The days are long but the nights not long enough. You're tired and cold and the cuts on your wrinkled fingers won't heal because you're always in the water. Your muscles ache from dragging anchors, scuba tanks and cement blocks around the boat.
The bruises from bumping into every hard steel protrusion on your ship get bigger and darker and you wonder, why am I doing this. People call me crazy, say that I'm a dreamer and that my world is just a fantasy. But I know it's here— somewhere! And you jump, still shivering, back into the water.
Days, weeks, months and, yes, sometimes even years pass. You feel isolated in your beliefs, but put up a strong front. You've eliminated much of the ocean where you know the treasure is not. The next dive and you'll find what you're looking for.
"Yes, just don't give up," you tell yourself, and you'll find it on the next dive, definitely . . ."Today's the day!"
The water's murky and cold and your time on the bottom is almost up. The earpiece connected to your underwater metal detector starts buzzing, slowly at first, then quicker as you swim toward the source of the noise.
Your heart beats a little quicker and your breathing is a little faster, even though you know it might be another false alarm like the thousands before it. A bottle cap, a sardine can from the galley of the charter boat, one of hundreds of metallic objects discarded by boaters over the years.
You are now directly over the source of the buzzing, and there's nothing there. It must be buried in the sand. You start to fan the sand, slowly at first, then quicker. Suddenly, you feel a tug on your breathing and you look at your air gauge. You're below the red line and almost out of air. But you've got to know what's under the sand.
You fan faster while trying to control your breathing. Unexpectedly, a dark round object appears and you recognize it as an encrusted silver coin. You grab it and fan faster, you're into something. More coins appear, three of them, then six— no, eight. The more you fan the more coins show up.
Suddenly, through a cloud of silt, you spot the shiny yellow color that you have seen nightly in your dreams. GOLD! It's GOLD! You have found what you have been looking for. Your adrenaline is out of control, your heart is pounding out of your chest and you are now completely out of air.
You kick for the surface, a handful of coins in one hand, a gold chain in the other, and your detector under your arm. Your lungs are burning— bursting for air. You swear to yourself, that for a gulp of fresh, sweet air, you'll never take that chance again— never!
But you know better, because that's who you are. You're a treasure hunter.