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Most-recently modified on 15:12:36 17-May-2002.
Upon arrival to Georgetown, I boarded the tender to be taken into the harbor to begin my Atlantis Deep Dive experience. The brochure says "800 feet down", but for another $100, you can go the full 1000 feet, and it was worth it.

The trip started out with a small powerboat ride to the location of the submarine. We then crawled down a small hole to squeeze into the sub. It had a 5-foot diameter curved glass front porthole, which was just barely enough room for Mike and me to sit side by side and still look out. The sub driver sat behind us with his head out the upper port, and operated switches to his side to move the free-floating sub.

The first part of the trip was a rapid descent to 1000 feet below, made entirely in natural light, slowly backing up from the 55 degree slope of the reef. The eerie blue light diminished, but never completely disappeared. At 1000 feet, we turned to the right to see a completely dark nothingness to which the driver pointed saying "that's the 5000 foot trench... if we started sinking, there'd be nothing to stop us from going to the bottom". That's the first point at which I felt like I was actually in danger. Wheee!

We then spent the next hour climbing back up slowly, just a mere few feet from the wall, with the front lights lit so we could see. It was incredible, and indescribable. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

If you want to skip over the descent, you can start directly at the ascent pictures.
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Tuesday - Georgetown and my deep-sea dive
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