nick goes under (TV Hits Special) When Nick Carter feels the pressures of fame weighing heavy on his young shoulders, he heads for the water and washes his worries away...
nick goes under (TV Hits Special) When Nick Carter feels the pressures of fame weighing heavy on his young shoulders, he heads for the water and washes his worries away...
Ask Nick Carter what the next best thing to singing and dancing on stage is and you won't get the answer you'd expect! Chatting up cute gals? Nope! Hanging out with his mates? Not even close! When Nick isn't off on tour, you'll find him chilling out somewhere near the water surrounding the Carter family home. Nick lives with his parents Bob and Jane in a dream house in Ruskin, Florida and if you saw it you'd understand where his water fixation comes from! On the masses of land behind the house you'll find the Carter's giant swimming pool. This is where Nick does his lengths every morning. After his exercise, he and his four younger brothers and sisters will muck about together. And when they get bored of the swimming pool, there are channels that lead down from the house directly into the Gulf Of Mexico which is where Nick pursues his greatest passion - scuba diving! "My parents taught me to dive," he explains. "They started to explore the sea as a hobby several years ago." Soon, the young Nick started paddling after them! Which terrified his poor parents as he didn't even have armbands on, just a snorkel! "It all started with the dolphins." Laughs Nick. "Every morning they swam past our house and they were totally tame. They even let you touch them. Eventually, I wanted to swim along with them." That was when Nick started training for his diving certificate, which is no easy matter. "First you have to do hours of theory," he says with a grimace at the memory of all that homework. "Then you get to start in a swimming pool. That's where you learn to deal with the tons of equipment and how to fix it on. It looks easier than it really is." "If you get frightened under water, the whole thing won't work. you have to trust that you can breathe through the mouthpiece." Laughing Nick continues, "Of course, that's not all there is to it. In the sea, you learn to dive properly. It's amazing. You have to find out how to get your body swimming in the direction you want to go in." Even the boy who's good at practically everything had problems getting to grips with it at first. "Either you float to the surface or you sink to the bottom like a stone. The art is in finding somewhere in the middle." Eventually, Nick got the hang of it. At first he only went down to 10 metres. "That's where you see the most wildlife," he enthuses. "I saw fish in all the colours of the rainbow, coral reefs and the most incredible jellyfish." Once he got under the water, the lad was addicted! "When you find out how to move yourself along, it's just like floating," he says with an amazed look on his face. his deepest dive took him 40 metres into the depths. However, it is pretty dark down there and without a lamp, you don't see much. As Nick says, "Even though the whole thing looks pretty easy, diving is quite a physical challenge. You have to be really fit to do it. There's something you don't notice so much while you're diving, but it affects you all the more afterwards. Your muscles really ache!" Any final tips for wannabe divers out there? "Hands off!" He says seriously. "Honestly, don't touch anything you see down there! You never know if you might get hurt." If Nick doesn't feel like a dive or a swim, he climbs into his speedboat, collects his little brother, Aaron, and the two of them jet off over the sea, and for Nick that's "almost as great as diving!"
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