Bruce is a NAUI dive instructor and an avid underwater photographer who began diving 10 years ago. He has been fortunate enough to travel throughout most of the Caribbean where he has photographed sea creatures ranging from nudibranchs to whale sharks. He hopes to begin doing more diving in Southeast Asia in the coming years. Bruce's photos have graced the covers of several magazines and can be seen at www.flickr.com/photos/bcampbell65/ or bcampbell65 on the photo stock agency shutterstock and on adobe stock.
It was 7:15 p.m. when we got ready to get in the water. It was dark and you could only see as far as your dive light would penetrate. The divers were all pretty excited. As the dive was briefed, we were supposed to try to stay on the bottom so as not to interfere with the glide path of the mantas. It took us about 7 minutes to get from the boat to the place on the dive where we would circle up around a big light which hopefully would attack plankton that the mantas would like to feed upon. The dive master put a sola 8000 in a milk crate and
turned it on and pointed up.
I was just getting situated when I saw a manta fly over my left shoulder. It was all I could do to try to squeeze off one shot before he was out of range. My initial thought was wow, this could be good.
We settled in to the site and I would periodically turn on my video light and search around. I left my focus light pointed up in hopes of drawing in the mantas. Then we waited, and waited and waited. At about 38 minutes into the dive I was bored and thinking that the mantas had just been teasing us.
There was a surge so I dumped all of the remaining air in my BC in hopes of staying on the bottom near the manta light. Staying in one place had proven to be quite tough for me in the surge. Try as I might, I stayed in roughly
the same area for most of the dive albeit I was having to work to stay there because the surge kept blowing me about.
At about the 40 minute mark I turned on the video light, put some air in the BC and started hovering above the bottom. I started hovering in large part because I was tired of getting banged around the coral by the surge. My “robo” camera was like having a sail tied to me and the surge just pushed me around the bottom. I was getting jostled around pretty good and not seeing much.
I was just piddling around checking out the site when I saw someone’s flash go off. I turned in the direction of the flash and could see a single manta swimming through the water column. He seemed pretty close so I took a couple of shots. A few moments later one more manta swam through. This one seemed to like my video light so I just hovered and watched him come in through the view finder, waiting to snap off a picture until I could see he was pretty close.
I snapped off a couple of shots and just stood my ground. He keep coming and coming. I kept shooting.
A few moments after that that the manta had swum through the site and the dive was over based on time. We swam back to the boat and only once on board did I take a look at the images. One really close one and some almost shots. While on board the dive master asked me if I had been hit by the last manta we saw. I said I didn’t think so. He showed me some video he shot that you could see the manta flying at my light and then it looks like I was bumped. Maybe I was bumped but it was nothing compared to the surge.
Oh well that is the thing about large animals. They are rare, unpredictable but very special to see in person.
I like to dive wrecks. Some wrecks are interesting because of their place in history. For instance, the RMS Rhone sank in a hurricane around the time of the civil war, yet large portions of the ship remain intact or at least visible to divers who dive the Rhone. Other wrecks are interesting because of the services they performed while they were in service. For instance, the Kittiwake was a submarine tender and while only recently being purposefully sunk, still has a number of features that existed from her working days– the re-compression chambers are still on board. The mirrors are still in the bathroom which is something I had not seen in a wreck before.
The Tibbetts is different because it was a Russian destroyer that was purposefully sunk off the coast of Cayman Brac in 1996. It has some sponge and coral life on it, but not as much as I had expected because it has been underwater about 20 years. It is one of the few Russian destroyer wrecks that exist in the western hemisphere. In its sinking, the hull of the ship was apparently cracked. After several hurricanes blew through Cayman Brac, it appears the storms applied enough torque to the ship so that the bow was twisted from sitting upright to sitting at a 45 degree angle. The mid-section blew out and became a debris field and the stern of the ship is sitting at about a 75 degree angle.
Our dive of the Tibbetts was with Liesel from the Scuba Shack dive shop. We came through a swim through to see the wreck unfold before us. It was quite an impressive view. The Tibbetts is sitting on white sand and its contrast with the blue water makes an impressive sight. The forward guns are interesting because sponges have grown out of them.
When we were there we saw quite a bit of fish life. A barracuda of over 5 feet in length was the highlight, but we also saw schools of goat fish an other reef fish living on the Tibbetts. Towards the aft of the ship, and after the debris field, the super structure of the ship is intact and leads to the wheel house.
