Welcome to the bottom of the pond.

My name is Randall Huston. I'm 38, I run a one-truck pool service route on the west side of Orlando (forty-one pools a week, and I could tell you whose is whose by the leaves), and on weekends I dive the water hazards at four public golf courses for the balls you hit in there. You know the ones. You stood on the bank and looked at that water like it owed you money, and then you dropped another ball. I'm the guy who goes in after it.

This page is about what that's like: how ball diving works, the gear, what's down there, the alligator rules I live by, and how I wash, grade and sell what comes up. The farther you scroll, the deeper you go. There's a separate page for the strangest things I've found, which my wife Debbie says is the only part anybody reads.

First thing, before anything else: I don't go in any pond without permission. Every pond I dive, I dive because the course and I have a deal on paper. There are people who sneak onto courses at night and go in after balls. That's trespassing, the course doesn't think much of it, and on top of all that, going in a Florida pond at night is how people get hurt. Don't. If you want to do this, go talk to the course manager in daylight like a grown-up.

Here's my deal. I pay each course so much per thousand balls I bring out, anywhere from $50 to $80 a thousand depending on the course and how picked-over its ponds are. I count honestly (Debbie counts too, and she's tougher than any course manager), and I pay at the end of every month. The courses like it because they get a check for something that was just lying in the mud, and because I'll tell them when a drain pipe is stopped up or there's a gator nobody's noticed.

I work four courses, Heron Lakes, Pine Hollow Municipal, Live Oak Links and Sandpiper Run, all public, all within half an hour of the house. Between them they have 31 ponds I'm allowed in. I don't do them all every weekend. A pond in front of a par-3 green can give me 2,000 balls a month. A pond way off to the side of a dogleg might give me 200 a season. I keep a spiral notebook with every pond and every count since I started in the spring of 1996, so I know about when each one is ripe again.

A diving day goes like this. I get to the course around 8:30, once the sun is well up. The pro shop tells me which holes I can have (they keep me behind the groups; nobody wants a man in a wetsuit coming up out of the water in the middle of their backswing). My buddy Terry Meza, who I've known since tenth grade, comes along as my bank man. I'll tell you about his job in the gator section. I walk the pond, I suit up, I go in, and I crawl.

That's really all it is. Crawling. The balls roll down the slope and collect where the bank meets the bottom and in the soft muck in the middle. You go along on your belly in rows, like mowing a lawn, feeling with your hands, putting balls in the bag by touch. When the bag's full you clip it to the rope, Terry hauls it up and sends down an empty one, and you keep going. On a good pond I'll come out with 1,500 balls on two tanks. The most I ever did in one day was 4,100, out of the pond on 12 at Pine Hollow, which is a par 3 over water that I believe was designed by a man who hated people.

I'm a certified scuba diver (I got my card in 1984, down in the Keys, which is a whole different world from a golf pond) and I use regular scuba gear, with a few changes.

• Wetsuit. A Florida pond in August is bathwater, so the suit isn't for warmth. It's for the broken glass, the fishing hooks, the busted club shafts and whatever's in the muck that I'd rather not have on my skin. Full-length suit, hood, boots, the works. I go through about one suit a year.
• Tank and regulator. An aluminum 80, same as anybody. I keep three, and get them filled at a dive shop on Tuesday nights.
• Weights. A lot more than you'd wear on a reef, around thirty pounds, because I want to lie on the bottom, not float above it.
• Gloves. Heavy rubber-coated work gloves from the hardware store. Dive gloves don't last a month.
• Mesh bags. Nylon mesh with a drawstring and a clip. A full one holds about 300 balls, and it's around thirty pounds when Terry drags it up the bank.
• Knife. Strapped to my leg, for fishing line. More fishermen use these ponds than the courses would like to think, and old line on the bottom wraps around everything.
• The line. A rope from my belt to Terry's hands. That's the most important piece of gear I own, and it cost four dollars.
• Mask. I wear one, but honestly, in most of these ponds I could do without it. Visibility is zero. I don't mean bad, I mean zero. Hold your hand flat against the glass and you can't see it. It's like diving in chocolate milk. Everything I do down there, I do by feel.

People always ask about that last part. You'd be surprised how fast your hands learn. After a few months I could tell a ball from a rock, a pine cone or a snail shell through a work glove without thinking about it. The muck is soft and the balls are hard and round and they sit just under the top layer, so you sweep your hands back and forth in front of you, feel the bump, and scoop. After three years I can usually tell a soft-cover ball from a hard one before it's in the bag. Debbie says I should put that on a resume.

Balls, thank goodness. On a busy pond that hasn't been done in a while they lie two and three deep in places, packed down in the muck like eggs in a carton. The best spots are always the same: straight out from the tee on a carry hole, the front edge in front of a green, and wherever there's a little dip in the bottom for them to roll into.

Muck. The bottom of a golf pond is black, soft and deep, made of leaves, mower clippings and everything else that's ever sunk. When you crawl through it you stir up a cloud, and when you come up, you smell like it. Debbie has a garden hose waiting for me by the truck and is not shy about using it.

