Some days I think about all the types of certain critters I have seen and then think that I will probably not see something new on the next trip. It sure is nice to be wrong. During the last trip to Grand Bahama it was awesome to see a loggerhead turtle up close.
I had only seen a loggerhead turtle one other time and that was from a boat deck. The last time I saw one it was only for a brief second because he popped his head up only a few meters ahead of our catamaran and then ducked down again as he saw we were sailing right towards him. I don’t think I have ever seen a turtle move so fast. Now he was never in danger because he would have passed between the two pontoons of the boat without any problem. Nevertheless, because I was close to the front of the boat I could see just how enormous he was. Most turtles I have seen have been maybe a few feet across the bottom of their shell. The fellow who swam under the boat was easily 2 meets across the bottom of his shell. If I had to guess he must have weighed several hundred pounds.
The loggerhead turtle I saw in the Bahamas raced through the dive site, right past a bunch of divers. He was huge — well over 500 pounds.
At first I did not see any reason for why this turtle seemed quite determined to “motor” through the site. It was only after I took the first shot that I saw why. Maybe having a grey reef shark following you is no big deal for a turtle that weighs several hundred pounds.
But then again, maybe having a large shark following you is just an annoyance. I really don’t know, but even if I had a hard shell, I don’t think I would mess around with those teeth. So maybe swimming through the circle of divers was the idea after all. We were the bait.
Oh yeah, the turtle took a right angle after passing me, and the shark just kept swimming straight. Who says turtles are slow.
Yes I understand that storms that go through dive sites are just part of the natural process that exists. But, I sometimes have mixed emotions when I see just how powerful some storms are and the damage they do.
Recently I dove a site off Grand Bahama that I dove a couple of years ago called the Chamber. The chamber is an old recompression chamber that was sunk after it failed inspection. I wrote about the dive a couple of years ago particularly since it was close to shark junction which is one of my favorite sites because of all the grey reef sharks.
The last time I saw the chamber it was sitting on the side of the site that was closest to shore. This time it was on the opposite side of the site. I am told that the chamber was found after the storm about a half mile away from where it had been originally. The dive shop Unesco used lift bags to pick up the chamber and move it back on to the site it had been on before. The chamber is probably close to 20 feet long and 6 to 8 feet across. I couldn’t guess how much it weighs but we would be talking about tonnage not pounds or kilograms.
The chamber was moved over half mile from its prior position by the December 2016 hurricane
To me it is hard to imagine moving such an object, let alone moving it hundreds of meters underwater.
The more interesting changes occurred with what is often referred to as the Papa Doc wreck. Two years ago the hull of the wreck was still pretty much intact and even at the stern you could see places where fish hid inside crawl spaces in the hull.
Gray angel fish swimming off the stern of the Papa doc wreck
Now the sea life that was growing on the wreck looks like it had been sand blasted off the wreck and the stern of the ship is largely demolished.
papa doc stern
Not surprisingly, even the wheel house took a pretty good beating.
Wheel house of the papa doc wreck
The sand surrounding the wreck is probably two feet deeper than before the storm. So I can only imaging what the swirl of sand must have looked like when the hurricane came through in December 2016.
Not long ago I had an opportunity to do a shark dive off the coast of Grand Bahama.
Our shark wrangler-shark feeder was Olivier. Olivier explained that on the dive we would drop to the bottom about 45 feet below the boat. We would line up with our backs to the Pretender wreck. Apparently the Pretender wreck got its name because there is so little left of the wreck that is just pretends to be a wreck.
Inasmuch I had the “big camera” they wanted me on the end of the line. Olivier explained that he would work his way across the bottom in front of our line and would start feeding at the other end of the line of eight divers. I thought that would be good since it would give me extra time to make sure I had selected the best combination of depth of field and shutter speed that I could use under the existing conditions. Inasmuch as I figured the Sharks would stir up the sand on the bottom, I decided to shoot natural light, but had my video light to throw a little extra light if I needed it.
We had a partly cloudy day with intermittent times when the sun would be exposed and throw a substantial amount of light on the white sandy bottom of the dive site. We would be kneeling during the shark feed.
Olivier explained that he would feed for a while, but then would try to put a shark to sleep and then would allow us to each feel the skin of the shark. He would then massage the shark some more and if the shark was malleable he would be able to lift the shark into a shark stand and then let the shark go.
