Tag Archives: blue water

Have you been to the “bad lands” in Belize?

Those dark spots are the reef reaching up to grab the boat

Belize is about the size of Massachusetts, so we are not talking about a large land mass, at least for someone from Texas. Belize is lucky because off it’s coast is the second largest reef system in the world. The Meso American reef stretches the entire length of the coast of Belize and carries over to the Riviera Maya in Mexico to the north, and down to Honduras to the south.

There are quite a few islands off the coast of the mainland. Perhaps the most famous islands include San Pedro, and Caye Cauker. What becomes obvious if you fly into Placencia, is that there are quite a few islands not far from the mainland. Many of the islands and islets have interesting names such as Ray Caye, South Caye, Silk Caye ect. Some are have houses or other buildings on them. Some are not much more than a palm tree or two and maybe a mangrove tree or two. But sandwiched among a number of the islands is an area that from a sailing perspective is a fairly difficult area to navigate. In the “bad lands” the water tends to be shallow, and the reef is not particularly well charted.

Ten years ago when we first sailed into the bad lands with a very capable South African captain, he told me that he really watched his gps chart constantly because he did not want to run aground. He explained and it became pretty obvious fairly quickly that the reef was very shallow and rose and fell without a lot of warning. Our captain 10 years ago followed exactly the same track on each trip, just so he would not run aground. Ten years later we sailed with a Belizean captain. Captain David knew the bad lands like the back of his hand, but still he was careful to watch the shadows in the water to make sure the reef did not reach up and grab our boat.

But because the bad lands are pretty shallow they make an excellent place to go snorkeling.

Are the bad lands deep enough to dive, perhaps, but they are probably better just to snorkel and save our gas for a part of the reef that is not so shallow.

Have you been to the Cistern dive site in BVI?

Megan exploring Cistern Point
Megan exploring Cistern Point

The first dive we did in British Virgin Islands (“BVI”) in 2018 was at the  Cistern point off of Cooper island. We dropped down behind the boat and swam to the mooring line.  We dropped to the bottom which was at 27 feet at the mooring ball.  The area around the mooring ball was mostly sand. It looked like the cat. 5 hurricane last year had beaten up most of the hard coral. But the hard coral is slowing making a come back.

The soft corals are ok, but a bit sparse. It was a sunny day to start, but later in the dive the sun started to go behind the clouds, meaning that I had to turn up the strobes a bit .  I found quite a few large lobsters in various overhangs. They looked to be in the 5 + pound range.

Megan diving with lobster
diver with lobster

There were several dips in the ocean floor. I dropped down to see the various animals hiding in the hole in the reef. The fish seem to be making a bit of a come back. We saw several scrawled file fish. I saw one queen trigger fish.  I saw quite a few box fish and one adult barracuda.  We saw three large tarpon near a cave mouth. Inside the cave were some silversides and there were two lion fish hunting the silversides.

Later in the dives we got reasonably close to the tarpon.

Three tarpon swimming over the reef
Three tarpon swimming over the reef; its actually 15 feet of fish:  3 X 5 foot tarpon

Late in the dive we found a turtle. I took quite a few shots of him and got a few with my daughter Megan in the picture.

Megan and the turtle
Megan and the turtle

Near the end of the dive we found one spotted moray who was pretty well hidden.

At the end of the dive an eagle ray that was easily 6 ft across came through the site. He was missing a tail.

A large eagle ray swimming away from us

I swam hard for both the turtle and the eagle ray.  The turtle wasn’t too hard to catch.   The ray was pretty fast and it was hard to get close to him.

I was a bit tired after the dive since the swim back to the boat was through some surge and the wind had picked up and was blowing us away from the boat.

The new housing and strobes worked well. I took over 200 images on the one hour long dive. Maximum depth was 42 feet. Viz was maybe 50-60 feet, less at the beginning and end of the dive. Better in the middle of the dive.

Have you been diving in the Exumas Cayes in the Bahamas?

Farmers Caye in the morning
Farmers Caye in the morning

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

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. 

slipper lobster
slipper lobster

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. 

sun rise Farmers Caye
sun rise Farmers Caye

Do you remember the King Cruiser accident?

King Cruiser bow
King Cruiser bow

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. 

stern railing
stern railing

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.   

