Since 2000, I’ve been an avid scuba diver in Southern California.
When the Yukon, a 366 ft. long Canadian warship, sunk off the coast of San Diego in July of 2000, it became an artificial reef for divers to explore, piquing my interest in and igniting a lifelong passion for diving.
In late 2006, my dive buddy, Barbara Lloyd, and I found ourselves at a crossroads. Both of us had earned various diving certifications, up to and including Rescue Diver and Master Diver. We had logged over 500 dives and were unsure where to go next. What could we actually do with our diving experience that would be both fun and educational?
We had seen articles on the Internet about a group called REEF (Reef Environmental Education Foundation), which offered to train divers how to recognize local marine life and then to log their sightings in a database used by marine biologists to monitor coastal conditions. The possibility of being part of scientific research sounded intriguing. It marked the beginning of our careers as marine citizen scientists.
