Produced by the I-Lab at W-B-U-R Boston. You go down and it's cold and it's dark and I wouldn't say it's silent.

Underwater, Shannon Leone Fowler always found peace.

There's popping and snapping.

The sand tinkling against the glass of your mask you might hear snapping shrimp.

I've heard whales sing.

Shannon fell in love with the water when she was eight years old.

She spent summers with her grandparents on the beach in San Diego,

and her grandfather was an oceanographer.

He taught her about currents and tide pools,

showed her sea inemones and crabs.

From then on, growing up in California, Shannon was never far from the water.

She learned to dive, became a marine biologist, and started her PhD studying sea lions in Australia.

The ocean was one of the most important relationships in my life,

sometimes the most important.

It was my identity. It was where I felt most myself. the most

My identity it was where I felt most myself that didn't change when Shannon got engaged to a man named Sean and

Australian working in marketing when she was 28.

I remember telling Sean at one point that there were only two things that filled me up in life

and it was him in the ocean.

They celebrated their engagement with a trip to Thailand in the island of Kupanyan, white sand, blue

water, paradise.

One evening as the sunset, Sean was holding Shannon in the water right outside the cabana.

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