Sounds like fun
For a 12 year old boy, it was great fun. I so envied his older brothers, one a junior, one a senior, and they had their own scuba gear, wet suits, spearguns, knives, the whole nine yards. (I recall one, the oldest, was named Jake, because it was embroidered on the leather jackets he and his other brother wore, but his brother had “Lucifer” embroidered on his jacket, and I don’t recall that was his real name.
Their youngest brother (Brett) and myself had fins, snorkels, and masks. Damn. But Brett did have a speargun of his own, and also had a Hawaiian Sling that I never got much good at.
Yes. We used to think we were great jungle explorers, but I suspect, looking back now, we never went more than a mile or two from any place that people could could be found. And it was on the base, so how unsafe could that be?
We did get lost just once, walking around in circles for what seemed like hours, until we decided to climb a tree and saw a road only a few hundred yards away.
I enjoyed that life then-there were weird bugs, animals, big-fanged aggressive baboon-like monkeys, snakes, giant bats, you name it.
We spent most of our days either in the ocean or in the jungle it seemed. Paradise for a boy...