Have you ever been to the feeding of the Hammerhead Sharks in Bimini?

Lunch is served

During a few months a year, primarily from December to March, it is possible to see great hammerhead sharks in Bimini. Sure I had taken pictures of sharks underwater before, but never hammerhead sharks. In my preparation for the trip, it looked to me like the likelyhood of getting a picture of a great hammerhead without going on a dive where the sharks were being fed, was a very low probability. You have to ask: “What self respecting apex predator would want to be around a bunch of noisy open circuit divers?” The answer it seemed to me was a very old decrepit deaf hammerhead and then that would probably be a fluke. So that meant in all probability I would have to be on a dive where the shop feed the hammerheads in order to get them to come in close enough to photograph. That determination, limited the shops that I could dive with to one. As often happens, it just so happened that one of my friends Michelle, with DXDivers was running a trip out to Bimini to dive at the Big Game Club with Neal Watson’s shop. So I signed up for the trip and talked David, one of my dive buddies into joining me.

So, before my trip I started by looking at images that had been taken in Bimini. What I noticed was that where I could find camera settings that had been used, for the most part, the images had been shot on 16mm fish eye lenses. Having shot a 16mm lens for several years it occurred to me that it is a great lens if you can get close to the subject, but not so great if you could not get reasonably close. A few years ago I had added to my lens collection a 16-35 f4 zoom lens. The optical characterisitics of the lens I think are quite impressive because it renders a good rectilinear image as long as there is a good amount of light. I shoot the lens behind a 9 inch Zen dome and the optical characteristics are quite good. Given that I thought there was a pretty good chance that the sharks might be a ways away from me when peak action occurred I opted to bring along the 16-35mm lens and the Zen dome. Now the down side of the Zen dome, it’s enormous, and weighs quite a bit. My camera rig without the Zen dome weighs in at about 35 pounds. TheZen dome adds another 3 pounds. And it takes up about almost a third of my dive bag. So now I had to think about what portion of my usual gear was I going to leave home?

Coming at you

In general the images I liked had been shot on full fame DSLR cameras. The ISO’s had been set at between 100 and 400 apparently depending upon the light. The fstops used had been between f7 and f14. I also noted that the shutter speed tended to be in the range of 1/200th to 1/250th of a second. The vast majority of the images appeared to have been shot with flash, although for most of the images I could not determine what flash unit or units had been used.

What I could not tell from the images was the relative depth that the shots were taken, but I could see that most were taken where the sharks were swimming over the white sand that is common in the Bahamas. My guess was that the water depth was about 30 feet. As it turned out my guess was pretty close, 26 feet on one dive and 24 on the other.

I next considered strategies for getting sharp focus of the hammerheads as they came in to feed. What I have noticed from other efforts at “shooting sharks” was that they are fast for underwater animals, and their movements seemed to me to be somewhat unpredictable. So It seemed to me that what I wanted to do was be able to use was three D tracking and to try to get focus on the eye as best I could. With some sharks I had noticed it was hard just keeping them in the frame if they were moving quickly.

It also occurred to me that continuous focus mode might help, but the limiting factor was that underwater strobes only recycle so fast. To try to help save the strobes I used a relatively low manual strobe power so that if I shot more than one image at a time there was at last some hope that the strobe would fire a second and maybe a third time before recycling.

I also decided I would take a somewhat different approach to shooting the sharks. In most of the images I saw the angle of the shot placed the shark alone over the sand, with few if any divers in the shot. It seemed to me that the reality was that because the sharks were coming in to be fed there were divers in the shot.

It wasn’t until I was mid-way through the first dive that it occurred to me that the story really was the interaction between the feeders and the sharks. No it is not ballet, nor is it a bull fight because hopefully everyone goes home with the same number of bits with which they came to the feed. Instead, it is a delicate effort to respect the sharks while at the same time demonstrate the pure power and strength that the Hammerheads have that have allowed them to survive millions of years as apex predators.

So for each pass by the hammerhead they do get part of a fish fed to them. the shark feeder pirouettes around to give the audience a view of just how fast and strong the hammerheads are. on each pass the shark feeder hands out a fish bit for the shark to eat. occasionally the hammerhead misses the fish bit but usually not for long.

After the shark receives his fish but most of the time the shark went off of the nearly right angle towards the surface. But not always. Sometimes the shark with swim off out about the same level as the shark feeder. In those instances it off and look like the shark feeder was moonwalking with her back away from the shark

In reality the shark feeder was probably just taking a breath and backing up a little bit to gain perspective on how to address the next feeding shark. For an improvised dance that is not choreographed, it is remarkable to watch.