At the back of the ship are the rear guns. In many ways I thought there were the most interesting because they are still easily recognizable as guns
We swam around the wreck for about 40 minutes before some of our group started to run low on air, so we made our safety stop and ascended to the surface. As soon as I can I would like to go back and spend more time diving on the Tibbetts to see more of the details of its remains. Maybe next year.
The Stoney Mesa II dive site was as tough as Stoney Messa I was easy.
Raccoon butterfly fish under a coral head
The surge picked up and then the current picked up and kicked my butt. About 20 minutes into the dive Nancy was ready to come up because we were fighting the the surge and then the current kicked in big time.
We came up to the hang bar and I grabbed a hold of it and looked like a flag blowing in the breeze. The current was so strong the hang bar slowly went up to the surface, which kind of defeated the purpose of doing a safety stop on the hang bar. So I let go of the hang bar figuring that I would just drop back and grab the trail line. I did drop back from the boat, but at an incredible rate of speed. I had to kick for all I was worth not to get blown off the site.
By the time I had kicked back to the end of the trail line for my safety stop I was at the end of the trail line. I kicked to keep the line in sight and slowing went up and grabbed the trail line with my left hand.
Now the dilemma: I had to either rely on my Cetacea cord to hold the camera or I was just going to end up hanging on the line until they pulled it in. The current was rippin’. I opted for trusting the cetecea keeper and it held, but it was tough for me to let go not knowing if the camera would stay attached to my bc or what it would do without me using one hand to control the camera. It’s at times like these when I wish I didn’t have quite as much invested in the camera rig.
What a beating. It took just about all the strength I had to pull my self back to the boat on the line. I am guessing but I suspect that the current was an easy 4 knots at that point. It was basically kick as hard as I could, pull the rope with both hands just to get to the boat. Once I made it to the boat I had to use one hand to release the cetecea cord and hand the camera up. That was a challenge. Thirty five pounds of camera gear to hand up one handed, while holding on to the boat with my left hand. I got it done; handed the camera up, and then got on board. I was beat. I’m not a young man, but I still work out 5-6 times a week just to stay in shape so I can dive. That was a hard dive. We had lunch and I took off the next dive so that I could take a nap and rest for the remaining two dives of the day.
I have had a chance to swim through quite a few swim throughs that ranged from feeling pretty wide open to feeling really claustrophobic. For me the one thing they all have in common is I have to think and look pretty hard at them to see if there is a chance that I can get the camera and housing through the available space. Sometimes I have to bring the strobes in pretty close to be able to get through the available space. Now that also means that at best I have to video that part of the dive because trying to shoot stills in such close quarters rarely works. I need about 5 feet wide to be able to get the strobes through without bringing them in close to the camera housing. I need about two feet vertically to be able to get the tank strobes and me through the available space. I can do about 2 feet by 3 feet but that feels really tight.
I’ve seen some pretty interesting responses by divers. Some are quite at ease and just seem to go with the flow of the swim through. Others, well they can get pretty spooked and bolt through the swim through. That happened in a swim through in Cozumel and as it looked as if two divers were swimming on top of one another. Now the good thing was that there was enough space for two divers so it wasn’t too bad, but it did make for an interesting image.
Now off the coast of Kona, Hawaii are a number of lava tubes that create some interesting swim throughs. The lava tubes ranged from very wide to very small. Each was different. Below is a link to a small sampling of the tubes into the blue that we saw.
As shark week approaches it occurred to me that I have had a chance to dive with quite a few varieties of sharks, and I am not talking about the two legged variety. I hope that I will never forget the first time I saw bull sharks. They are incredibly beautiful animals that move through the water column easier than most people breath. They are so efficient under water a very small flick of the tail will carry them forward with incredible speed.
From fast to enormous size was the next set of sharks with which I had a chance to interact. The first time I jumped out of the boat with my camera in hand I had not even had a chance to turn around entirely when I saw this incredible mouth, almost 6 feet across, coming directly at me. I kicked for all I was worth trying to get out of the way only to realize later that with a small flick of the whale shark’s tail he could easily avoid me. So much for my swimming skills.
Drafting a whale shark
It was not until I traveled to Ambergris Caye in Belize that I really had a chance to watch a number of active nurse sharks. Sure I had seen nure sharks laying on the bottom napping while I was diving, but I had not really seen them actively moving around a reef until I was in Belize. Although many people think of nurse sharks as fairly “tame” you still need to be careful because they are big animals and can create some problems if their space is not respected.
The Bahamas gave me an opportunity to interact with grey reef sharks. They are very fast predators and they have a mouth full of teeth, but unless they are being fed they tend be to fairly shy about divers.
