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Routing solutions for multi-hop underwater wireless sensor networks suffer significant performance degradation as they fail to adapt to the overwhelming dynamics of underwater environments. To respond to this challenge, we propose a new data forwarding scheme where relay selection swiftly adapts to the varying conditions of the underwater channel. Our protocol, termed CARMA for Channel-aware Reinforcement learning-based Multi-path Adaptive routing, adaptively switches between single-path and multi-path routing guided by a distributed reinforcement learning framework that jointly optimizes route-long energy consumption and packet delivery ratio. We compare the performance of CARMA with that of three other routing solutions, namely, CARP, QELAR and EFlood, through SUNSET-based simulations and experiments at sea. Our results show that CARMA obtains a packet delivery ratio that is up to 40% higher than that of all other protocols. CARMA also delivers packets significantly faster than CARP, QELAR and EFlood, while keeping network energy consumption at bay.