“Lady of the Deep” – Ras Mohammad National Park, Egypt – Jacques de Vos – Featured Photographer
When you think of Egypt you tend to think of pyramids and sand. Lots of sand! If someone asked me where this image was taken you could have given me 1,000 chances to guess and I would have needed at least 1,001 to guess Egypt.
I’ve gotten several requests for more photos on this blog. So, in response, I will be taking a break from “lessons learned” and will discuss specialty lighting techniques in an upcoming post. Coming soon!
As we continue down this series of lessons learned while exploring the high seas, I feel things wouldn’t be complete unless I told the fable of the infamous “undersea crack”.
Several years ago, I took a trip down to Bonaire to enjoy some of the world’s best shore diving, shoot some photos and just chill out. Bonaire is just one of those places where you can take LONG dives, shoot lots of frames and just do whatever you want, when you want, how you want. This was to be my second trip to Bonaire, so I was very much looking forward to the trip and using every opportunity to make my co-workers as jealous as humanly possible. As part of my diabolical plan to make everyone at home green with envy, I arranged a specific time to have a few good friends look for me on an underwater webcam situated right off the beach in front of my rental.
Fast forward to the island. About a half hour before the scheduled time, I partnered up with one of my best friends and dive buddies and headed off for a leisurely dive to the webcam. We arrived at the right spot and leveled off for a few pics. I was told that the cam refreshed once a minute so to make sure that my picture was taken, I hovered in front of the cam for a good long while. I hovered, and hovered and hovered and hovered there for what seemed like an eternity, and in doing so, got really, really bored. So, once I was convinced that my smiling face was immortalized in cyberspace, I began to swim away.
I couldn’t tell you why, or what got into me at the time, but I just had this urge to drop my shorts and flash the cam a bit of the old moon. So, on my way away from the cam, just for a second, I mooned the camera. Thinking nothing of it, I went on my merry way and finished a great week.
Fast forward again to the following Monday. I marched into the office feeling tan, relaxed and full of stories for my poor coworkers who were stuck in the office all week while I was fulfilling my Aquaman fantasy. As I made my way to my desk, nobody said anything or acted odd at all; just the normal “hello” and “how was your trip”. However when I sat at my desk, it dawned on me. The wallpaper on my desktop was changed to this bluish picture of something I didn’t quite recognize.
The funny thing about one’s own tush, is that until you see a picture of it, you really don’t recognize what you’re looking at. Ah, but as soon as I realized what was shining so brightly on my desktop, I took a look around and noticed that it was on EVERY DESKTOP IN THE OFFICE! Sometimes you find fame for all the wrong reasons.
I guess the moral of the story is that diving is supposed to be fun. It’s vital that we all observe safe diving practices, but none of them preclude the application of humor to what we are doing down there. We all have to work at striking a balance between making good decisions and staying in control of one’s own safety, and not making the sport too rigid. Plan your dive, dive your plan, never hold your breath, stop-think-act, and have a great time!!
Lesson learned: Keep your shorts on, because revenge isn’t always sweet!
Backscatter is a constant problem in underwater photography. So, the less water is lit up, the “cleaner” the image. I have always struggled with backscatter in these turbid UK waters and I have marvelled at the spotlessly clean images produced by other photographers. My buddy Trevor introduced me to the idea of “snoots”, which limit the area of lighting from a strobe, and which produce noticeably cleaner images, as well as opening up interesting lighting possibilities.
For this week’s installment of, lessons learned as a scuba instructor, lets look at one of those bizarre behaviors only seen during checkout dives.
Here’s the scenario. You’re teaching an open water diver course. Your students have performed well in their pool work, and have made it to their open water dives. You bring them to the platform, sandy bottom, or wherever else you’re teaching and start to run through skills. They display out of air signs perfectly. They perform their free flowing regulator skill perfectly. They perform their partially flooded mask skill perfectly. They move on to their fully flooded mask skill and do great. You then give them the signal to remove and replace their mask. They reconfirm their connection to the bottom, take a deep breath, reach up, and remove their mask and woooooooooooooo, they toss it away like one of the Manning brothers! I may be crazy, but it always seemed to me that one would want their mask for the rest of their dive. Seeing is just one of those things that most people cherish.
Divers of the world, you can admit it, this probably occurred at least once on your checkout dive. Instructors, you can also admit, you’ve seen it, and probably are guilty of it “way back when”. For all the dives I’ve done, and all the classes I’ve taught, I will never understand what causes open water divers to throw their mask away during this skill. I’ve gone back and double-checked the text to make sure it doesn’t refer to the skill as “loose your mask and get your instructor to find it”. The dive curriculum makes no mention of finding such things until Search and Recovery Diver. Still, I would say that at least 20% of certification candidates do this. It’s one of the great mysteries of the deep.
If I did most of my teaching in warm clear waters, right on the sandy bottom, this really wouldn’t be more than a minor hiccup. However in Maryland we do most of our teaching in cold, dark quarries with nice thick silt bottoms, which are often 40’+ under the platform where the divers perform their skills. These conditions make the prospect of hunting for a student’s mask less than appealing, not to mention terribly impractical.