This is why you wear the steel suit
Grey reef sharks I think are very photogenic sharks. They are innately curious and will often give divers at least a quick look before they go back to looking for more interesting food.
The most recent type of shark I came across off of the Kona coast. A white tip reef shark. At least the one I found was about 5 feet in length, a juvenile and he was not interesting in hanging out with divers. I barely got a couple of shots off before he was long gone. And, even then he was pretty well hidden in the shadows.
One of the many sharks at Shark Junction
Maybe on my next set of dives I will get a chance to see a tiger shark. I guess we will see if we are so fortunate.
Alright I know, mud bugs are technically crayfish, but to me lobsters are just a bigger version. And, fortunately, more meat to eat. I was thinking after a week of diving off the Kona coast that in 24 dives I had seen two lobsters. Now, granted the two lobsters I did see were quite large, probably 5 pounds or more a piece, but that was far fewer than what I usually see when we are diving in the Caribbean.
A Kona Lobster on the coral head
Maybe I was diving in the wrong place to see them. But it reminded me that what is plentiful in one part of the sea is often times quite rare in another part of the sea. So I guess I should look forward to the next trip to the Caribbean and seeing lots of lobsters.
In this little hole there were well over a dozen little Caribbean lobsters off the coast of St. Vincent.
Stoney Mesa was the first dive we did on our week aboard the Kona Aggressor. The water was a pleasant 79 degrees and we had at least 80 feet of Viz. The structure of the reef is awesome. Enormous lava flows had flowed into the ocean and created immense cliffs to swim around. The fish life was abundant. The small fish were very adept at swimming between the branches of coral only to reappear moments later.
Gearing up was easy and we had plenty of room. We dove nitrox all week and even though I only did 24 of the 27 possible dives as usual I found nitrox a huge help with recovery.
I was eager to duck down and see the fish life. I was not disappointed. Lots of small fish and some very interesting middle-sized fish. I saw one moray eel who was well hidden in the coral.
The surge was quite strong at several points so I had to wait until the surge passed by and then kick like crazy to get past the choke off points where the passage ways in the reef structure got fairly narrow. The Sun had come out and the light on the reef was awesome. I was amazed at the colors of some of the fish; I am going to have to get a fish book for this area.
Not long ago, I had a chance to do two night dives with the potential of seeking manta rays off the Kona coast. The first night I was all geared up and we were swimming to the site. Just before we reached the site I looked up and a manta buzzed right over my head. My initial thought was: wow, this could be good. The manta made two passes and I took a couple of shots that were ok, but I was hoping there would be a few more passes so I could hone my timing in on the manta’s pace. I was actually quite surprised at how fast he blew by me. Yeah, I know I am slower that a turtle, but that manta was fast. Well, as happens with many opportunities to watch for animals, you can wait and you can wait. The manta made one more pass about 35 minutes later and that was the end of it.
Well I could not complain. I had seen a manta. I had gotten off a few snaps and I wasn’t even that cold in my 2mm shorty. But my hopes were that on Thursday night we would see more than one manta and they would make more than a few cursory passes.
Well we were lucky. We saw at least 10 mantas and they were pretty active for our 70 minute dive. Now the environment at the second site was totally different. Night one was just a few divers and one manta. Night two there were 20 dive boats, at least 60 divers a lot of snorkelers and 10 mantas making a variety of passes. There did come a break in the action early on where the mantas seemed to stop making passes through the site. It’s about that time I got into it with a photographer who decided she was better than the rest of us. All of the divers but one were circled around the lights that were on the bottom of the ocean and they were facing inward. Not her, she put herself inside the circle and faced outward shining her lights in any diver’s eyes that were close to her. I was within three feet of her and I was not happy. After one of the local instructors chewed on her she still wasn’t moving. It is rather hard to cuss some one out through a regulator, but it is a helpful talent I have developed. I’m guessing she got my message because after I finished telling her what I thought of her behaviour, she flipped me off, and she moved away from me. Now, it might have had something to do with my shining my 4000 lumen video light in her face, but she moved off not long after I was done “talking to her”. Nevertheless, inspite of the challenges, I shot over 200 images and a little bit of video during the dive. Some of the images were very good, and some were interesting. The whole scene had a rock concert feel to it. At about 50 minutes most of the divers had cleared out. The last 20 minutes were awesome. So here is the link to the video from the show.
