Deleted Scenes - Doing Pen Patrol

I start my day by checking all of our above-water equipment. Damage or theft are the biggest problems – we don’t see too much theft because of Dad’s street cred. All of our fish are monitored by a counting system and I look at those numbers to see if anything is off. Usually, I catch the first part of this while heating up the first pot of coffee of the day. I wasn’t a coffee person before I came out here but having something hot to drink makes a big difference.

After the first round of checks is done, I take a coffee and get suited up. My suit is always cold first thing in the morning, for some reason. At first, the neoprene feels cold and clammy like I crawled into a tub of raw meat. After it warms up, it’ll still pull at my shoulders – it still keeps me warm when I’m out there under water. By this time, Dad’s up and ready for hookah tending. He reads some battered old novel while sitting there next to the compressor. A chair, something to read and something to drink and he’ll sit there until the end of time.

I know not to jump in the water next to him, he hates getting wet. I pull my fins and mask on while he makes himself comfortable. Then I step off the dock and into the water. The world goes green-blue and the water pushes all the air away.

It makes you realize why people have been writing about the sea as long as they’ve had things to write with. The dark, secret, ancient world underneath the water and we’re all just very small ants floating on the garbage that doesn’t sink. I fix a small leak in my face mask and look around. The clouds of fish we have in this pen are moving around like they always do – a shimmering mass of floating silver. Breaking the surface, I stroke over to Dad and he hands me my regulator. “Be careful,” he says, just like he always does. I nod and slip back below the surface, starting the process of pen patrol that will take hopefully not more than an hour to complete.