essay
Chuck and Lijie's scuba diving trips
A growing record of Chuck and Lijie's annual or semi-annual scuba diving liveaboard trips — the deep-water companion to the bike-rides corpus. So far the trips have taken them through Thailand's Similan Islands, with a Philippines liveaboard planned for 24 December 2026 through 2 January 2027. Each trip is documented with photos and short videos as the holdings accumulate. The corpus collects the trips as they come.
What this corpus is
A growing visual-and-textual record of Chuck and Lijie’s scuba diving liveaboard trips — the underwater counterpart to the bike-rides corpus. Where the bike rides are an annual cycling practice at home in the Bay Area, the scuba trips are the shared travel-and-adventure practice the two of them have built around their certifications: planned, multi-day liveaboards on dive boats to coral-rich tropical reefs and remote islands.
The corpus is a small one so far. As trips happen and the photographs and videos come in, each trip will get its own entry under this parent document — the same structure as the bike-rides corpus, with a clean per-trip page collecting the diving sites, the wildlife seen, the weather, and the visual record.
Trips logged so far
- Thailand — Similan Islands, 2023 — December 2023 Andaman Sea liveaboard, the earliest documented trip in the corpus. Famous for hard-coral reefs, dramatic granite-boulder topography, and proximity to Richelieu Rock. Five-minute YouTube recap attached.
Trips planned
- Philippines liveaboard — 24 December 2026 to 2 January 2027 — the upcoming trip, covering the new-year-over-new-year window. Specific itinerary, dive sites, and photographic record to come after the trip.
Why this corpus exists
The scuba trips sit alongside — not under — the Family Threads synthesis essay’s major patterns. They aren’t a continuation of a generational practice; they’re the current-life adventure record of two people who have built their married life around shared experiences in new places. The same impulse that put Chuck and Lijie on a tandem cycling cadence at home runs into a separate-but-related impulse to go far together and see things they wouldn’t see from a desk or a road bike — underwater coral systems, schools of pelagics, mantas, sharks at altitude, and the diminishing wild reefs the next generation may not get to see in the same condition.
The corpus is therefore in part a documentation-as-witnessing project. The reefs and the wildlife the trips document are, by global scientific consensus, in decline. Each trip’s photographs and videos are a small piece of the visual record of what these places looked like at the year of the trip.
How entries are organized
Each trip’s entry carries:
- The dates and operator (the liveaboard company / boat name)
- The route through dive sites
- Notable wildlife seen
- Photographs from above and below water
- A short video where one was recorded
- Any narrative reflection on the trip itself
Entries are listed chronologically under the Trips logged so far heading above as they accumulate.
Sources: Trip records, photographs, and videos held by Chuck and Lijie; the broader liveaboard-and-reef-diving context follows the PADI and Project AWARE frameworks the certifications come through.