Alan Scott is an exceptionally good friend and boating buddy of mine for many years. Besides owning and operating a cruising sail boat here in Puget Sound for many years, he has been a diver all his life. I think I remember (if I remember correctly) that he was on the dive team that brought up bags/boxes/chests full of gold from an old wooden sailing ship in the Caribbean. Alan didn’t get rich from that, not in money anyway, but in life experience he sure did. Ok, so I might be wrong about the gold doubloons and pieces of eight details, but I like what I think is true! 🙂
He has been diving on shoals and reefs, in bays and oceans, around islands and mainlands, all his life. And he takes the most extraordinary video of his dives.
Here is his most recent video, from November 2022 ……
The Revillagigedo Islands, and in particular Isla Socorro, are in the Pacific Ocean, about 300 miles off the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula, off the west coast of Mexico.
Turn your sound on … click on that lower right square thing to enlarge the video. At about time stamp 7:17, you’ll hear Alan’s breathing apparatus, his scuba gear. Ok, what’s scuba gear? The letters “scuba” are an acronym or an acronym for “Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus”, a term coined by Christian J. Lambertsen in a patent submitted in 1952. It’s the tanks and mouth-piece and other parts of that equipment used by humans that enable us to breathe underwater. Here is a wikipedia article about Scuba gear/diving.
Also at time stamp 7:17 in the video below, you can hear the real-time clicking and chatter of the Dolphins that Alan was swimming with.
So let’s get to Alan’s dive! Read all that other stuff about Scuba gear in the link above if you must, but Alan’s video is better than all the rest. Look for nose bumps between Dolphins soon after time stamp 7:17 and especially the tap on the nose! And then the cool little flipper friendliness at 8:55. 🙂 And the huge, huge Manta Rays at the end … 15-30 feet in wing span.
Ok, let’s start from the beginning.
What an amazing video. And an amazing life for Alan. Lots of us have hobbies … Alan’s is over the top!
The name of Alan’s own personal boat, a handsome and very well-maintained sail boat, is “Distant Drum”. There are sayings about hearing a distant drummer and marching to a distant drum. Some of us hear that distant drum beat from time to time. Alan actually listens to it and sets his course to the beat of that drum.