After Olivier finished briefing the dive he began to put on the chain mail suit which he would use as protection from any shark that might otherwise try to bit him. The chain mail suit reminded me of something you might see on a knight in medieval times. The suit covered him from head to foot and included gloves and boots. All told the suit weighted 25 pound. Olivier said jumping into the water with the suit on was like jumping into the water with a boat anchor attached.
This is why you wear the suit-
Between the suit and the container of fish, Olivier would make a quick drop through the water column to the white sand bottom below. The regulators that would provide air to Olivier during the dive were wrapped in what looked like electrical conduit so that Olivier’s air supply was somewhat protected from an inadvertent shark bite. The BC he was wearing was similar to most BCs but did carry a number of scars from where it had been bitten. While Olivier was gearing up, Shelly the official video-grapher was putting on her chain mail suit and getting ready for the jump.
The Sharks that were expected to show up for the meal were gray reef Sharks. What we saw were about 20- 25 Grey reef sharks and a couple of nurse sharks that converged on the dive site. Olivier had warned us that if any great hammer head sharks showed up, he would call the dive and the dive would be over and he would not continue to feed the Sharks. He explained that a great hammer head shark could make short work of his suit and would be far more to deal with than we would want to do.
Olivier said normally once the feeding was done, he would walk away from the group and the group could search the sand for any shark teeth that had fallen out during the dive.
Before we started the dive, Olivier asked if I would mind taking a few stills of him for his personal collection. He said that after the feed was over when he walked away from the group, I could follow along behind him at a safe distance to take some shots of him feeding the Sharks away from the site. I said sure that sounds like an interesting challenge. Besides I figured I had the benefit of professional curtsy so why worry.
Olivier done feeding-
The guests all geared up and then after the safety divers were in the water we began to drop to the bottom towards the pretender wreck. The Sharks had already begun to congregate in expectation of a meal. They tended to circle in a clockwise circle. As I headed towards the bottom, I started shooting. I figured that I needed to know if the shutter speed and aperture settings I had selected were going to work. I checked the camera display and the settings seemed to be a bit bright when the sun was out, but fine when the sun went behind a cloud. I decided to leave everything as I had set it.
As the divers settled towards the bottom, we lined up in a line on our knees in front of the Pretender Wreck. Not long after the last diver was lined up, Olivier appeared from behind a large coral head. It was no surprise to see him because just before he landed on the bottom the 20+ Sharks whom we had been watching changed their course to get closer to Oliver near the other coral head. I can only imagine that Olivier’s BC was struggling to keep him off the bottom based on the weight of the suit and the feeding container. It was not Olivier’s usual perfect body position in the water, but he made it work to move the 20 or so yards over to the pretender wreck. Shelly was right behind him taking video as Olivier made his way over. While they were trying to get into place, the Sharks continued to circle. Now instead of one or two at a time they were stacked up 3 or 4 abreast swimming through the site. Oliver began feeding the Sharks.
The action was fast and furious. At times Olivier would disappear in what looked like a shark vortex. Among the Sharks, there were horse eyed jacks and some yellow tailed snappers. All were looking for a free meal. Only the Sharks were big enough to muscle their way into the vortex to try to get in line for food.
Yes he is in the scrum somewhere!
After a while Oliver selected a smaller shark, maybe only 5 feet in length to try to put to sleep. He was successful and brought the shark around to the divers so anyone who wanted to feel shark shin could. I kept shooting.
Shark stand-
After the main feed was over, I followed Olivier over towards the other coral head. I thought I was relatively far away, but Shelly made sure I stayed a bit farther back. Probably a good thing, since I was the only one in the frame without a chain mail suit. The action continued to be fast. At one point I had to stop shooting because the memory card had slowed down because there were too many shots stacked on top of one another to load to the card. I paused and let the memory card catch up and then started shooting again. What a blast. For someone who likes fast action, this was definitely fast. I kept watching and seeing different shots to take. In an ordinary dive of an hour or so, I take maybe 60 to 70 shots which usually gives my strobes a huge work out. On this dive without using strobes I shot a total of 320 stills and 10 video clips. Would I do it again – of course. Now I just need to figure out when.
