When first-time diver and environmentalist Laura James explored a shipwreck park in 1990, it was like a fairy tale. After swimming through the murky waters of the Puget Sound, she found herself in what felt like a cathedral set in Alice’s Wonderland — a shimmery world of colorful fish, barnacles, and green kelp. “It was booming with life,” she says of the marine habitat that had taken hold of the sunken vessel. “It was so breathtaking, I realized in that moment that I had found my place on this planet.”
What James didn’t know at the time, however, was that the beauty she was beholding was just the tip of the iceberg. Just like Alice going deeper into that rabbit hole, new details only revealed themselves to James after numerous dives. “I learned to see those details from diving over and over and over again,” the Seattle-based James says, explaining how a novice diver could swim right past the bell of a ship because it might be dilapidated or miss an important relic as it blends into a dark and hazy background. “You don’t see it at first because your eyes aren’t trained.”