesitation. A cup of coffee? Just ask. A ride somewhere? Hop in.

The diving and fishing is run by a cooperative on the island that takes care of everything. They organize the diving, provide utilities for everyone, process the catch and sell it at market. And they are already looking at alternatives for their island and the marine protected area it’s in the middle of. They are working with Reef Check to train the divers to monitor the health of the MPA and looking to train them to work with recreational divers in some of the thickest kelp forests I have ever seen.

For people interested in having a coffee shop on the corner and a resort with a spa and maid service, there are plenty of places to visit in Mexico. But if you’re looking for a place where the night sky is inversely proportional to the cell signal, Isla Natividad has some real potential. And it is the sort of place that inspires you to just sit and watch a sunset as the sky turns to black.

When I see things like what I have seen while researching this project, the good and the bad, it makes me take a lot of things (office politics) a lot less seriously. And makes me think people who do play those games really need something more important in their lives. Probably the best lesson of all for me. There is a much bigger world out there than our little problems..

Finally made it in the water yesterday. Like I’ve said before I talk about diving more than I actually dive, but occasionally I do get to blow bubbles.

We were diving with one of the harvesting divers from Isla Natividad to see how he dived and better understand his working conditions. They dive using a hookah system: a hose connecting a compressor on the boat to a regulator the diver wears. They don’t bother to wear fins. Instead, they wear double the weights a diver interested in swimming would wear and don work boots to literally run on the ocean bottom searching for their catch. Each dive they focus on one particular item. They collect sea cucumbers or snails or red algae, depending on the season. This time, the diver was demonstrating how he finds and collects snails.

To watch the diver do his job was very much like trying to chase a rabbit through a thicket, he moved so fast and so randomly. But it was very eye-opening to see how he worked. We were only diving in about 30 feet of water but normally, they dive much deeper and the work of breathing at those deeper depths is dramatically increased. I was breathing hard swimming around trying to keep up with him. I can only imagine what it would have been like at his normal depth.

While I love the ocean, I think I find man’s interaction with it the most fascinating. For me, diving and travel and exploration isn’t just about seeing things (although I do get to see some really cool things from time to time), but it’s about understanding that interaction. People who make their living directly from the ocean, working on it or in it, see the ocean differently than those of us who simply visit it from time to time. The only way to understand that is to work directly with them.

After making two dives, where I got to do very little sight-seeing other than chasing the diver, the boat man wanted to take us on around the island and show off his home. On the back side of the island is a sea lion colony. You could hear the dogs barking a long way off and smell them from almost as far. The closer we got, the louder they barked and the bulls moved back and forth protectively. It was fun to get up close to them, though, on the boat and watch them sun themselves or jump off the rocks into the ocean. They look like big brown Labrador retrievers.

After that, it was back to work. Matias and I put on about three hours of presentations for the local divers, mostly just answering their questions. And that is where the connection in a place like this happens. We stopped being tourists watching and started connecting with the divers as equals, helping them out and understanding what they do, how they live and what they think. Afterward, we were talking that you can’t understand people by standing on the outside. Travel is great, but getting to know people and become friends is the real purpose behind the adventure..

Matias and I are here for a couple reasons. The primary one, though, is to perform a risk assessment on the hyperbaric chamber here on the island to make sure it is functioning properly and able to treat injured divers. That is one of the many functions we serve at Divers Alert Network. Believe it or not, I end up talking about diving more than actually doing it. But, I do get to at least talk about it in some really cool places.

Part of the surrounding area is called the Vizcaino Marine Protected Area (MPA) where no harvesting or fishing is allowed. This area is designed to help the fisheries recover, giving fish, sea cucumber and lobster a place to reproduce and grow. To offset some of the potential lost revenue that comes from making a portion of their fishing area off-limits, the local divers are looking to find ways to diversify. One possibility is eco-tourism into the MPA. The island already has some limited tourism from surfing (they were telling us that a couple big name surfers were here just last week) and they have opened a tourism office. It’s still pretty rustic and visitors are typically camping but it has some possibilities. But, before they can really offer tourism diving here, they want to make sure their chamber is up to standards.

In the midst of our review, though, one of the harvesting divers who works on the island got the bends yesterday. Sort of threw a wrench into our plans (and his of course) but we have ended up helping organize the treatment. Never hurts to travel to places like this with a hyperbaric physician. The case ended up being one of the worst, if not the worst, cases of the bends they have ever seen.

The connection to the ocean is what makes these divers continue doing what they are doing in spite of the risks they face. They take great pride in being fishermen and divers. The diver in the chamber, as a matter of fact, has the diving cooperative logo tattooed on his arm.

There is very little to do on the island that doesn’t actually involve the ocean. They work in the water, they commute to the mainland and have goods delivered by boat, the kids play in the waves and most of what they eat comes from the ocean. Today, the divers had a party to celebrate the last day of diving for sea cucumbers for the season. They celebrated with a cookout of flank steak—they eat seafood every day so this was something special.

What is rewarding to see is that these divers, and the cooperative they belong to, recognize how important the ocean is to them and their way of life. They are more than willing to change if it means ultimately preserving their way of life. Obviously, I wasn’t here when they decided to set portions of the area aside as MPA and I am sure they had arguments and fights and people were scared by it. But, by taking these steps and changing how they operate—realizing that while the ocean is vast it’s not infinite—they are finding ways to preserve their way of life for themselves and their children..