Fish. Bass and bream and catfish. Bass follow me around, I think for the bugs I kick up. Every so often one bumps my mask, and every time, my heart stops for a second. See the gator section for why.

Turtles. Softshells, sliders and snapping turtles. I've put my hand on a snapper more than once, thinking it was a big rock. You find out quick that it isn't. See number 7 on the Hall of Weird Finds.

Snakes. I've seen water moccasins on the bank, and I make Terry check the reeds before I get in. I've never had trouble with one in the water. I'd like to keep it that way.

Clubs. Lots of clubs. Mostly putters and wedges, which tells you something about the short game around here. Some are bent, some are snapped clean in half, and some went in perfectly good, I guess because the club was the one that let its owner down. I've pulled out over two hundred of them.

And then the strange stuff. Bowling balls. Teeth. A whole golf bag. A wedding ring, which I got back to its owner. That's all on its own page: The Hall of Weird Finds.

Here's where I quit joking around.

Every pond in Central Florida bigger than a kiddie pool either has an alligator in it, had one in it, or is going to. Most of them are small and shy and want nothing to do with a man in a wetsuit. Most is not all. These are my rules. I've never broken one, and I'm still here to type this.

The closest call I've had was in July of 1997, in the long pond on 14 at Pine Hollow. I scouted it like always and there was nothing. Forty minutes in, I got the long pull. I came up and out, and there was a seven-footer cruising about thirty yards off, that had come in from the drainage canal on the other side of the road while I was under. Terry had seen the wake. I sat on the tailgate for a long time after that. I didn't go back in that pond until the course had it taken care of, and I bought Terry a steak dinner, which I'm still doing every July.

If you remember one thing from this page, make it this: no golf ball is worth it. They make new ones every day.

Sunday afternoon is wash day in our garage. The balls go into a cement mixer I bought used for ninety dollars, with water and a squirt of dish soap, and tumble for about twenty minutes. Then they get a rinse with the hose and get spread out on old window screens across the driveway to dry. Then Debbie and I sit at the patio table with the ball game on the radio and sort. A big weekend can take us till dark.

First we sort by brand: Titleist in one bin, then Top-Flite, Maxfli, Pinnacle, Precept, Wilson, Spalding, and a bin for everything else, which is mostly logo balls. You would not believe how many banks, real estate offices, car dealers and family reunions have their names on golf balls, and how many of those end up in the water. Then we grade:

A word about the cut ones: the soft-cover balls the better players use (the balata balls) look great when they go in, but they cut easy and a lot of them come up with a "smile" from somebody's thin iron shot. The hard two-piece balls, your Top-Flites and Pinnacles, can sit down there for a long time and come up looking ready to play.

And a word about water: some people swear that a ball that's sat on the bottom for months loses distance. I don't know the science and I'm not going to pretend I do. I do know I don't sell an old yellowed ball as mint, and I'll tell anybody who asks what I think a ball's been through.

Debbie runs our table at a Saturday flea market east of town, seven to two, while I'm in the water. I get there around two-thirty, smelling like a pond, and she makes me stand downwind while we pack up. She's a better salesman than me anyway. She can sell a dozen Pinnacles to a man who came in for a box fan.

Here's what we get, per dozen, as of this summer:

The other place they go is back to the courses. Two of my four buy mint and near-mint balls from me by the hundred for their pro shops, and sell them out of a wire basket by the register. They pay less than the flea market, but it's one trip and no standing around in the sun, and I like the idea of a ball going right back where it came from. Some of them, I figure, are on their third or fourth trip into the same pond.

Last year we brought out right around 61,000 balls. After paying the courses, the air fills, a new wetsuit, gas for the truck and Terry's steak dinner, it came to about what a decent part-time job pays, plus the used bass boat sitting in my driveway. Nobody gets rich doing this. But it's a good Saturday, I'm my own boss, and I'd rather be at the bottom of a pond than at a desk.

Thanks for coming all the way down. It's dark and it's quiet and nobody can see you. I kind of like it here.

News, September 19: Floyd had all of Central Florida nervous in the middle of this week, and half my pool customers had me sink their patio furniture in the deep end so it wouldn't blow away, which is an old Florida trick if you didn't know it. Floyd stayed out to sea, thank the Lord, and all we got around here was some wind and a few limbs down. I spent the rest of the week fishing chairs and chaise lounges back out of fourteen pools, which put my regular route so far behind that I spent yesterday catching up instead of diving. So I was a diver all week, just not in the usual water. Back in the ponds at Live Oak next Saturday.

If you like golf stories, Harold Pettibone's page, Grandpa's Golf Stories, has sixty years of them, including a lot of lost balls. I like to think a few of his are in a pond I know.

Course managers in Central Florida: if your ponds haven't been done in a while, drop me a line. Golfers: keep your head down and your ball dry. Or don't. Either way works for me.