Familiarity with the hammerheads is obviously a very important advantage that the shark feeder has. Feeding hammerheads is not for the faint of heart. And not for amateurs. For it would be far too easy to become a four fingered shark feeder.

Lighthouse Reef: Abundance, Intimacy, and the Unexpected

Nervous photographer
A reef shark with his buddy cruising the reef
Cruising the Sea

Do You Like Sharks?

A grey reef shark sizing us up in Roatan

I grew up living near the Great Lakes. It was not until much later in life that I saw my first shark. The shop I was diving with at the time had told us to expect that we would see a shark or two on the dive. We did see a shark, but he took one look at us open circuit divers and swam the other way. Before his tail had completely disappeared into the distance, I thought well that wasn’t too bad. That sighting was over 20 years ago and since that time I’ve seen many varieties of sharks, but seeing a shark never gets old for me. And no, it is not because in my day job I’m a lawyer and I have enjoyed professional curtesy with the sharks in the water.

A nurse shark cruising over the soft corals

Before last year, I used to think oh there’s a nurse shark. Whoopi, a very docile animal.

Well, last year I was on a night dive where we knew nurse sharks would be feeding. In the briefing we were told to stay off the bottom which was only maybe 35 feet below. So we stayed in the mid-water about 15 feet off the bottom. I’m glad I stayed off the bottom. What I observed were a handful of nurse sharks pounding every hole in the reef looking for a sleeping fish to swallow. I have been in a cage and watched bull sharks go after fish bits that were tossed into the water near the cage. The bulls sharks were not that much different from the vigor with which the nurse sharks crashed the holes in the reef to find fish. The thing that startled me the most was the speed at which the many attacks were launched by the nurse sharks. Had Micheal Phelps been in one of the holes in the reef he would not have stood a chance of out swimming the nurse sharks.

Some close up scars on a handful of feeding bull sharks

In the murky water of the harbor where the shark cage was it was stunning how fast the bull sharks came at the cage and how careful I was at keeping everything well inside the cage.

Then there was the dive where we were watching and taking pictures of great hammerheads swim in water that the visibility was not great. After having visibility that was awesome a few days before, I began to feel very uncomfortable when I realized that a 12 foot hammerhead could swim up behind me while I was focused on a similar sized hammerhead in front of me and missed the one that was on my blind side. Glad my buddy was watching out for me.

Open wide
And visibility got worse from here.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t attribute some ill will to sharks. They just do what they have been doing for hundreds of millions of years. They are a top predator and they are just looking for a meal. They are intelligent predators and they are designed to move through the water far more efficiently than we are. And, they do an excellent job of cleaning off the the sick or otherwise unhealthy reef critters.

In your face

Of course as top predators, the existence of sharks in a particular dive site I always take as a good sign that the reef is healthy. That is, if the top predator is doing well then all of the fish and creatures that are on lower levels of the food chain must be in at least decent shape otherwise there would be little in the food chain to support the top predator.

Have you been to Thunder Dome?

Not far off the coast of West Caicos, which is part of Turks and Caicos, is a failed media idea that nevertheless still makes a very interesting dive site. Thunder dome was intended to be an underwater set for a television show that was based on what most scuba instructors would tell you is a fairly dangerous practice; i.e. mixing skin diving with compressed gas. The concept was that contestants would dive down 30 feet to a set which had a bubble system that spilled out pearls. The contestants would gather the pearls and when they needed more air they would go to a “mermaid” with a regulator connected to compressed gas, essentially a scuba system, would take a breath or two and continue collecting pearls. The object was to collect the most pearls and take the fewest hits of compressed gas and that contestant would win the most money. What could go wrong with that? Well, plenty. None of the contestants appear to have been trained scuba divers so presumably they had never heard the number one rule of scuba diving: Don’t hold your breath? Why—- because by breathing compressed gas and changing depth a person risks an over expansion injury; i.e. you could over expand your lungs so much they burst, among other serious injuries. Fortunately, while the production company did make a pilot or two, someone finally woke up to the risks of the project and killed the project. Nevertheless, the production company left the set for Thunder dome where it was in Turks and Caicos. The dome and other set pieces have made an interesting man made reef structure. Thirty years later, the set makes a very interesting site for certified divers.

habitat for fish

While I was exploring the set on scuba, did I look for pearls, yes, but not so much. I figured they would be hard to find and after 30 years had probably been pretty picked over. But there was still plenty to see because in the last thirty years quite a few sponges and corals had claimed the set as their new home.

grunts looking for pearls?

Although Thunder Dome was a failure as a television show, it nonetheless does make for a very interesting dive site to explore. So if you get to Turks and Caicos Thunder Dome is definitely a worthwhile site to dive.