Michael Ragan started life in land-locked Colorado. 

But that didn’t stop him from becoming a deep-sea diver.

Nothing could.

"I’ve always loved diving,” said Ragan, who lives in Seattle. "I was about eight years old when I told my parents. We used to visit my uncle in Vermont, and we’d go see him in the summertime. He was a firefighter and a master scuba diver for the fire department. He had a tank, and I started diving in my parents’ swimming pool in the backyard.

"I’ve always been a swimmer. I always loved the water. By the time I was 13 or 14 I realized there was little or no diving in Colorado, but when I got re-introduced, it re-ignited my passion for it and I went for the diving master class.”

Ragan said much of his early training in open water diving was in Colorado reservoirs.

"I was told that master divers are a dime a dozen, that I could go anywhere as a dive instructor,” he said. "There was a realization that I love diving, but I don’t like babysitting new divers. At that time, I learned about commercial diving. I’d always known about Navy divers, but I didn’t know about the commercial aspects of it. 

So, how does a guy from Colorado wind up diving in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands? As is usually the case, it’s a long story. The short version is that he was working at the University of Colorado Prenatal Research Center, and it was then that he decided to take EMT training and medical technology. 

After completion of his studies, he moved to Louisiana to take a job working for two years on pipelines in the murky waters at the mouth of the Mississippi River, where visibility was three feet or fewer. His job was to help "push the pig,” fixing leaks by placing a foam bullet and using water to push it out. Alligators were nearby, watching the proceedings.

Eventually, though, things went dry.

"Things got slow so I didn’t get offshore as much,” he said.

But he was offshore when the pandemic hit, so he went to Seattle to visit his girlfriend, now his wife, and sent out resumes to various companies as he looked for work. After a Zoom interview, Ragan found a gig working for a company that did most of its work in Alaska.

"I went to the Aleutians for the first time, and I got to take a nice five-day boat ride to Valdez to do deep dives, and that was the first time I met the supervisor who hired me,” he said. "I was there for three years. It was very cold. We would use dry suits when we dove. We didn’t have hot water suits when we dove, so we wore a good amount of thermal underwater.”

After finishing one dive, he was sitting in the decompression chamber and realized that it was the coldest he had ever been.

"With the company I worked for, I was all over Alaska,” Ragan said. "I got to see a fair amount of Alaska. Sometimes, we went as far north as Nome, but I never dove in the Arctic Circle, although some guys went to the Red Dog mine. It would have been cool, but I wasn’t in the crew that went up there. We worked in the Aleutians and all the way to Ketchikan and Sitka. We covered a lot of Alaska.

"You see a lot of beautiful places, some things that are very striking. The Aleutians were beautiful. You have the ocean and then you have a mile-high mountain on an island. The topography is really interesting.”

Ragan also did some diving for leisure on his honeymoon in Belize, his favorite diving spot, and Bali and Komodo, an island off the coast of Indonesia.

Diving has become part of Ragan’s DNA. He has experienced the joy of being underwater, seeing sites that landlubbers can’t even imagine.

"You’re in a completely different world,” he said. "I’ve always likened it to being in space. With the weightlessness, you get a completely different perspective. You don’t see anything like walking in your neighborhood and you see a squirrel or a bird. Fish are completely different.”

For example, Ragan has seen manta rays, and while he was in Komodo, he spotted reef sharks, "but they kept their distance,” he said. "In the water, you’re entering a completely different world. Humans are not designed to survive in the water.”

Speaking of survival, Ragan has had a few experiences that left him a bit edgy. The key is not to panic.

"I’ve had a few times when it got sketchy, and a little bolt of panic starts to bubble up,” he said. "I’ve always said, well, I can still breathe, so I breathe slowly, and I have emergency air and contact with the supervisor.

"There have been times when I have felt it welling up, but I’ve always calmed myself.”

Not everything under the sea is beautiful, however. Even under the ocean, there is evidence of human contamination—lots of plastic and tires.

"Diving is a whole other world, and if people could see it, they’d be they’d be more conscientious about the aspect that we need to take care of our planet,” he said. "I’ve come across so many tires. The amount of trash I’ve seen, the plastic in the ocean that I’ve seen diving for work and pleasure, it’s very saddening. Sadly, I came across a fishing net with a dead otter in it.”

Still, diving is his passion.

When asked whether he has ever been afraid while in the briny deep, he said: "Am I scared? A daredevil? Kind of. When I was younger, I was an adrenaline person. I never played sports for a team. I played soccer when I was young, but I never did high school sports.

"I’ve always enjoyed a challenge, doing something that not many people do. That’s why I went into commercial diving.”

Mere diving is not enough for Ragan, though. His dream is to swim with sharks without the benefit of any protection.

"My favorite animals are sharks,” he said. "I would love to swim with a great white without a cage. It sounds crazy, I know.”

Crazy or not, Ragan truly feels at home swimming with the fish, whether manta rays or great white sharks.

After spending time in the beautiful but cold seas of Alaska, the question is whether he would go back.

"If it was for work I would,” he said. "If it was for vacation, probably not."