Wanna go to Thailand? you should

After making a 10 day exploratory trip to Thailand I can say, I sure hope I get to go back.  Here is what I learned from the trip. 

  1.     If you can break the flights into multi-day segments, do so.   What did I do:  I flew Dallas to Doha, Qatar (about a 15 hour segment) Doha to Phuket, Thailand, (6+ hours) with a multi-hour layover in Qatar.  Even though all the segments were on 777’s, flying 20+ hours is just a beating.   I hope next time I can break the trip up into somewhat more manageable segments.  Dallas to Hawaii, after a couple of days in Hawaii to …. (you get the point, hop skip and jump style flying). 
  2. If you fly the trip all at once, get a day room when you land.  I did and I was very glad to be able to sleep 5 hours and then go find the sail boat I would live on for 10 days.  Oh and having a pool at the day room was good too since after all of that flying I needed a way to stretch out the muscles that had been cramped up in those airplane seats.  
  3. Thai food is awesome.  Every meal I had was great.  Now many of the meals I had were on the catamaran, but the meals I had on shore were also great and ridiculously inexpensive.  Try finding a restaurant in the U.S. where you can get a main course and a drink for $6 U.S. at dinner.  Do be careful, the Thai’s like their food spicy so get the tourist version of the meal at least until you figure out how spicy you like it.   
  4. After flying as long as you have to in order to get to Thailand, get a Thai massage.  Compared to  what you would pay in the U.S. they are very reasonable.  $400 baht or as of this writing about $12 U.S. 

    porcelain crab fishing for dinner
    porcelain crab fishing for dinner   

    5.  If you are an underwater photographer, plan on shooting more macro than wide angle.  From Phuket where I got on the boat, until we had sailed down to Phi Phi island,  the water reminded me of the Platte river in Nebraska; too thick to drink to thin to plow.  We did not do any diving for the first couple of days of the trip because the water visibility was too poor.  Diving would have resembled the Helen Keller diving school, you see with your hands and not with your eyes.  That said there was plenty to see topside.   

    Koh Hong
    Koh Hong

    6. If all you shoot underwater is macro, you are going to miss some great wide angle shots.  If you think about it for a moment, you will probably realize that the abundance of particulate in the water is food to fish.  And, yes we did see some amazing schools of fish on quite a few of the dive sites.  So if all you shot was macro, you may have missed shooting the enormous fish aggregations.  

There were three divers on the other side of this school of fish.  I couldn’t see them, can you? Now I could swim through the school of fish to find them, but I think I’ll take a shot or two before I do so.  

7. The long tail boats (see the first picture above) are everywhere and you do need to be careful where you surface.  Near Phuket the long tails are powered by what looks like an old chevy engine. 

long tail boat
long tail boat

The engine is attached to about an 8 foot transmission with a propeller at the end.  That system allows the long tails to operate in very shallow water with a draft of about a foot. 

For divers long tails can be bad, because if you get hit by the prop you will look like a frog in a blender.  Not a pretty sight.  As we got further from Phukett the long tail boat engines were smaller so that towards the end of the trip they were running with what looked and sounded like lawn mower engines, but even those engines could deliver a lethal blow to an unsuspecting diver.   We surfaced as a group and made sure we had our smb’s deployed during the safety stop.  

8.  Be ready for current.  Cozumel Mexico has current, for the most it part goes one direction.  The Cozumel  port authority shuts down diving if the current gets too fast or the weather gets too bad.   The water around Thailand has current; its fast and it doesn’t necessarily go in one direction on any given dive.  There is no port authority monitoring it.  Early in the trip we anchored the boat, threw out the tag line and the pool was open.  One of the guests jumped in with a noodle and before he came up he had reached the end of a 50 foot tag line.   We moved the boat and got out of that current.   So watch the current it can be fast.  Dive with locals who know the local currents.  

Those are the big points I learned from the trip.  More on the dive sites later… 

 

Have you been to Paradise?

Rainbow reef in Tevouni
Rainbow reef in  Taveuni with loads of soft corals

For the most part, when I travel, I usually have a pretty good idea of what I expect to see when I arrive at my destination.  Typically before I leave to go to a destination, I have looked at one or more photo sites to give me  a sense of what I may be able to see, and shoot, when I get to the destination.  Many times I have done some research on the accommodations that we will be staying at to make sure we don’t get an ugly surprise.  It is rare that I am surprised, and even more rare that I am pleasantly surprised.  I suppose based on all of the traveling I have done, I am spoiled and have very high expectations.  And yet, a pleasant surprise is what we found in Taveuni at Paradise resort.  