Corals beginning to feed as the sun goes down for a night dive
For a person who is largely visually oriented, night dives can be a little bit disconcerting, particularly the first several times. The first night dive I did was in an advanced scuba class in a Texas lake. The visibility might have been 15 feet and at night I was lucky to be able to see the fins of the diver in front of me. I probably stayed pretty close because even with a bright underwater torch there was not much to see and even then I didn’t want to get left behind. At one point we turned out all the lights and the dive instructor cracked open a chemical light to simulate bio-florescence. It was interesting but it would be years that passed before I had a chance to see bio-florescence in the ocean.
Roll forward several years and I had a chance to do a night dive in Playa Del Carmen. I had just started shooting a digital camera underwater and was still at the stage of chasing sea creatures in hopes of capturing an interesting image. Well I learned on a drift dive at night that was not a good strategy because we ran out of reef pretty quickly.
Roll forward a few more years and I was introduced to “glow diving” in the Cayman islands. The concept was shine a blue light on corals and other creatures and see whether they had any luminescence. This time I was moving pretty slowing and acquired a few interesting captures.
Brain coral luminescence
Well after that trip I started studying bio-luminescence and found that there is actually quite a lot written about the subject. I also made a few contacts such as Fire dive who pointed me in the right direction for further inquiry.
Anemone with blue light
Assuming I can keep TSA from breaking my filters I think there is quite a bit more to see in my night dives than I would have ever guessed.
A 200 plus pound Black Grouper at Shark Junction in the Bahamas
I used to think of the ocean as endless and its fish life as unaffected by people. I was wrong on both counts. Yes, over 70% of the earth is covered in water. Yes, if you were to take the average depth of the ocean and take out the lows and the highs the average depth would be over 4,000 feet deep, or at least so I have read.
But, the ocean that can be explored by recreational divers is only 130 feet deep. And, within that depth in many places, fisherman have and are over fishing many species. Many variety of grouper, such as black grouper are becoming much rarer to see in large part because they do taste good. For the most part I have stopped eating grouper because of the pressure on them. Other species of fish are also being fished to extinction.
Isn’t it odd, that lion fish, an invasive species in the Caribbean are thriving and doing so at the expense of native fish such as the parrot fish who is necessary to reefs in order to keep algae at bay.
Are you the scourge of the Caribbean?
So I will continue to eat lion fish, in hopes that someone will figure out how to eradicate them from the Caribbean, and avoid grouper in hopes that they will make a recovery. And, I will continue to bring up trash when I see it in the ocean in hopes that by removing it some small part of the wild life that remains in the sea will be there the next time I return. Its an enormous task in reality. I hope you will join me in my small little effort to save the sea.
I am not sure what it is about turtles that always fascinates me when I am diving. Sometimes it strikes me that turtles remind me of grumpy old men swimming under water. I guess I can relate to that. Other times I am amazed at just how quickly they can swim and leave me in the dust, even when I am wearing fins.
Some dives are just magical
Over the years, I have seen hawksbill turtles, green sea turtles, Ridley’s turtles and even a leather back turtle. I was amazed when we were sailing to see an enormous leather back turtle surface directly in front of our catamaran. I had no idea that a turtle that probably weighed half a ton could immediately dive down with seemingly very little effort and at a speed that took it out of the center of our catamaran.
I especially like to see sunlight reflected off the shells of green sea turtles because their shells reflect so many colors. So here is to the turtle, I tip my hat so to speak.
The Grenadines are known for having nearly countless small underwater creatures to see under the sea. Arrow crabs, banded shrimp and other small creatures are plentiful to see if you are scuba diving.
A banded shrimp hanging upside down waiting for fish to be cleaned
We had seen a number of small hermit crabs during our trip to the Grenadines. There were quite a few to be seen, but for the most part they were in shells that were not much bigger than a silver dollar. Most species of hermit crab have long, spirally curved abdomens, which are soft, unlike the hard, calcified abdomens seen in related crustaceans. The vulnerable abdomen is protected from predators by a salvaged empty seashell carried by the hermit crab. The shell is ususally large enough so the crabs entire body can retract inside the shell. Hermit crabs often use the shells of sea snails (although the shells of bivalves and scaphopods and even hollow pieces of wood and stone are used by some species). The tip of the hermit crab’s abdomen is adapted to clasp strongly onto the columella of the snail shell. Most hermit crabs are nocturnal.
So I was not expecting to swim around a part of the reef only to come face to face with a hermit crab whose home shell was as big as my head.
The biggest hermit crab I’ve ever seen
Even assuming the crab did not fill the shell entirely, he was enormous, and obviously quite strong because he did not seem to have any problem trying to carry about such a large shell.
