In his first open water dive 30 years ago, Mark Belrose was the first one in the water.
Following the dive boat's anchor line down toward the sandy floor of the Caribbean, the Muskegon Heights High School science teacher saw something he hasn't seen since, despite hundreds of dives.
"I got about 20 feet from the bottom and a big sandy area between two coral head began to move," Belrose said.
"It was an enormous giant manta ray. Your mind magnifies things, but it was somewhere between 15 and 20 foot wide. I was, maybe 30 feet away from him."
"He lifted up, started shaking the sand off and, 'Whoooosh!' he glided off."
Belrose is now a veteran diver and has shared the ocean with spectacular schools of fish, odd creatures like eels and octopuses, and sharks of all sizes, including the 30-foot whale shark.
He said he never tires of the unearthly beauty and very real adventure that lies beneath the ocean's surface.
"You never know what you're going to find coming out of the deep ocean. That's the cool thing," Belrose said.
As many as 60 times a year Belrose plunges into the open ocean to see, face to face, some of the world's most spellbinding underwater creatures. Many of his dives are during excursions with his sister, Lisa Bailey, and her husband, Derek, a dedicated underwater photographer.
Hovering on the edge of a 4-mile deep ocean abyss near the Cayman Islands, Belrose has watched, fascinated and a little bit scared, as a mature hammerhead shark swam past 15 feet away.
He's played with octopuses the size of small beach balls, marveling as they changed color from blood red to almost white to blue, "just like that!" Belrose says.
"Octopuses are my favorite animals," he says. "They're good to eat, too."
Once, inside an underwater cave near Cozumel off the coast of Mexico, he kept his cool while his air supply rapidly boiled away through a cracked air line.
"That's the big danger of diving -- freaking out. Especially if you're below a certain depth," Belrose says. Scuba divers have to carefully -- and slowly -- rise to the surface after diving deep or physiological problems caused by the water pressure can be fatal.
"That's what kills a lot of people, that fast ascent. The (air sacs) in your lungs explode."
Belrose says he'll keep on diving as long as he can. Given his current fitness regimen, that should be for quite some time.
Belrose trains four to five times a week, doing both weight-lifting and cardiovascular workouts.
The 58-year-old teacher's V-shaped torso is evidence he was once an Olympic-caliber powerlifter. A broken wrist sidetracked Belrose's chance to compete in the 1972 U.S. Olympic trials.
Belrose began a 35-year career with the Muskegon Heights school system not long afterward.
"I feel a real connection here," Belrose said. "You don't run into too many phony people here and for the last 20 years I've been able to coach track and cross country."
He married fellow teacher Karen in 1973. The following spring, the couple continued Karen's college tradition of spending spring break in the Bahamas.
Bored with lolling on the beach in the sun, the Belroses signed up for an introductory diving class.
He continuing resort diving each spring over the next few years. "Then I decided I wanted to get certified," he said.
Belrose has traveled as far as New Guinea to dive among the profusion of underwater creatures attracted to the submerged undersea volcanos called sea mounts.
The towering underwater volcanos attract millions of underwater animals, Belrose says. "It's like a nursery for the little fish, then the bigger fish come to feed there."
And among the bigger fish are the sharks.
"They're amazing animals. There are big schools of them. You can dive and watch them feed," Belrose said. "We actually fed the sharks to attract them."
Last year, he went diving among huge 15- to 30-foot-long whale sharks in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula.
"It's mesmerizing," Belrose says. "I couldn't get enough of it. You could tell their little eyes were watching you. They knew you were there."
The huge sharks glide easily along, gulping down schools of tiny plankton.
"They can swim faster cruising than you can swim for very long," Belrose said. Going full-out, Belrose could match the sharks' estimated 3 mph cruising speed for, at most, only 5 minutes at a time.
This spring, he is planning a 12-day diving vacation to the Cocos Islands, in the Pacific Ocean 300 miles off Costa Rica. The Cocos have another claim to fame: They were the "Jurassic Park" islands.
Belrose and his fellow divers will live aboard a former oceangoing research ship and dive up to five times a day.
Diving vacations like the one to the Cocos can cost up to $5,000 a person.
"The scary stuff is going to be the night diving," Belrose says. "There are thousands of sharks. They feed at night. They scour the coral heads looking for sleeping fish, drag them out and gobble them up."
Many other undersea animals, including octopuses and Moray eels, also emerge to feed at night, Belrose says.
To the best of his knowledge, no divers have ever been eaten on trips to Cocos, Belrose says.
Belrose already has his sights set on his next destination.
"I'm gonna go to the Galapagos Islands in about two years," Belrose says. But he knows going to the islands that inspired Charles Darwin to form his theory of evolution is going to be pricey. "I'm gonna start saving my money now."