The coolest thing you ever saw on a dive?

[kidspot]

I've had some incredible long encounters with Monk seals and Hawksbill Turtles, but the 2 most memorable critter dives are:

1) annual Sea hare migration - just seeing thousands of those slugs in the water column was amazing.

2) Watching a buddy pull urchin spines out of the face of a zebra morray as it lay in his arms letting him work - apparently it had run smack into a banded urchin and had a face full of spines.

Aloha, Tim

 

[Thalassamania]

Giant Bluefin Tuna (I hope you'll bear with a rewrite of a somewhat long story, a previous version of which I posted before):

Underwater science is usually rather dull. Hours spent collecting data. Data that's not particularly interesting in and of itself. Data that becomes interesting only when conjoined with similar data from other sites and times. The media stars of underwater science like Sylvia Earle and Bob Ballard reach out from the pages of a glossy book or beckon from a tightly edited video production, crisp and seductive images that intersect at a precise and meaningful conclusion right there on the last page or in the last minute. Real life is not like that, at least not very often. It's repetitious hour after hour, cold, uncomfortable, usually strenuous, occasionally dangerous. But every once in a while, every once in a long while, there's magic in the water. The universe clicks just right and something really special happens that makes up for all that's come before, something really special really, really special. This was one of those times.

It had been a hectic and eventful trip so far. I'd staged a close escape from a classic bind, I had to be two places at once. I had to go out to sea on a research cruise, the ship was leaving the dock with the morning tide, but on the same day I was scheduled to deliver a paper at the annual American Academy of Underwater Sciences meeting. My Director, insisted that both things get done, he's like that, used to be in charge of the Thor-Agena Booster Program for North American Rockwell and firmly believed in that NASA motto of, "The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes only slightly longer.”; Our ship was leaving Woods Hole and transiting the Cape Cod Canal on its way to the Gulf of Maine. If my talk was moved to the first slot in the morning and there were no hitches, I could be back in time to meet the ship at the north end of the canal just after sundown. I were late Plan B goes into effect, a night-time, “Casualty Evacuation Drill” with a USCG helo a buddy flew out of Otis. That would be the cover for my Plan-B ride out, if I needed it.

Friday was spent stowing the last of my gear on the ship. I caught an oh-dark-thirty flight out of Boston down to Florida. A quick cab ride and I was at the podium going over the slides that illustrated a paper I'd authored with Rich Pyle from the University of Hawaii on the use of mixed gas, open circuit scuba down to five hundred feet. Twenty minutes of talk, ten minutes of questions, I shook hands with the moderator, shoved my Certificate of Appreciation into my Zero-Halliburton, the one covered with dive stickers, and zipped out the back to a waiting cab that took me back to the airport. I ran for a plane back to Boston. On the plane I switched my tan go-to-meeting suit for a pair of 501s, a gray U. C. Berkeley sweatshirt and my Topsiders.

My work study student, Dave Sipperly, was waiting for me curbside at Logan. I threw my leather flight bag and briefcase on the back seat, jumped in front and off we sped; south to the Cape. Highway 3 to 6a, over the bridge at Sagamore and left onto Tupp er Road, left again to Town Neck Road and one more left onto Coast Guard Road. There, at the north end of the canal was a small U.S. Coast Guard station. We pulled in past the whitewashed rocks that lined the circular driveway.

Retrieving my briefcase from the rear seat, I got out. I pulled a set of CANDIVE coveralls from the top of my flight bag, which Dave would later drop at our office. We'd made good time, the ship was not due for a good half hour, Plan-B could go by the board. I pulled out my ICOM M5, slid a charged battery pack on the bottom and keyed it to Channel 16. “Whiskey, Victor, Foxtrot, Quebec. I repeated the call ship's call sign three times and then identified myself, “This is WVFQ Port one, come in.” No response yet. I had some time to kill and the heavy humid air was cooling now as the sun dipped below the land west of the canal. I shivered slightly and went into the Coast Guard station.

I found the O.D. and explained that I was meeting a ship out of the Hole, it would heave-to outside the north end of the canal and send a Zodiac for me. The Coasties seemed happy to have something to break their routine; they offered up a mug of hot coffee and asked if I wanted to use their longer range base station to call the ship. The O.D. offered to save us time and confusion by running me out in their rescue boat.

Now I could see the ship in the canal. I pulled on the bright orange coveralls that CANDIVE's Operations Supervisor gave me when we’d worked with the Deep Rover submersible at the Caribbean Marine Research Center during Sylvia Earle's record dive the year before (but that's a story for another time). We went down to the dock, hopped into an overpowered hard bottom inflatable and sped out toward the oncoming ship, blue lights flashing and siren screaming. We flashed past the ship, starboard to starboard, headed in opposite directions, came about in a tight turn to port and then pulled up along side the moving and much larger vessel. At about eight knots our boat slid smoothly over to the Jacob's ladder hanging amidships on the starboard rail. When the Coastguardsman shouted, “Go!” I leaped from the port gunwale of the RIB, out across the black chasm and grabbed on to the Jacob's ladder. The small craft veered off to starboard, throttled back and then came back up along side. I gripped a treadle with my left hand and leaned out. A Coastguardsmen handed my case up to me. I passed the case up over the rail to a fellow Explorers Club member who was making the cruise with us and clambered aboard. Not exactly the way I usually start a cruise, I was really having fun with “action movie” aspects of the situation.

