Floating just under the surface about fifty yards from the rocky shores of Big Pine Island, I searched.

It was Key West on the opening weekend of Florida’s lobster season. It was my birthday. I was a million miles from my reality. No deadlines. No training camps. No pennant races.

The serenity of the crystal-clear water and the vibrant landscape of coral and grass bobbing along just below me, combined with the deep, rhythmic breathing that is both inherent and essential when drawing your oxygen from a tube had left me in a meditative sort of state that should have sharpened my senses like a filet-knife.

I still felt weight even though I wasn’t wearing a dive belt.

I should have been zeroed in on the small enclaves that dotted the steep, rocky slope into the channel, looking for those unmistakable antennae of a spiny lobster to peek out of their hiding places. Instead, my mind drifted off like a bottle in the tide.

We were, after all, a man down on this journey.

Not even two weeks prior to this little bug hunting excursion, I attended the funeral of my best friend and roommate, James Johnston, who had been killed in a motorcycle accident just two blocks from our house. The last thing I thought I’d write as a 29-year old journalist would be a friend’s obituary.

We had been planning this trip for months. I even bought myself a brand new mask for my birthday.

And then you wake up to police on your porch and suddenly life isn’t quite as simple.

I almost felt guilty floating there, face-down in paradise. I took one deep breath and dove down towards the bottom.

Once that lobster was coaxed out of its hiding place it flicked its tail twice and slid down the slope and into the channel below. I was free-diving so I had to watch it disappear into the 25-foot channel. James would have been right there with his SCUBA gear for just this kind of occasion. I felt frustrated and angry - at the crustacean and the absent friend.

Catching your dinner isn’t as simple as it may seem. Recreational lobster fishermen are prohibited from using traps, snares or trot lines so the only way to harvest them is to go find them. Once you’ve spotted them, you must get them out into the open using a long dowel rod or “tickle stick” where you can grab them with a gloved hand or a bully net.

Although the Keys have the greatest population of spiny lobster in Florida, finding non-egg bearing bugs that have at least a 3-inch carapace can prove difficult along a shoreline shared by hundreds of other fisherman with the same goal and a sea floor whose rocks get flipped like it’s 2 A.M. on Nebraska Ave.

Doing all of on this on a single breath -  in water that can be as dangerous as it is beautiful - is all part of the challenge when free-diving.

Going without the tank also means that if a lobster darts into deeper water you have to let it go. No sense in compounding tragedies. Twice more I watched my targets flee as soon as they were sprung from their holes.

On the third pass along the channel slope, I brushed my stick under a ledge not quite knowing what I would sweep out.  Four bugs came scurrying out and immediately darted towards deeper water, only this time I was ready and one swam backwards into my waiting net.

Even though that first catch of the morning wasn’t quite big enough to keep, it lifted a weight from my shoulders. The idea of heading to Key West to swim all day and laugh all night had become a reality; the spirit of the adventure hadn’t changed even though the spirits on it had.

For the next three hours, we continued our cat-and-mouse game with the bugs. Floating and diving, pausing every now and then to watch a school of mutton snapper or a red grouper swim past.

When I finally came back to the shore for the final time that day, I walked up the bank surrounded by my girlfriend Krystal, my brother and his girlfriend – all friends of James in their own right – and I found that some of the driftwood had disappeared from my mind’s ocean. With my arms aching, my shoulders a little pink and well under the bag limit with my catch, I was no longer angry or frustrated. Uncertainty had been replaced by optimism, death by life.

Life was a little bit simpler because I knew James would have wanted us all there together on our little adventure because that was how he was. Everyday was an adventure that should be lived to the fullest.

We all have to get out of the water at some point.

Whether you head home with a lobster feast or not doesn’t matter. In the end, it was the dive that made life special.