The Universe Next Door: A Personal Odyssey

by Judith Hemenway

Overview

In the personal narrative essays of this book you are offered a hint of what the universe of the ocean contains for those who choose to examine its depths. Adventures abound in this exciting journey of the sea written by an avid and experienced scuba diver. Written from a personal perspective that will enable the reader to experience a wide range of adventures, from light-hearted and funny to tense and suspenseful. The author calls "The Universe Next Door" her love song to the sea and to scuba divers everywhere.
Contents Include:
Flying – The Jewel – The Deep – Dirty Jack and the Fins – Idyll – The Thrill of the Hunt - The Boomerang – Octopus’s Garden – Here There Be Dragons Halfway to Tonga - Just Another Perfect Day – Naked Gills and Sarcastic Fringeheads – The Eternal - Spiral – Shore Leave – A Single Breath – The Eye of the Beholder – Diving Amok - El Bajo – Extreme – To Live Before the Wind

Product Details

BN ID:	2940045259781
Publisher:	Judith Hemenway
Publication date:	09/01/2013
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

As a very young child, Judy was afraid of the water, until the fateful day her father picked her up and threw her, water-wings and all, into the deep end of the pool. She immediately realized that she had found her true element, and hasn't come out of the water since, except grudgingly to earn enough money to support her diving habit. She and her husband, Jon Fellows, spent their honeymoon in 1974 diving in Cozumel, and in the four decades since then have dived extensively around the Channel Islands of Southern California. They have also traveled to the Turks and Caicos Islands, Mexico's Sea of Cortez, Fiji, Borneo, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, and the Solomon Islands to get their diving fixes. Now retired and living in the Central Coast area of California, they have given up cold water diving, but still travel to tropical waters, always in search of new diving adventures.

Editorial Reviews

Landlubbers taking the plunge underwater for the first time will be alternately beguiled, terrorized and inspired by these highly personal, technically informative tales of veteran scuba diver Hemenway's most memorable dives in nearby and exotic locales. It's a riotous world of brilliance down there. Even our familiar waters teem with surreal, voracious and surprisingly playful life forms.

Off Catalina Island we delight as balletic neon nudibranchs pirouette past colonies of strawberry anemones, while overhead, sea lions zoom by in showers of green phosphorescence. In El Bajo, Mexico, we shrink from a wall-to-wall platoon of patrolling hammerhead sharks, then soar ecstatically as Judith Hemenway piggybacks on the wing of a giant manta ray in a swooping reef-top glide. It's not all seashells and sea horses however. Scuba diving is serious business. Throughout these adventures are cautionary passages reminding us that in the underwater world we are privileged but alien visitors.
—Los Angeles Times

Susan Dworski