In five days of diving, I did 15 dives, 3 dives a day, and each of the sites we saw were different and I did not grow bored with the sites becoming too similar.  Fiji is famous for being the soft coral capital of the world.  Paradise Resort which has relatively quick access to rainbow reef is in my mind the epicenter of soft coral diving.  Keep in mind, to be interesting there must be a pretty good current that runs through a dive site with soft coral to adequately feed the soft coral and keep them open and beautiful. 

Most of our dives we did on slack high or slack low tide, so the current was not completely rippin’.  After one of our dives one of our guides pointed out a place where the current was racing through near where we had been diving.  The current looked to be well over 5 knots and if we had been there we would not have been there long!

Soft corals and a blizzard of fish

If you want to be able to push a big camera through the current, be prepared to bring your big blade fins.  I wore my dive rite fins and left most of the people on our trip behind.  Split fins may be comfortable, but leave them for water that doesn’t move as much. And be prepared to be well fed at the resort.  Big engines need lots of fuel!

Back at the resort there are opportunities to shoot macro shots, with nudibranchs and the house reef has resident blue ribbon eels and other macro subjects. 

A juvenile anemone fish trying to hide in an anemone

During the week, we saw sharks, but because there is no feeding of sharks in the area.   The white tip sharks did not approach our group and were content to sleep just off the wall in water too deep to dive.  We also saw two enormous Napoleon wrasses that each would have weighed well over 300 pounds.  We saw several dozen pilot whales on our way to several of the dive sites and a pod of dolphins as well.  Sure it would have been interesting to get closer to them than 20 meters while on the surface, but I was quite content to be able to observe them from afar.  So when will I go back to Paradise Resort, as soon as I can find  space in my schedule.  I will plan on spending at least two weeks there next time.    

Rainbow reef after the storm

Hurray it’s shark week again

Grey reef shark
Grey reef shark swimming overhead

In my opinion, apex predators are very interesting.  From what I have observed they are curious and will investigate what they think might be food.  If there is food in the water they will take an easy meal.  

This is why you wear the suit-
This is why you wear the suit

Sharks unlike people do not have hands which might otherwise allow them to tactically check out potential meals.   So what do they do, they taste potential entres with their mouths.  Now that might seem bad, it can have a bad effect on anyone the shark chooses to sample.  

Grey reef shark at shark junction
Grey reef shark at shark junction

So I keep thinking they sure are interesting but I ill try to avoid becoming a meal,  

 

Have you seen the array of colors underwater?

Orange Elephant ear sponges off the coast of little Tobago

I admit it, as a photographer the first thing I see in an image is color.  Some people see texture, some see composition, but I see color.   Growing up,  most of the time I spent in the water was either in a pool or in a fresh water lake. Ok if you are lucky a pool is a nice color blue and a lake is some what clear and you can see fish.    Imagine my surprise the first time I went snorkeling in the Caribbean.  Lots of colors in sponges and fish and coral.  Continue reading Have you seen the array of colors underwater? →

Have you seen the Sea Star after the hurricane?

sea star wreck with railng
Sea Star wreck with railing and sun ball
The last time I dove on the wreck known as the Sea Star off the coast of Grand Bahama, the ship was intact and it was relatively easy to circumnavigate around the exterior of the ship.  The ship may have had a small list to one side but it seemed to be otherwise upright and easy to tell that it was formerly a ship.  

In December 2016 a hurricane went through Grand Bahama and did quite a bit of damage on the island, but also changed several of the dive sites that are just off shore from the island.  The Sea Star went from looking like a ship to being torn in about half and left in the shape of an “L”.  It certainly opened up the cargo hold.  

And, while many parts of the ship were almost unrecognizable, towards what was the stern of the ship there were still parts that looked similar to what we had seen of the stern in our previous visit.  And, some of the sponge life was undisturbed by the storm.

 

The new “foot print” of the Sea Star does give some interesting views that previously either didn’t exist or were not as recognizable.  

It will be interesting to see if the sea life that previously grew on the Sea Star re-establishes itself in the coming years.  

Turtles

 

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.