Do you snoot II?
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Trying to stay neutral?
Wide angle at the Keith Tibbetts in Cayman Brac
Want to go to Tonga?
Is it time to go back to Fiji?
The islands of Fiji 
Broadclub cuddlefish 
The cabbage patch 
blue green damsel fish and stag horn coral 
Blue chromis in the afternoon sun 
Rainbow reef 
Rainbow reef in Tevouni with loads of soft corals 
A juvenile anemone fish trying to hide in an anemone
How should underwater photographers treat the underwater environment?
Delicate vase sponges
Have you seen a fresh water jelly fish?
Close up of a fresh water jelly fish
Have you been diving on the Lesleen M?
My grandfather used to say quite often “Sonny using the right tool for the job makes all the difference.” My grandfather was a very skilled repairman who could take almost any mechanical device apart and repair it, most of the time without any schematics, diagrams or other description of the devise. When he took something apart he was very systematic. When he was done dissembling a device it looked like an engineer’s exploded schematic of the device. Of course for him the device went back together with no left over parts and almost always worked better than when he found it. Coming from my grandfather, advice about using the right tool for the project had significant meaning to me.
On the other hand, some of my family members motto has been adapt and change to meet the situation. Or if you don’t have the right tool for the job, improvise.
So I guess it is somewhat telling that one of my reoccurring nightmares is going on a trip to take pictures of whales underwater and discovering the camera rig is set up for macro or worse yet super macro. How many pictures of a whale’s eye do you need or want?
The same thought applies to ship wrecks. When I think about shooting a ship wreck I am thinking about what is the environment like where the wreck is located?
Is the reef near the wreck, is the reef interesting? Has the wreck begun to grow over the wreck?
In preparing for a recent trip to St. Lucia I had looked on the internet to see what the most important wreck off the coast of St. Lucia was. I found some reasonably helpful information about the Lesleen M which pointed out that the Lesleen M Wreck is an old cargo ship that was sunk in 1986. The resulting artificial reef is home to numerous species of coral and aquatic life. The Lesleen M Wreck lies evenly on its keel. The wreck is approximately 165 feet long and rests at a depth of at a depth of 60 feet. From inside the engine room of the Lesleen M Wreck, there is a ladder that takes you into the cabins of the main deck. I think that is a reasonable good description of what I saw when I dove the Lesleen M.
But wouldn’t you know the day I dove the Lesleen M instead of having my wide angle lens, I had a 105 mm macro lens. So how did I adapt and adjust? I had no choice but to shoot macro. Here are few macro shots I took.
And there were a few other interesting shots…
But alas, no pictures of what I would call an underwater wreck. I guess I will have to go back.
Do you have a favorite undersea animal?
Have you been to St. Lucia?
green moray in your face
Have you been to Anilao?
Have you been diving in the Exumas Cayes in the Bahamas?
The Exhumas are a group of islands that are part of the Bahamas that begin about 30 miles of the southeaster tip of New Providence island where Nassau is located. The Exhumas are a beautiful chain of coral islands. On one side is the Atlantic Ocean, on the other side is the Gulf. On the Gulf side it is easy to sail in 20+knot winds and the water is still relatively calm. On the Atlantic side, with the same winds whip up the seas and it is easy to have 5-6 foot swells.
By staying on the gulf side of the islands, we managed to move relatively effortlessly without getting beat to a pulp by the seas. The diving on the gulf side, well it was relatively shallow, but the sea life was relatively diverse.
Red tipped sea goddess nudibranch, of course shows up while I have a wide angle set up on the camera.
The creatures also included a rather large slipper lobster, who I thought was as large as I had ever seen.
For diving, it was important to be at the dive site ready to dive either on slack high or slack low tide. Most sites are near the channels between the islands. if you try to dive the sites without being on slack tide you are going to be doing a serious drift dive with currents ranging from 2-5 knots. Given that we were not particularly well set up for drift dives it meant that we had to time our dives well to be on slack water. Of course in between we were able snorkel and saw eagle rays, green sea turtles and even swimming pigs and native iguanas.
Most days early morning and sunsets were spectacular.
Do you remember the King Cruiser accident?
The only wreck dive in the Phukett area of Thailand, is near the Phi Phi islands. The MS King Cruiser was a car ferry. On May 4, 1997 it sank off the West Coast of Southern Thailand. The ferry was operating between Phuket and the Phi Phi Islands in southern Thailand when she hit a submerged collection of rocky pinnacles at Anemone Reef, 10 miles off Phi Phi Island. The impact tore a large hole in the hull, and the vessel sank within two and a half hours. Nevertheless all of the passengers were rescued.
The ferry was on a regular crossing in normal conditions, and the Anemone Reef was charted and well known by captains in the area. This has led to various unproven theories as to why the accident occurred. Theories include insurance fraud due to the owners experiencing financial difficulties on the unprofitable route, and also that local dive companies paid the captain to sink the vessel as, up until that time, there were no wreck dives around Phuket. The captain was found to be negligent.
The vessel sits upright on a sandy bottom in around 30 meters of water. Originally the shallowest part of the wreck rose to ~10 meters, but today most of the superstructure is collapsed making the shallowest part of the wreck currently deeper than 18 meters. The wreck remains largely in one piece, although all of the upper deck has collapsed.
When we dove the King Cruiser we had a calm day, with very small surface waves. Although we were diving the wreck at slack high tide, the current around the wreck was moving. Getting to the mooring ball with my camera was a chore. We all descended on the mooring line which ties to the wheelhouse. Once we got to the wreck, the wreck for the most part blocked the current. The thing that struck me was that the first school of fish we was a school of giant porcupine fish. Now in the past I have seen a couple of porcupine fish swimming together but I’ve never seen a school of several hundred swimming together. Now here was the disappointing problem, besides the current moving pretty quickly where the porcupine fish were swimming, viz was maybe 20 feet. Instead of burning my air to try to get a picture that would at best have been difficult to see the school, I opted to follow individuals around as they swam around the boat. 
As we dropped down over the leeward side of the wreck it was pretty obvious that the hull was covered in oyster shells and other mollusks. I could see an enormous number of sea urchins. That was reason enough to be careful not to touch anything. But there were also other reasons like lion fish and stone fish on the hull. If you look closely beneath the lionfish in the middle of the screen you can see the tail of a stone fish who is right next to a sea urchin. 
Soon we were in the mist of an enormous school of big eyed snappers. The schools of fish were crazy and the were everywhere.
As we made our way around the wreck we found the ship’s propeller which is at about 93 feet. 
The current near the bottom was not nearly as strong as it was towards the top of the wreck so I stayed near the bottom, but had to watch my deco time. I stayed over 20 minutes at 90+ feet and then had to move up once I got back to the leeward side of the ship.
Where there were once windows in the ship there were large cutout where you could look in and see some of the schools of fish. 
When I reached the stern of the wreck again it was time to start the ascent. No I didn’t go into deco, but I did have to do three stops to avoid doing so. This was a very good dive to be diving a shearwater dive computer since it made determining the end and stops on the way back up very easy.
All in all the King Cruiser was an interesting dive. I was really wanting the rebreather so I could have extended my bottom time and not had to rush through certain parts of the dive.