VentureBeat takes a “leisure dive” into San Francisco Bay (video)

You’ve heard of planking. You might have heard about owling or hockern (aka extreme sitting). Now get ready for the next weird internet photography craze: leisure diving.

Leisure diving is like planking, only instead of lying face down on random surfaces, you jump horizontally into a body of water while looking as relaxed as possible. The online phenomenon was started by Alex Scott, my cousin, who works at Google when he isn’t being leisurely.

“Get perfectly parallel to the water with legs straight or one leg straight and the other knee bent like you’re laying on your side at the beach,” Scott advises would-be leisure divers. “Have one arm cocked with hand on hip the other cocked to the side of your head or with a prop or leisurely beverage.”

There’s also the essential “leisure face.”

“You are relaxing.  You are the picture of calm.  You are not scared, excited or about to receive a blow to your abdomen,” says Scott.

So naturally, we had to test this ourselves.

To celebrate a VentureBeat traffic milestone, we made our new executive editor jump into San Francisco Bay. Fully clothed. While reading a newspaper. (Trivia: It was a print copy of The Daily Dot, the web newspaper helmed by previous VentureBeat executive editor Owen Thomas.)

For good measure, we made our editor-in-chief Matt Marshall jump in too.

Actually, executive editor Dylan Tweney said he would do a leisure dive into the Bay as soon as we hit a traffic milestone. We destroyed the milestone and Tweney had no choice but to start scouting leisure dive locations. Marshall was “peer pressured” into joining Tweney by writer Dean Takahashi. You don’t say “no” to Takahashi.

“I’m going to need luck on my side to pull that off,” said Tweney before his dive. “I will be leaping off a wooden dock into water of unknown depth, after all.”

Pay no attention to the massive “NO DIVING” sign that looms over Tweney and Marshall as they do their dives.

Thank goodness we accomplished the feat before November when the water gets even colder. Tweney probably took the pending water temperature plummet into consideration, along with our mad skills as writers.

And so, without further ado, I give you the VentureBeat Leisure Dive.

Photos taken by Dean Takahashi and Heather Kelly; video created by Christopher Peri