Making sure all her equipment is in its correct position, she adjusts her snorkel and double-checks the gas tank. 

And after falling back into the water, she follows her dive buddy deeper into the Caribbean Sea. 

For AP Environmental Science teacher Jamie Berendt, scuba diving is like being transported to another world.

“To me, it’s like you’re in another world completely. It’s completely foreign from what you’re used to. I mean, from the way you have to breathe, to your vision, to sound. Like, even the sound is different. It’s kind of majestic and it demands a level of respect that, you know, you have to obtain or else it can be very dangerous. So, when you’re down there, it’s like you kind of know you are not in your own world and to me, it’s adventurous, but it’s just an amazing place to visit,” Berendt said. “And that’s literally the way you feel, you feel like you were visiting this other world, like, you know, inside that you’re not part of that world at all. So you were there to just watch and observe and kind of take it in. It’s like visiting another planet.”

Berendt has been a certified scuba diver since she was 16-years-old, highly encouraging everyone to go scuba diving themselves as she had done. 

And already having the basic certification for scuba diving, Berendt had gone on a three-week catamaran, which is a multi-hulled watercraft, trip to study marine life while working towards her marine biology degree in college.

“We got to do a lot of field study of marine life there, in the Virgin Islands,” Berendt said via Zoom. “And we had about two different scuba dives a day, maybe up to three, because sometimes we did go out at night. So, there were a lot of cool things we did. There were lectures by a professor on board the boat that was at night that it’s really hard to stay awake for because you’re so tired from all the scuba diving during the day.” 

During her trip, Berendt participated in night dives, shipwreck dives and cave dives, amongst the regular ones, as they all required different certifications.

“We did cave dives, you know, because there’s different types of species inside caves. Do you get to see those types that live in a very, that was actually, that was kind of creepy because it’s very, very, very dark. Even at night it’s not as dark as it would be inside a cave because you usually have some sort of light from the moon,” Berendt said via Zoom. “We actually got to see a lot of bioluminescence. We’ve also done, or we did like some shipwrecked dives because there’s a lot of species that like to hang around, like wherever there’s a boat or anything like that.” 

But there can be hidden dangers when scuba diving which is why Berendt is a strong proponent of dive buddies.

“So, my buddy and I were nearby a reef so we kind of hovered over the drop-off, and we went out farther and then we thought we saw something down below. So, like, let’s descend a bit. But the thing is, as you go deeper, you start to sink really fast and you don’t realize it because you don’t see the bottom. And so before you knew it, we were like way too deep. And you’re wearing a weighted belt,” Berendt said. “You can’t talk underwater, but you have signals. And we were kind of pointing to our depth gauges and be, like, we need to go up. And you have to do it very carefully or else you could get something called the bends. If you ever heard of the bends, it’s a very dangerous situation and it can be actually very deadly. That was quite the experience.”

But nevertheless, Berendt is fond of the ocean and all the marine life surrounding it, demonstrating that enthusiasm through her teaching. 

“I think it’s really cool that Mrs. Berendt does scuba diving,” junior Sreya Das said via text. “It shows that she’s passionate about the environment in and out of school and that’s something I really admire.”