BOTTOM TIME BELL & ROSS BR03-92 DIVER

The wind woke me up. As I lay in the lumpy bed of the cheap motel cottage, I could hear the palm fronds slapping the window and the persistent whistle of a steady 18-knot wind. Through the slats of the jalousie blinds, I could see whitecaps marching shoreward on the Atlantic. It promised to be a rough day of diving. Welcome to the Florida Keys, a place I’d dived often over the years, and where windy conditions were familiar but never welcome.

The Keys dangle like a necklace of small islands off the southern tip of continental USA, with the Gulf of Mexico on its protected northern side and the Atlantic to the south and east. The name “Keys” is an Anglicization of , a Spanish word for “small island”. This series of coral bumps has long been a bastion for misfits and adventurers escaping from the American mainland to write novels, ply the waters for game fish or search for