 When it comes to careers in diving, I think I have been as
fortunate as anyone who has ever donned a set of mask, fins and snorkel. After
all, in a career that has spanned more than 35 years and 10,000-plus dives, I
have made my living traveling the globe with my cameras and pen to help tell the
story of the world’s oceans. I am not claiming to have seen or done it all, but
my “been there, done that” list is getting pretty long. The beauty of diving is
that the opportunities are limitless — I still have a long list of places I want
to visit and animals I have not yet photographed.
The Middle of Nowhere
One of the places that I want to get to know a whole lot better is a “place”
that I often think of as “the middle of nowhere,” although it really isn’t a
single place. It is the waters of the open ocean, a “place” often far out of
sight of land and high above the seafloor below. No doubt the open ocean is
vast, and at times it can seem to be an enormous void, but patience and closer
inspection often reveal a fascinating variety of wildlife not often seen over
reefs and other sites where sport divers commonly explore. Despite all my years
of diving and my intense interest in natural history, in the waters of the open
sea it is not uncommon to find myself having no idea how to classify the
bizarrelooking creatures I swim with. While some look much like miniature adults
of their species, many are larval forms that bear little, if any, resemblance to
their adult forms. Other creatures have what are often described as gelatinous
bodies. Many are harmless ctenophores and tunicates. Other semi-translucent,
gelatinous animals are jellyfishes, or their close relatives. To protect myself
against their stings, no matter what the water temperature, I wear a full wet
suit, hood and gloves when diving the open sea. Still other gelatinous masses
are the eggs of squid and other creatures that inhabit the open sea. But the
heart-in-my-throat excitement I always feel — and I do mean always — when
freediving or scuba diving in the open sea is not generated just by the presence
of tiny larval creatures or gelatinous organisms. That feeling results from the
mystery of the unknown — the possibility of encountering some large shark,
whale, billfish or other creature that seems to magically appear, literally, out
of nowhere. You never know what the deep blue will provide. Sometimes I find
myself in a big lifeless world of nothing but salt water. But at other times,
every minute or two it seems like I see some lifeform I have never seen before.
It doesn’t matter how experienced you are as a diver, when you step off a boat
in the middle of nowhere, where there is no land in sight or the closest land is
merely a difficult-to-see bump on the horizon, your heart is going to beat a
little faster and you are going to feel the excitement in your guts. Out there,
the ocean seems huge (it is), and if you are anything like everyone I know who
has ever dived the open sea, you will feel insignificantly small and somewhat
vulnerable (you are). But it is also alluring, exciting and big-time fun.
My First Times
I made my first open-ocean dives more than 30 years ago in the waters off
the Southern California coastline. In those days we “hopped” kelp paddies,
meaning we dived under floating rafts of giant kelp pulled loose from the bottom
and that were floating on the surface in the open sea far from land. Like other
drifting debris, those “rafts of kelp” often attracted schools of yellowtail,
dorado, ocean sunfish, bonito and other open-ocean fishes including the
occasional blue and mako shark. Sometimes from the surface we could get an idea
of what animals might be swimming below a paddy, but jumping into the open sea
is always a case of “keep your head on a swivel” and be ready for whatever swims
by.
Southern California Shark Dives
 A blue shark swims in front of a shark cage, a shot taken in the
late 1970s in the open ocean off Southern California.
To add to our kelp paddy dives, along with several of my diving buddies I worked as part of a team that began to take shark cages out
into the open sea. We did it so we could have a safe place to be when we baited
the sharks, as we had learned that on the days when we couldn’t readily find
kelp paddies and we just jumped into the water in the middle of nowhere, empty
blue water was usually all we saw. After a while we built shark cages and bought
bait, and found that could consistently attract and photograph blue sharks and
mako sharks. Eventually we began to work outside of cages when attempting to
photograph the sharks and other creatures, which ranged from pelagic stingrays
to salp chains. Being outside the cage is commonplace with baited sharks in some
settings today, but 30 years ago we were on the leading edge of a new adventure
in diving.
Hawaii's Open Ocean
For the past seven years I have served as a photo pro, giving seminars and
helping participating divers learn about underwater photography, at the Kona
Classic, a spring event in Kona, Hawaii. The Hawaiian Islands are extremely
sheer mountains that rise dramatically from the deep seafloor below. Because the
islands are so sheer, extremely deep water can be found very close to shore, and
several of Kona’s dive operators take advantage of their access to the open sea
to venture offshore to look for pilot whales, dolphin pods and oceanic whitetip
sharks, among other open ocean inhabitants that
routinely cruise near the surface. The waters of the open ocean off Kona have a
well-deserved reputation for being exceptionally clear and for being full of
marine mammals, sharks and a variety of fishes and other creatures. On sunny
days you feel like you can see forever, but by any stretch of the imagination,
you cannot see all the way to the bottom. I have never measured the visibility,
but I can say that you can often see so far that even large whales and sharks
often look tiny in the distance. Diving in such clear water is a magical
experience. I find the mystery of the unknown and feeling so small in such a
vast ocean always to be both humbling and exciting, and it always makes my heart
race with excitement. But I am always able to relax as soon as I see something
to photograph. In Hawaii that “something” seems to show up quite often.
On my dive my biggest score was photographing a larval slipper lobster
riding through the open sea on a salp chain. The larval
crustacean looked somewhat like a large spider and I was ecstatic to see it.
Black-Water Night Dive
At the recent Kona event I had a chance to dive the open sea at night. Dive
leader Matthew D’Avella has made more than 300 excursions into the open sea
after sunset where he has filmed some extraordinary creatures, including the
pelagic Hawaiian sea horse, larval eels, larval flatfish, a larval broadbill
swordfish, numerous deep-water fishes that rise toward the surface to feed in
the moonlight, salp chains and myriad invertebrates, including the gelatinous
mollusks known as heteropods, ctenophores, siphonophores, shrimps and larval
lobsters. On these dives the boat crew deploys a sea anchor — a parachute
attached to the boat — into the water to slow down the drift speed of the boat.
Most of the divers are tethered to the boat via some safety lines so the divers
can’t go deeper than about 40 feet (12 m) and can’t drift away from the boat,
but even so, there is something very different and very exciting about stepping
off a boat in the darkness of night over a bottom that is more than 5,000 (1,515
m) feet below you. No doubt, a black-water night dive is not a dive for the
newly certified or faint of heart, but with proper training and equipment a
black-water night dive will open up an entirely new diving universe. So many of
the creatures that Matthew and his friends have filmed had never been
documented, and that is a huge thrill for everyone who participates. On my dive
my biggest score was photographing a larval slipper lobster riding through the
open sea on a salp chain. The larval crustacean looked somewhat like a large
spider and I was ecstatic to see it. I also saw a variety of comb jellies,
numerous larval fishes, and a small fish hiding in a salp chain. Throughout the
dive, everywhere I looked it seemed like I was seeing something that was new to
me. On numerous sightings I only knew that the organism had a fascinating
appearance, but I had no idea what I was seeing. That sort of thing doesn’t
happen to me very often these days when diving a reef, but it is a common
occurrence when I dive in the open sea. It’s “pelagic magic.” Based on my
experiences, the name is truly apropos, not only for the black-water night dive,
but for all the dives that take place in the open sea. Ever since I returned
home from Kona I have been scheming and plotting about how to do more open-ocean
diving. I want to see more big animals swimming through the blue and I want to
drift with the planktonic soup in the middle of the night in hopes of
photographing another creature that is unknown to me, and perhaps unknown to
science. It’s hard to imagine a more exhilarating adventure. |
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