cozcharlie
Contributor
Aldora held what was their 1st (and hopefully not last) annual Blackwater Week. I happened to hear from a neighbor here that they were having the event and I hopped on at the last minute. They brought in Mike Bartick who works out of Crystal Blue Resort in Anilao Philippines and has written an ebook called The World of Blackwater.
In summary, it was a great week with a lot of Blackwater diving. We did about an hour of Blackwater creature background combined with participant photo review every day followed by 2 80 minute Blackwater dives (Aldora was using 117 cf tanks, so 80 minutes wasn't that tough to achieve). I think Aldora normally will do single tanks, but we were doing 2 tank dives each night. There were about 10 divers in the water every night. Mike Bartick was a pleasure to be around and was helpful with camera and creature questions. One of Aldora's divemasters, Juan, did a great job of rotating around the customers and showing them creatures with his flashlight. I found this made it much easier to photograph the smaller subjects because you often lose track of them when you are making any camera adjustments (some subjects are less than an inch long). Liang at Aldora also does quite a bit of blackwater so I am not certain how they divide responsibilities between her and Juan. The staff at Aldora did a great job (they have a great reputation, but I generally use another shop that I have been using for decades).
Various thoughts
Once again, thanks to Aldora (Liang, Juan, Julio, Memo and others) for hosting a great week. I certainly appreciated Mike Bartick working this week in while on this side of the world from his home in the Philippines. I am hoping they do it again next year.
Link to my photos. There are a couple in this folder from the spring, but the vast majority are from this week. I was just in the middle of the pack as far as photos go--we had some really good photographers who also were better setup for blackwater (hopefully Aldora will post on their website--I am not on facebook)
[Cozumel - CozCharlie]
In summary, it was a great week with a lot of Blackwater diving. We did about an hour of Blackwater creature background combined with participant photo review every day followed by 2 80 minute Blackwater dives (Aldora was using 117 cf tanks, so 80 minutes wasn't that tough to achieve). I think Aldora normally will do single tanks, but we were doing 2 tank dives each night. There were about 10 divers in the water every night. Mike Bartick was a pleasure to be around and was helpful with camera and creature questions. One of Aldora's divemasters, Juan, did a great job of rotating around the customers and showing them creatures with his flashlight. I found this made it much easier to photograph the smaller subjects because you often lose track of them when you are making any camera adjustments (some subjects are less than an inch long). Liang at Aldora also does quite a bit of blackwater so I am not certain how they divide responsibilities between her and Juan. The staff at Aldora did a great job (they have a great reputation, but I generally use another shop that I have been using for decades).
Various thoughts
- You get to see a bunch of organisms you would either never see on the reef or would barely recognize because in blackwater they are very early in their lifecycle. Mike Bartick photographed a few very small frogfish while he was here (zero for me) . People in the group also a tripod fish that when mature lives a few thousand feet down. My pictures don't really do the very small fish justice due to my lens setup (more on that later)
- The event was held near the new moon. I had read before that in general blackwater dives are better near the new moon when there is less light at the surface,--this does seem to be the case. (Near a full moon the creatures don't need to come up as close to the surface to reach the same amount of light). Very limited sample set, but the one blackwater dive I did a few months back near a full moon wasn't that great.
- For those that don't know, they usually suspend a series of lights from a floating buoy. The light will draw in some organisms (especially squid), but also provides a frame of reference. Aldora had one light around 10 feet, one at 30 feet, and one at 60 feet. You obviously needed to be very careful of depth if you went past the 60 foot light.
- We were generally floating about 1-1.5 miles offshore in 750-1,000 feet of water.
- Aldora's experience requirement is 50 dives--I would see that is as the bare minimum. You need to be very comfortable with your buoyancy and all your gear floating in the dark with no bottom. We didn't experience any downcurrents but evidently they can happen out in the channel.
- The organisms we saw tended to vary quite a bit from night to night. We generally saw quite a few squid and jellyfishevery night, but many of the other things varied quite a bit from dive to dive (unfortunately they saw a bunch of flying fish on a dive I missed due to a camera issue
- Definitely wear skin protection (rash guard etc). There are way more stinging organisms in the water on a blackwater dive than your typical drift dive. I didn't get stung but one person got hit by a jellyfish pretty badly.
- I didn't really have the correct lens set-up for the dives--I only had a 90MM macro and people generally had much better luck with something in the 50mm-60mm range. I have heard the same thing before, so it wasn't a surprise. I was already on the island when I heard about the event so I had to make do with a less than ideal lens and then just crop/edit my way out of it.
Once again, thanks to Aldora (Liang, Juan, Julio, Memo and others) for hosting a great week. I certainly appreciated Mike Bartick working this week in while on this side of the world from his home in the Philippines. I am hoping they do it again next year.
Link to my photos. There are a couple in this folder from the spring, but the vast majority are from this week. I was just in the middle of the pack as far as photos go--we had some really good photographers who also were better setup for blackwater (hopefully Aldora will post on their website--I am not on facebook)
[Cozumel - CozCharlie]
