You have planned your scuba diving trip far in advance. Reserved your liveaboard adventure. Booked your airline tickets. Checked and packed all your scuba gear. Packed your clothes and zipped your suitcase. A quick trip to the airport and you’re on your way!

After the plans, packing, flights, transfers, boarding, unpacking and setting up your gear, you get your first dive briefing. The payoff for all this is enjoying every dive, slowly swimming and drifting among the many corals, fish and ocean critters, soaking in the wonders you’ve come here to see and experience.

I have seen too often those who get to this point and then proclaim that they did not see anything on the dive. These are the same divers you see rushing up and down the reef, consuming their air way too quickly and missing some of the most amazing encounters I have ever witnessed.

Just as we all want to experience the cultural and daily life of foreign lands and their inhabitants, this should also be your goal on every dive. Moving slowly, or better yet, finding a spot to stay stationary to watch the daily reef life, is how you get the most out of every scuba dive. Our underwater world and its inhabitants are tending to their gardens, building their homes or courting their potential lifetime spouse. They are aerating their eggs as good parents. They are forming symbiotic relationships like the blind shrimp and gobies. The shrimp continuously bulldozes out the sandy home they are both living in while the goby stands watch at the entrance. At any hint of danger, a quick flip of the goby’s tail and the blind shrimp knows to retreat into the safety of their hole.

I am always amazed watching a unicornfish move into a cleaning station, point head-down and turn almost all white, signaling it is ready for a good bath. Then, the cleaner fish swarm it until it’s the next unicornfish’s turn.

I have seen two indigo hamlets in Belize swimming around each other on the top of a reef, which seemed out of character for this species. I stayed as still as possible and was rewarded with a long creative courtship dance and then the mating of this colorful species.

We also learn that most animal behaviors are repeated, just as we humans are prone to do. In the Dominican Republic, where we snorkel with humpback whale mothers and their calves, we know exactly how long the mother rests on the bottom and how often the calves come up for air, all from slowly watching and learning. This gives our guests the most opportunities to be in the water close to these gentle giants as much as possible during the adventure. Had we just run out to the area the whales are in, jumped in all at once and started snorkeling around, we would never have any encounters with the humpbacks.

I was observing a corkscrew anemone while diving from the Turks & Caicos Aggressor II a few years ago. Just hanging out, watching several Pederson cleaner shrimp that also inhabit these same depressions in the reef. I noticed several very, very small black shapes swimming among the anemone and was able to make out that they were baby shrimp. I then had the biggest surprise of the week. What looked like a grain of sand but moving deliberately in one direction turned out to be an infant conch! It was being protected by the anemone just as the baby shrimp were. Had I just kept on going, I would have never had this profound experience that only increased my passion for this sport.

You have put a lot of effort into getting to the dive site. Make the most of it by enjoying everything it has to offer. Slow down and soak in the underwater world, and you will return with 10 times the memories.