The path that led to us
snorkeling around the world...
...and making a website about it
Hi. My name is Galen. I write this site. But I get tons of help from my wife Nicole. She edits my bad spelling and makes sure I get directions right. Oh yeah, she also has to go snorkeling for weeks at a time in the most fantastic tropical snorkeling spots on earth. But she bears with it.
It is probably obvious, but we really are both just in love with snorkeling and thoroughly enjoy sharing all of our travel stories, pictures and snorkeling tips with you.
Traveling is our passion. Feeling free, seeing new places, and exploring the beautiful outdoors, that is what turns us on. Currently our goal is to take three big snorkeling trips a year. Generally we take 17 days to a month on each snorkel trip (plus we go on lots of other non-snorkeling trips).
How Do We Do This?
A Hard Knocks Lesson
Leads To A Better Life
Only a few years ago Nicole and I owned a small massage therapy and natural health store business in northwest Washington state. We were working our tails off, up to ninety hours a week. In the terms of business it was going very well. We were successfully growing it, and it was paying for itself, us, and five employees. But it was destroying our health and happiness (fortunately not our marriage).
Why? Here was the hard to admit truth. We were doing something that we really did not want to do - slaving away in a building from 9am to 8pm every day - in order to get something in our life that we passionately wanted - travel and freedom of time.
In was a very hard lesson to swallow. It just about killed me. How can success be a failure? How can quitting be the right choice?
The lesson - you can't happily get what you want by doing what you don't want. That became very clear, and it changed our lives from then on.
And the result of that realization? To wrap up a torturous long decision and a bunch of work into a few words - we sold the business.
A Fortuitous Event Unfolds
Hawaii here we come. After selling our business we needed some time to just relax and rethink our direction in life. Fortuitously one of our previous employees had a friend on the Big Island of Hawaii who needed house-sitters for a couple of months. Perfect!!
And where were we house-sitting? Of all places, a favorite snorkel spot from our past - Kealakelua Bay. We snorkeled a bunch, ate lots of dark chocolate macadamia nuts (and drank lots of Kona beer!). Mostly we thought about what we wanted to do next.
This experience did not immediately give us the idea of making a website about snorkeling. But it did make super clear that we love snorkeling.
And in retrospect I can see now that we were starting down a path, based on our decision to have a better life.
A Move Toward A Better Lifestyle
At this point in our lives a couple of things were clear. We wanted to work less, and have a higher quality of life that allowed us to travel more. No longer were we willing to trade the quality of our life now for a "future" better life.
After coming back from Hawaii Nicole and I decided to move to Tucson, Arizona. We love the desert for the sunny weather and harsh beauty, and Tucson offers lots of outdoor hiking and scenery. And our business taught us lots of important things about managing money, like the balance of expenses to income. So we picked a place that we could make great income part time, but the cost of living was low.
And what a great new direction in life this has been. We actually make more money, work part time (just four days a week, and have three days off a week together), and have purchased our first house. Most important it has freed us up to travel and enjoy life more, which led to making this website.
A Snorkeling Website? What For?
Why not? Actually this website makes a lot of sense for me since my degree from college is in landscape photography and writing. I find it a joy to create.
But the main incentive for this site is because of a problem we have encountered over and over when going on our snorkeling trips. That problem is that most of the information available on the web and in books is focused on diving. Even in the books that say they are diving and snorkeling guides generally have some pretty worthless and incorrect snorkeling information. You can hardly even find a good snorkeling forum on the web. Snorkeling is almost always relegated to a little area on a diving forum.
Well, diving and snorkeling are two different things, and snorkeling is not some lesser cousin to diving. And the current industry does not seem to recognize that there are lots of people who love to just snorkel, who don't want to dive, but still need good snorkeling information for the places they want to visit.
So we figured we would fix that problem, and began making this website that is snorkeling centric, and attempt to give the best information possible on snorkeling locations, equipment, photography, and the fun related to snorkeling.
And we expect that this will attract a lot of like minded snorkeling nuts who will enjoy to share their stories, pictures and advice here also (mostly because we love hearing them).
And finally, we want to provide a site based on our own experiences, not just regurgitated stuff from the internet. So darn, we will just have to go to all of the best snorkeling spots in the world, many times, to accomplish that. We promise to suffer through that for you.
What Do We Get For Providing This Website?
Do you really need to ask? Look at my self portrait on the right. That is me working on my website in Belize! We get to travel to some of the most stunning places on earth. Isn't that enough? I get to apply my joy of photography and general web tech geekiness. Isn't that enough? Well, not really.
It costs a ton to go on these trips. So you'll have to pardon us if we make some money from this site as well with some ads, affiliate revenue, and other products. Hopefully you will look at these as ways to support what we are doing. Besides, building a small web business is part of the joy I get creating this site.
If you are interested, the company we use to build this site is excellent and easy to recommend. It is called SiteBuild It!. Lots of folks make travel sites like this and make a great living doing it using SBI. And many more makes sites about other topics they love.
What Else Do We Do?
Besides our love of traveling to snorkeling destinations, we do our best to enjoy all the rest of our hours as well. We both love hiking and the outdoors. In fact I am an avid landscape photographer and we have made the goal to visit every national park in the U.S. over the next ten years (yep, another website to follow). Nicole is also a world class massage therapist (I can say that, being her husband, but her clients from all over the country and world say it also). She gets a lot of joy from her work. She also loves cooking. And both of us are really enjoying being home owners, with all the chores and projects that come with that.
That is about it. We will add some updates here as our life moves along. We wish everyone the joy that we are experiencing.
Galen & Nicole
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