I was thinking about the dives we did in Nassau and it occurred to me that it was some of the most diverse, and productive diving I have had a chance to do. Day 1 we spent a fair amount of time diving with gray reef sharks. Even before the feeding began the sharks were remarkably cooperative in positioning themselves so that they made interesting models.
Grey reef shark swimming overhead
The first day we did two shark divers at shark junction with the Stuart Cove dive shop. Dive one was pretty mellow and while there were quite a few sharks, the 18 divers on the boat never got particularly close to the sharks since they were curious, but at best aloof. The second dive was a shark feed and it was interesting to watch the sharks come in and be fed. There was quite a bit of bumping and jostling for position by the sharks. The divers were all pretty well out of the line of swimming, except for the shark feeder and the photographers who had chain mail suits.
Here is a brief video from the shark feed.
And did I mention the wrecks? There are lots of them and many of them have appeared in one or more movies.
And some of the wrecks are just interesting because their structure has an amazing amount of growth that has accumulated on them.
Imagine this: clear blue warm water. Loads of fish, and a wreck or two to explore. Sounds great, it is.
We sailed a catamaran into Anguilla and tied off in a small bay waiting to go diving the next day. Where we moored was near a small mini wall so we got out of the boat with our snorkels and explored the mini-wall. There were a lot of fish, mostly sergeant majors, but some puffer fish and few grunts. I was feeling lazy so I didn’t take the camera. I figured I would wait until the next day to rig it and used it for the dives we would do the next day.
In Anguilla they require that you use a local dive shop to lead the dives. They say that it is required in order to make sure the divers don’t abuse the reef. I suspect it is really more about keeping the local economy working.
Nevertheless, we the following morning our dive guide arrived and we then went diving on the MV Commerce. The Commerce had been sunk about 20 years before as a purposefully sunk ship. It was a cargo ship before its sinking. It was in relatively good shape for having been down as long as it had, but there were places where the hull had rusted away and there were many places where sponges and coral had grown over the hull. As we were diving I noticed a turtle swimming over head and he appeared to be swimming to the bow of the wreck.
I wasn’t quite sure where he went after he crested the top of the ship so I keep exploring the wreck slowly making my way towards the bow of the ship.
After rounding the bow, I began swimming down the port side of the hull. It was there I found the same turtle. He looked like he was about the take a nap. So as not to disturb him, I made sure that my approach was down below the top of the hull. I estimated about how far down the hull I would have to swim and then I popped over the hull with my camera and took his picture.
I got off only one picture before he swam away. Sometimes it pays to be stealthy.
Its been a while since I was last in St. Martin, or St. Marteen if you prefer. It is not a place that many divers go, but it is a place that attracts a lot of yachts and super-yachts. We were there sailing on a catamaran that was part of the Trade winds fleet. One of my favorite dive sites on St. Martin was a place called turtle reef. Now if you look on most maps of the island you will not find a dive site called turtle reef. We dove with a shop called Octopus diving. They picked us up at our boat which was anchored in Grand Cass. They were well prepared and whisked us off to the diver sites for the days diving.
We did not have far to go. I had not even finished kitting up before we were there. The buoy marking the dive site was not much bigger than a plastic coke bottle. You would probably only find the site if you knew the gps coordinates. After our briefing, Keith and I were ready to get in and see what the site had to offer.
Our expectations were high that we would see a turtle. Viz was pretty good and the site was basically a small pinnacle that rose from the surrounding depths to within 15 feet of the surface. It was a sunny day with lots of light. The site was full of fish life. There were grunts galore, but for much of the dive, no turtles.
But towards the end of the dive the dive master spotted a turtle heading to the pinnacle from much deeper blue water. It was a rather large hawksbill turtle and he was not at all concerned about the presence of a couple of divers.
Hawks bill turtle grazing on sponges
Would I go back to turtle reef? Of course, any day you get to dive with turtles is a good day.
Have you ever noticed that we become accustomed to the sounds around us? Many times we get to the point that we stop hearing those sounds. I was thinking about how I had almost completely blocked out the sounds of the birds on my way to work the other day. Now that might not have been a bad thing particularly since they were a bunch of grackles who don’t have a song, and sound more obnoxious than a gaggle of crows. Nevertheless, it occurred to me that in addition to grackles that there are a lot of other sounds that I have either learned to tune out, or just do so out of self preservation. I take the 5th as to whether I tune out family members.
