Senara's latest christening.........from K

Despite everything we have done on, in, to and under Senara, there has been one christening we had not been able to perform, until now. We have finally scuba dived off of her. Up til now, we used my nephew's boat or a dive boat to dive, but now we feel we've done it all, and as always, Senara proved her versatility.

Scuba diving off of a sailboat is not easy. The gunwhales are too high off the water to flip back into the water, and there is no clear platform from which to step off from. So, as everything else while living on a boat, we improvised. We situated the dinghy next to the cockpit and Pat carefully placed (dropped?) our weighted gear into the dinghy. Then we put on our wetsuits and climbed into the dinghy and pulled on our heavy BC's and air tanks. I felt more than awkward perched on the side of our inflatable as P tightened my vest. In fact, I panicked and announced, "I can't do it." P never missed a beat - he said, "catch your breath and take your time." And I did. Then we plunged off the dinghy into the gorgeous underwater scenery of Looe's Key. We swam with a barracuda, some parrotfish, a school of yellow chubs, and marvelled at the colorful coral. We never get tired diving down deep. And this time, we had a friend follow us back up. As we were hauling our gear back onto Senara, a 6-foot barracuda circled our boat. We choose to believe he was giving us a polite farewell, but we didn't shake fins to find out...