While you’re at 120 feet, especially if the conditions are good, you don’t feel like you’re deep underwater… you feel like you’re flying. But getting to 120 feet, or getting out, there’s no mistaking that you’re descending into (or arising out of) a deep, watery, utterly alien place. The change in pressure, the change in the light, the way your body reacts to those changes, the motions and actions you go through while manipulating your equipment… stark reminders that you are an outsider here, and getting more and more outside with every foot you sink.

That’s a depth of merely twenty times my height. The height of a twelve-story building. I could climb twelve flights of stairs without thinking about it, other than being a little winded from the exertion. I could walk up a 120 foot hill without walking into a completely different world. Not so, going 120 feet below the surface.

The bottom of The Trench is literally unimaginable.