All this being said, I’ve adapted! Nothing in the Divemaster’s manual refers to being a goalie, but this is indeed a great description of a divemaster during this particular certification dive. Pre-dive, we (my divemaster and myself) take note of who’s right or left handed, and position them to that side of the student during this skill. So, when the student inevitably takes their mask off and tosses it away, it magically finds its way right back into their hands. It’s as if some mermaid with an unhealthy sense of goodwill was waiting to keep the dive on track.
Although it rarely seems funny to the student until they’ve been handed their c-card, the fact that it happens with such predictability really just makes this even funnier. But it’s all-good! Remember, the first rule of diving is to never hold your breath, but the second rule is to learn to laugh at yourself, learn from your mistakes and be a better, safer, and happier diver. Always be prepared for the unexplainable, yet predictably unpredictable.
Scott Shenton
www.scottshenton.com
Fire coral is nifty stuff. It looks like everything and it looks like nothing. Anyone who has spent any time at all, particularly in the Caribbean, knows how easy it is to “find” fire coral. You can have the best buoyancy control, be perfectly weighted and swear up and down that you didn’t touch anything, yet you have that wonderful burning sensation on your skin somewhere after most dives. It just seems to be everywhere!
As you all know, I shoot underwater photography on the vast majority of my dives and my setup of choice is macro. I just can’t seem to get enough of those extreme close-ups! When shooting macro, a photographer is required to get very close to the subject. Very, very close. A rule of thumb when shooting macro is that when you think you’re close enough, get closer. That’s great advice, except………
On one particular dive, I was trying my hardest to get a great close-up shot of a goby on the rubble bottom, just off the beach. Being that I wasn’t on the reef itself, I made myself negatively buoyant for stability, got my camera pointed at my subject and waited. Every time the goby would dart into his hole, I would inch my face just a bit closer. Inch by inch, I made my way close enough to get the shot I wanted. While angling the camera to frame the shot, I leaned my face against the bottom. Well, as it turns out, my lower lip came in contact with a nice bit of fire coral and it swelled up like a balloon animal at a birthday party. The skin on our lips is quite thin and quite sensitive, so any irritant, like say the nematocysts in fire coral, will have an amplified effect. To give you a point of reference, imagine putting your lower lip into a campfire, or perhaps kissing the engine of your car after you drove a few hundred miles; that’s something like how it felt. A real hoot at 60 feet!
But, let’s not vilify fire coral, for it is not evil! Fire coral is just another example of a well-adapted species living happily in its natural environment. That is until some photographer comes along and tries to make out it with! However eventually the swelling went down, I learned my lesson, got the shot and have another life lesson to share.
Lesson learned, don’t eat fire coral!
I’ve been at this diving thing for a while now, and along the way I’ve picked up a few of those life lessons learned that only misadventure can give you. It’s easy for any experienced diver to tell stories of great dives and perfect adventures. However, the truth is that every one of us has done some pretty goofy things in the water. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing some of those lessons and stories with you, so you can avoid them and move on to have you’re own misadventures. So to kick this off, let’s talk about a little drysuit etiquette.
Drysuit diving is fantastic. What could be better than braving the cold waters of California or the North Atlantic, while nice and warm and snuggly in your jammies? I often tell my students that using a drysuit is like diving in a giant zip lock bag. It’s easy to do with the proper training and it vastly expands your potential diving locations. As a PADI MSDT working in Maryland, I teach a number of classes in cold dark quarries since they are the nearest open water available to dive students. Most of the time, I try to use the same exposure protection as my students and wear a 7mm wetsuit (it’s only fair after all), but every once in a while, if I’m teaching a lot in one day, I’ll break out the ol’ drysuit to ward off the cold.
Several years ago, I was teaching a class in April and after a long day of diving; I went home and cooked up a pot of spicy vegetarian chili. There’s just something special about the combination of kidney beans and tofu-meat product (more on that later), that’s just magic when it comes time to warm a cold body. So after 2 or 3 bowls of chili, I hit the sack. The next morning was day two for my students so I hauled my gear back to the quarry, suited up and took to the water.
The funny thing about pressure is that any “air” spaces in your body become compressed. That goes for “air” in your digestive system as well. The funny thing about vegetarian chili is that it creates a lot of “air”. Well, not thinking anything of it, I was down for several dives with my students, blowing off excess “bean air” from the night before. Topside between dives, I just stayed in my drysuit (it was April after all), so I didn’t think anything of the volcanic vent erupting in my suit. I just had a good ol’ time in my toasty warm suit, venting as necessary, and going about my classes.
After about 5 hours of working with students, it came time to take off my gear and head home. I had my divemaster unzip my suit, I put my fingers inside the neck seal and began to pull it over my head when WHOOOOOAAAAAA, it hit me! I could have knocked out a walrus with the smell! While I was blissfully tooting away in my suit, I was unknowingly marinating myself in the fine smell of used chili.
Back at the shop I hung up my drysuit to dry before packing it away. Fellow staff members would come back from the “wet room” asking “man, what is the sulfur smell?!”. Then they would turn to me and say, “dude, it’s you!”. Turns out my skin had picked up the smell as well, which shouldn’t come as any surprise considering the pressure cooker I was in all day. All in all it took over a week to get the smell out of my suit! Drysuits are expensive, so selling it cheap wasn’t a good option (not that anyone would have bought it anyway). However several washes later, it returned to it’s normal stale neoprene smell and I was back in business!
Lesson learned: Chili and drysuits don’t mix!
Stay tuned for more misadventure………
Scott Shenton
