Mitch Harris
Open Water Scuba Instructor
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My fascination with scuba diving is a product of growing up in a coastal Florida town, watching too many episodes of Flipper and Sea Hunt as well as nearly every Jacques Cousteau documentary ever done. I started scuba diving at a very early age after a crash course from my older brother on the do’s and don'ts of diving and a couple of hours in the pool. My older brother needed a dive buddy so that he could go spear fishing or at least that was his story. I look back and tend to think that he needed a shark distraction and I was the perfect candidate as I was small, slow, and nobody in the family would really miss me much, at least in his mind. I survived many dives in the San Diego Bay area of California with luckily few incidents and none of major consequence. My family moved to Texas a few years later and it was not until 1995 while attending the University of Texas at Arlington that I had the opportunity to become an officially certified recreational diver. It was the importance of safety, good equipment, and knowledge, and that I no longer wanted to be my brothers shark decoy that prompted me to enroll. After achieving my goal of becoming a safer more knowledgeable diver, I then wanted to become a better and more experienced diver so I took Advanced Open Water the next semester. I got married near the end of that semester and much like a married guy wanting to buy a motorcycle I found diving very hard to justify as my new wife was not a diver. That alone should have been grounds for divorce but it took another five years to figure that out. After that I took a job working for the cable companies traveling all over the US rebuilding the electronics out on the poles that distribute the cable signal. This job took me back to Florida where I spent a year moving up and down the east coast from Ft. Lauderdale to Miami. While there I began diving again with some frequency going nearly every weekend to Ft. Lauderdale for shore diving. I returned to Texas at the end of that contract and again became involved with a non diver (you would think I would have learned) and again was out of diving for a few years before becoming single again a little over a year ago and deciding to get serious about diving. I retook Advanced Open Water then progressed through EFR, Rescue
and on to Dive Master. This year I hope to at least begin and with
some luck possibly complete Open Water Scuba Instructor. One day I hope to take a working retirement in the
tropics living out my own version of a Corona commercial.
Everyone needs a dream don’t they? |
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Specialty Credentials
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