A little bit about me... with pictures!

I'd like to start my first attempt at blogging with a little bit of an introduction.  I'm Ben.  I'm recently married, a recent US Coast Guard veteran, a huge watch nerd, and a brand new student of Marine Diving Technology at the beautiful Santa Barbara City College.

The original watch nerd and I... My Dad.

I'll give you guys the short version.  I was born in Germany due to my Father's brave service in the US Army (he won the Cold War, as he tells it) and moved with my family to Illinois when I was two.  I lived  and attended school in Champaign, IL until I was 18 at which time I moved to Chicago to study at University of Illinois at Chicago.  I didn't study much.  I mostly worked at a bike shop until about 2011.

At some point in 2011, I'd had enough.  I was uninspired and spinning my wheels (pun!) at the bike shop with little in the way of aspiration.  After an unsuccessful college experience, I felt like something was missing.

One thing I was passionate about was my rapidly developing interest in the maritime world.  I read every Jacques Cousteau and diving related book I could find.  I watched every Jacques Cousteau documentary Netflix, Youtube, and minimal online pirating allowed.  At 24, living in the Chicago area where the closest thing we had to an ocean was the cesspool that is Lake Michigan, I was hooked on the sea.  I had to go find myself some water, some oceans, and some adventures like those I'd read about.  I was ready to do something interesting, challenging, and more worthwhile than skipping class and fixing bicycles.  I joined the Coast Guard.

Semper Paratus.

After a sleep deprived eight weeks at boot camp (er... recruit training they call it) I was a freshly minted Coast Guardsman.  I was given my orders for Station San Francisco.  I asked for SF specifically as I had a friend who had studied out there and said it was an incredible city.  I did not, however, think I would actually get what I asked for.  Sometimes, you get lucky.  

I spent the obligatory 1.5-2 years in the Coast Guard doing grunt work and getting qualified to act as a crew member onboard the Station's 41ft and 25ft response boats used primarily for search and rescue and law enforcement.  I also studied for my specific rate, Boatswain's Mate, in my spare time. I knew that as the BM, I'd be in line to start learning about driving the awesome boats I'd been cruising around on as a crewmen.

The Coast Guard's brand new Response Boat-Medium.  I was lucky enough to drive this bad boy.  

In time, I made rate and started working on my qualification as a small boat coxswain (driver, and also commander of a small boat while underway).  Eventually, after a shocking amount of studying and memorization of navigation rules, policies, laws, regulations, vessel operating techniques, search patterns, etc... I was qualified to take the boat out and handle business.  I never dug into anything in my life as hard as I did my qualifications in the Coast Guard.  Here was a chance to work on the water, learn about the ocean, and maybe even save some lives or help some people.

Business, as they say, was good.  Station San Francisco regularly vies for busiest station in the Coast Guard with an average of somewhere around 500 cases per year.  These cases varied from the mundane like a vessel out of gas all the way to children abandoning their flaming boat and almost anything else you can imagine.  This enabled me to gain a huge amount of experience in leadership, critical thinking, stress management, and maturity in a fairly short amount of time.  I enjoyed it immensely but my desire to dive, to be a diver, to be like Cousteau and so many adventurers under the sea, pervaded and consumed my thoughts.

One of the Cousteau homies I so idolize. 

Though I had some incredible times and challenges during my time in the Coast Guard, my favorite thing that happened during my time in the Coast Guard was undoubtedly meeting my beautiful wife, Katherine.  We met in Half Moon Bay, California where we both happened to be living.  She was a physical therapist from the Milwaukee area who had moved to California to work at Stanford Hospital. We fell in love, moved in together, and were engaged  a couple years later.  On August 2nd of this year, we were married.

People ask me all the time, "Why not become a Coast Guard Diver?" Sure, the Coast Guard has divers.  They even recently made diving its own rate, DV.  However, the nature of Coast Guard diving (generally shallower water and a fixed military income) didn't get me excited and the stress associated with the military model and lifestyle weighed on me and made me curious about what the commercial diving world had to offer.

Definitely not me... At least not yet! 

I did a lot of research and quickly found the Marine Diving Technology (MDT) Program at Santa Barbara City College.  They offered not only the opportunity to obtain all of the pertinent professional certifications to be a commercial diver but also the ability to go beyond and obtain an Associate's Degree in MDT.  Just as important, they accepted the GI Bill.  I decided with my then fiancee that when I left the military, Santa Barbara would be the place for us and a quick visit only cemented our excitement to move down there.

On March 22nd, I was honorably discharged from the Coast Guard.  On April 1st, my wife and I moved down to Santa Barbara.  Days later, we both started at new jobs.  I worked at a local bike shop ( Damn!  A bike shop again!) and my wife immediately got a great job doing outpatient PT.  Keep in mind during all of this change my wife and I were still planning our wedding two time zones away.  It was stressful.  One way or another, after a couple trips home to take care of planning matters and to obtain a marriage license, we had a perfect ceremony in Milwaukee, WI with all of our family and friends.  After that it was a quick honeymoon to Del Ray Beach, FL and then back to SB!  A couple of weeks later, the Wednesday before school started, I had to pass a swim evaluation for the MDT program... but that's for another post!