...J&J's Excellent Adventure: 40th anniversary of the Our World-Underwater Scholarship Society

Tulip season in Skagit County

There is much to celebrate over these last few months, like great ski trips, a wooden kayak, and tulips blooming in Skagit County in April. I haven’t blogged about all these fun life events because I’ve been busy blabbing away about our awesome adventure in Madagascar. So where to begin? Well, it might be easiest if I just skip the last few months and focus on what happened this past weekend. But you should at least realize that we have had a great winter!

About a year ago, I blogged about my fantastic reunion in New York City with the Our World-Underwater Scholarship Society (OWUSS) (you can read that blog here). Once you have been involved in this amazing organization, you happily end up involved in it for the rest of your life. Last year was a blast and it was great to reconnect with other scholars as well as all my friends, hosts, and sponsors that made my year as the 1999 Rolex Scholar phenomenal. This year the gathering was even bigger and better! It was the 40^th anniversary celebration! Wohoo! The crazy thing to think about is that I started my scholarship year in 1999, on the 25^th anniversary of OWUSS. I felt a tad bit older attending the 40th anniversary. Jeez.

Here are some photos from my scholarship year, 15 years ago....when we still took photos using slides and I had a new, fancy, state-of-the-art, digital video camera. I've got to work on scanning more images from my year. Some day.

And here I am with my main man, 15 years later. A few more laugh lines and wrinkles have snuck in on our foreheads....but who cares? Life has been great so far.

I had a blast with my friends Kerry ('03 Scholar) and Ali ('00 Scholar). It was fun to look back on old photos of us when we were hanging out during our various scholarship years. Kerry was visiting New England in 2003 when we took the photo in the top right. Jay and I took her out on a dive in Rhode Island, probably to help with Jay's M.S. research but we ended up catching little tropical fishes that got caught in the Gulf Stream and transported, a bit woozy, to Rhode Island. Jay stuck them in a tank where they promptly died. But it was fun to collect them with Kerry! The photo on the bottom right is of Ali and me at the Caribbean Marine Research Center in the Bahamas, taken during my scholarship year. We just finished hiking to the highest point of Lee Stocking Island, which is something like 500 ft. in elevation. Tough hike. Ha.

It is really neat to see where we are in terms of our careers these days. Both Kerry and Ali have completed their PhDs and gone on to incredible postdocs and jobs. Kerry is about to start a tenure-track appointment as Assistant Professor of Marine Science at California State University, Monterey Bay! And Ali is working in D.C. at the Department of Energy as a General Engineer dealing with marine and hydrokinetic technology development (i.e. renewable energy...she is trying to save our planet). And I went the route of applied fisheries science, with a M.S. degree that involved studying the Dungeness crab fishery in Alaska. This was followed by jobs that connect fisheries and fishermen to resource sustainability and restoration. It is safe to say that all three of us have benefited from our scholarship years!

These two guys spell trouble! Doug ('83 Scholar and extraordinary diving safety officer) and Karl (Director at USC Catalina Hyperbaric Chamber)

This has nothing to do with the scholarship at all but because I knit this wrap, I had to put a photo of it in the blog. It took me a year and a half to finish and I finally got to wear it on our fancy night out at the NYC Yacht Club!! Exciting!

More fun scholarship stories! Anya ('05 Scholar) is now the Diving Safety Officer at my graduate school alma mater, the University of Rhode Island. I finished my work at URI in 2004, so Anya didn't appear on the URI scene until well after I had left....but I know the divers at that school are in good hands with her at the helm! And finally, no scholarship year is complete without the amazing love of Dan and Betty Orr. They recently retired from their work at the Divers Alert Network and moved to Idaho, so I'm not sure how many scholars will be crashing in their guestrooms now. But after sleeping on numerous couches for months on end during my scholarship year, coming to Dan and Betty's house (then in Durham, NC) was like coming home. They are the best and we all love them dearly.

Every scholar has a mermom in Robin! She has been the North American Scholarship Coordinator for a damn long time (i.e., I can't tell you the actual number of years - 20??) and she was the first woman to receive the scholarship in 1976. She holds you up, both literally and figuratively, throughout your scholarship year. Here she is holding me up in 1999 at the DEMA (Diving Equipment and Marketing Association) tradeshow in my least favorite place in America, Las Vegas. I should note that I'm probably a solid nine inches taller than Robin, which makes this photo even more entertaining!

Following the big night out in NYC, where I can happily report that a small group of us closed the bars, we woke up with real NYC bagels. Just what you need after a great night!

We can't fly back east to NYC and not steal a quick visit with our parents! So, Jay and I took the train north to Hudson where we met up with my parents and Jay's mom and her husband Jim. We took them to Olana, the Persian style home of Hudson River School painter Frederic Church. I think it may be the best view in Columbia County!

Jay headed back to WA on Monday and I stuck around for one more day of fun with my parents. Which usually means finding a brewery! We did just that in Saratoga, NY - I had a lovely barleywine at Druthers Brewing Company and dreamed of ordering their double IPA....but one barleywine can kick you in the ass so I didn't need anymore beer.