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.
