Ever since my friend the Selkie and I learned to dive, I've been dying to make SF0 amphibious. For this task, we wanted to transplant a routine into the place which was as unfamiliar as possible, from a place as familiar as possible, in this case my kitchen. The unfamiliar space was chosen as about twenty-five feet underwater in the middle of a beautiful kelp forest just off the coast of Anacapa Island. Anacapa is really out in the middle of nowhere, about an hour's drive and two hour's boat ride north from Los Angeles, and under the water there seemed obscure enough to us.

I knew right away which routine I wanted to transplant. There is one action I do incessantly and with a ritualistic fervor that would make any organized religion jealous. I make tea, very good black Darjeeling British-style with milk and sugar, and drink it. I do this often in company with my good friend the Selkie. We talk at my table and then play rock, paper, scissors to see who actually has to pour the tea and add milk and sugar and so forth. Whoever loses walks about five paces north-east into the kitchen to prepare tea. Then we drink the tea and talk more. We did a quick filmed run through of this in the normal location.

Doing a convincing ritual based on above-water actions is pretty tricky underwater. Underwater in a full divers' suit feels a lot to me like what I imagine zero-gravity is like, and as a result normally we tend to move like deranged and clumsy seals, and deliberately imitating a normal bipedal gait is a challenge.

The Selkie and I are very recently trained divers, and we were on this dive trip with a group of experienced divers, who make pretty eccentric company as well - much more good-humored, bearded, and tattooed than the rest of the population. They saw us filming and decided we were bonkers.

We took the film during the fourth and last dive of the day, and concerns both about nitrogen buildup and hypothermia convinced us to make it a brief and shallow dive, so we ended up doing this on a rocky unstable surface rather than a smooth one, which made filming more of an interesting challenge but probably made the task more visually striking, since there's kelp and fish everywhere.

Here we are drinking tea under the sea:



Hi, this is the Selkie here, I apologize for the bad camera work here, but in my defense the area not covered in kelp was small and I had to deal with staying on a patch of rock a foot in radius while occasionally pushing aside some kelp.

And here we are drinking the actual beverage on dry land later that day:



So this is how one drinks tea when you aren't under 25 feet of water, it is a bit simpler, and you can usually find other people to hold the camera for you.

Disclaimer: the still shots shown here we did not take. I met a diver on the boat with the most formidable array of camera equipment I had ever seen and asked him if he'd gotten any good pictures. He sent me these. Please don't consider them part of the task, but they're so amazing I couldn't resist posting them.