But I digress. Now when all I took were still images underwater it did not occur to me that noise might make a difference in the quality of the images that I was able to capture. In retrospect, there are probably quite a few images I missed being able to capture because either I or those who were diving with me were too noisy. Yes, I have shot more than my share of fish butts, and I suspect that many fish butt images were a direct result of the enormous amount of noise that open circuit scuba diving makes.
Nevertheless, when I started shooting video it became painfully obvious just how noisy open circuit scuba diving is. I am reminded of that line from Star Wars where Darth Vader says to Skywalker: “Luke I’m your father”…. To me that’s kind of like the sound that scuba divers make breathing on open circuit. In the track below I did not strip off the audio track so in case you have not noticed how loud scuba is, you can hear for yourself.
Now even breathing as slowly and quietly as I could, the grunts and school masters were plenty happy to swim away from me. I’m going to chalk it up to noise, because that beats the alternatives. So historically my process with video is to strip off the audio sound from the video clips and either submit it without sound to my stock agency or if I am going to use the clip for personal use, add a soundtrack. Sometimes my choice of music is a bit questionable, but sometimes it captures the mood I feel when I look at the clip.
So next time you are diving, there probably is a reason the fish seem to be swimming away from you… you are just too noisy.
According to my critters book the crustaceans in the Caribbean can be divided into shrimp, lobsters and crabs. Now assuming we are just talking about seeing these critters underwater, I tend to find the variety of crabs to be the most interesting. Now that is not to say that I do not find the various lobsters to be interesting, its just the variety of crabs seems to be more diverse and that is interesting to me. There are about 45 varieties of crabs in the Caribbean. The largest of which tend to be the channel clinging crabs. I have seen them on quite a few dives in Belize, Mexico, Cayman islands and Dominica. That is not to say they do not live elsewhere in the Caribbean, they do. I just have not had the opportunity to see them.
Now, it seems to me that hermit crabs are the most common crabs I have seen. I have seen them on just about every island or islet I have visited. There appear to be about 11 varieties of hermit crab in the Caribbean, and they range in size from tiny to enormous.
An enormous claw for a polkadotted hermit crab
When I was in Cayman Brac this year, while I was diving on a night dive I looked up under a part of a coral ledge and found a plumed hairy crab. He was very shy and very quickly after I got a shot or two of him he crawled back into his hiding hole in the reef.
plumed hairy crab
Arrow crabs almost always make me laugh because they remind me of daddy long legs, but when they are hunting if they are very successful, they stick their prey on top of their heads and just keep hunting.
arrow crab hunting for dinner
For me, some of the most productive dives for finding crabs, have been night dives. I guess that is not surprising since that is usually when crustaceans hunt for food. Inasmuch as it looks like I still have about 30 varieties of crab to see, I am going to have to do alot more night dives. 🙂
On the trip to Kona I did 22 dives during a week spread out over 20 dive sites. The dive sites were sprinkled along the Kona coast over about 60 miles of coastline. Each site had its own unique characteristics, but there were many similarities. The hard coral for the most part looked pretty much the same.
Before each dive we would get a dive briefing and I would alway being listening to get a sense of the types of animals that we might see during the dive as well as about the reef structure and other features of the particular site. Of course, I was always trying to get a sense of whether I should rig the camera for wide-angle shooting or macro. Many times I would ask the crew the night before whether I should rig the camera for wide-angle or macro because it takes quite a bit of time to get the camera set up if I have to change from one setting to another.
For the most part the crew was pretty good at estimating whether the next day would be good for wide-angle or macro photography. Nevertheless, as Murphy’s law would suggest there were times where I guessed wrong. Now shooting a small animal with a wide-angle set up is not the end of the world, it’s just frustrating. (Kind of like being asked to hit off the golf tee with a putter or sink a put with a driver. Yes, it can be done, because I’ve tried it, but I don’t recommend it. For me and golf it just adds another layer of frustration to an already frustrating game.)
Halgerda-terramtuentis, –yes that little blob on the left hand corner with the iridescent skin is a nudibranch
Shooting a macro subject with a wide-angle lens is similarly frustrating. If you get the critter in the image you end up cropping to the point that the image ends up pretty small. And, you rarely get the detail that I would want to see with a macro lens. In this instance, you could count the spots on the little guy’s back. Now he was less than an inch in length so trying to find him was just dumb luck. Nevertheless, there he was on dive 20 and I doubt that anyone else saw him. Now of course, one of my recurring dreams is to be able to swim with and shoot whales, but with my luck it will probably be a day when I’m rigged for macro. I will probably get a good shot of the eye and then be relegated to shooting barnacles on the whale’s back. Oh well it would still be a good story.
Sometimes when we are underwater, we see cooperation between fish from the same species hunting for food. When I see that kind of behaviour, I think, now that is an interesting cooperative skill. Nevertheless, when we see fish or other animals from different families cooperating to hunt for food together, that is unusual and is well worth watching.
When we were in Hawaii I was somewhat surprised to see a white mouthed moray eel team up with a tivoli to hunt for food.
Now in the middle of the day to see a free-swimming moray eel is fairly uncommon. But to see a free-swimming moral eel hunting with another species of fish is even more unlikely, and certainly is interesting — at least to me. I watched this pair swim together and chase several smaller fish into holes in the reef. I did not see them have any success in hunting. But I could imagine that a ray which could easily get into relatively small holes in the reef could be a very helpful hunting buddy. I could easily imagine the ray either catching and eating a small fish in the hole, or chasing out the small fish into the awaiting jaws of the tivoli. Of course the opposite could be true. the tivoli could chase a smaller fish back to the reef and into the awaiting jaws of the moray eel.
Similarly, on several occasions I have seen snappers hunt with southern rays. The first time I saw that behaviour was on a shark dive in Playa del Carmen. We were waiting for the sharks to come in when the first pair through the dive site was a southern ray and snapper apparently hunting for scraps. I was just hoping that I was not part of the scraps. Now I have seen the benefit of these partnerships between rays and snappers on several occassions. The ray stirs up the bottom looking for food and the snapper gets the left-overs that squirt out the gills of the ray. I have seen southern rays feeding with a snapper in Cayman Brac, Belize, and Mexico. I suspect this kind of cooperative hunting goes on all over. Regardless of how often it may occur, I still never get tired of observing it.
When I first started diving finding healthy stag horn and elk horn coral was easy. Unfortunately, finding healthy stag horn and elk horn coral has become more more difficult more recently. You don’t have to look very far in the headlines to see various headlines about coral bleaching. Unfortunately there have been size-able beaching incidents on the Great Barrier reef and around the world. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2014 through the end of 2016 will likely be the longest coral bleaching event ever recorded. The current bleaching event is largely blamed on global warming. There can be a number of causes of coral bleaching causes, which among others include:
oxygen starvation caused by an increase in zooplankton levels as a result of over fishing;
increased solar irradiance (photo-synthetically active radiation and ultraviolet light);
changes in water chemistry (in particular acidification caused by CO2 pollution;
increased sedimentation (due to silt runoff);
bacterial infections,;
changes in salinityherbicides;
cyanide fishing;
mineral dust from African dust storms caused by drought; and
four common sunscreen ingredients, that are non-biodegradable that can wash off of skin and on to coral.
Some days I think about all the types of certain critters I have seen and then think that I will probably not see something new on the next trip. It sure is nice to be wrong. During the last trip to Grand Bahama it was awesome to see a loggerhead turtle up close. 
I got off only one picture before he swam away. Sometimes it pays to be stealthy. 
Have you ever noticed that we become accustomed to the sounds around us? Many times we get to the point that we stop hearing those sounds. I was thinking about how I had almost completely blocked out the sounds of the birds on my way to work the other day. Now that might not have been a bad thing particularly since they were a bunch of grackles who don’t have a song, and sound more obnoxious than a gaggle of crows. Nevertheless, it occurred to me that in addition to grackles that there are a lot of other sounds that I have either learned to tune out, or just do so out of self preservation. I take the 5th as to whether I tune out family members. 
On the trip to Kona I did 22 dives during a week spread out over 20 dive sites. The dive sites were sprinkled along the Kona coast over about 60 miles of coastline. Each site had its own unique characteristics, but there were many similarities. The hard coral for the most part looked pretty much the same.