Supper was still on in the mess. I had a hot meal and then we all got to work. Contact with Offshore Medical Services had to made and communications with our contingency helicopter evacuation facility needed to be tested, and I needed to turn off Plan-B. The compressor van had to be hooked to ship's power and run. The air had to be analyzed and the bank brought up to pressure. Filling whips needed to set up at the ship's waist and a 10,000 PSI Kevlar line run from the compressor up on the O1 deck down to the filling station. All our gear for the next day's dive needed to be unpacked and readied. With everything done, I rolled into my rack about 22:00 hrs and was out like a light.

Eight bells. I got up, showered, pulled on my khakis and went up to get some chow. No one else from the science party was up yet. I had a chance to spend some time with the ship's folks. I went over the general dive procedures with the Captain, who had stayed up beyond his usual midwatch so that we could talk. The Coxswain set up the diving Zodiac and we went over the boat and all of its gear. By now it was seven bells in the morning watch and the science party was drifting into the mess, pouring coffee and sitting down in the library and the lab.

We were due on station at Ammen Rock in the Gulf of Maine at the start of the afternoon watch. We were planning our first dive about two hours later. The science party spent the morning setting up their computers and laboratory equipment. Each of the divers got his or her gear unpacked and stowed in the wet lab that had been turned over to dive locker space. As I hung up my black NATO Viking suit one of the University of New Hampshire grad students was heard to exclaim, “Oh! No! It’s Darth's wader's.”

Dive procedures are pretty straight forward. The Zodiac is on the deck. You assemble your rig and put it in the boat. You put your weight belt and fins in the boat. Then you go and get your suit on. By the time you’re dressed in, the ship's crane has put the loaded Zodiac and the Coxswain in the water and the crew had rigged a Jacob's ladder over the rail. The water is about nine feet down that ladder. The Zodiac is held against the side of the ship with a bow painter and a stern line and you clamber down the ladder into the boat. You put your gear on in the boat while it motors to the site. On the way the you run through pre-dive checks and then all it takes is back roll off the inflatable's gunwale.

We needed to service some instruments on a seamount at about 110 feet. It was a great day, visibility was more than 100 feet. There were immense numbers of herring in the area for their summer spawning. Down we went through the loosely organized school, down to the tide gauges. Ten minutes later we'd dumped the data and reset the gauges; the herring cast enough shadow that we needed our dive lights to see what we were doing.

Our tasks done, we were getting ready to leave, suddenly in the blink of an eye there was a snap and the world went from an eerie deep green to pitch black. The lights were out! Mounds of herring pressed closely in on me. I was completely blind. No gauges, no buddy, not even my light was visible. I raised my light and pointed it straight toward my mask. The beam burst into a million mirrored reflections off the herrings scales. I took a slow deep breath and felt myself lift gently off the bottom and begin to ascend. Carefully I maintained slight positive buoyancy with my lungs. I could not see my gauges. I could not judge my upward progress. My field of vision was filled with the scintillations of my light reflecting off the herring that had closed tightly in upon me.

As fast as the dark arrived it was gone. My eyes were momentarily dazzled. I exhaled sharply and sank back into the blackness. Another breath started me up slowly. This time, just as my head broke out of the tightly packed herring school, I exhaled gently and transformed my ascent to a hover. From my chin down and out as far out as I could see, there was a mass of squirming fish, black with millions of rainbow reflections bouncing off, so closely packed that there was little room even for water.

I turned to my left, three-quarters of a rotation. I could see one of my three comrades coming up out of the roiling mass, twenty feet away. She ascended about ten feet and pitched horizontal and smoothly neutralized her buoyancy. A circular motion of her light indicated she was fine, had seen me and inquired as to my status with that unique economy of an underwater “okay.” I brought my seemingly detached left hand up out of the darkness and responded in kind.

Suddenly, she pointed two fingers at her eyes and then pointed sharply to her left, her arm stiff and outstretched. I swiveled my head right, and there is one of the most incredible sights I’ve ever witnessed.

Six Giant Bluefin Tuna move toward us in formation, they pass between us. Each fish, the size of a dinner table that would seat eight, moving fast, yet without apparent effort. They glide past, each with a huge left eye that stutters for a tiny moment as it finds me for a fraction of a second and then moves on to seek it's normal prey. We watch them almost disappear, circle to the right, and move to the other side of the herring school. They come right back by us, look us over again, and go left to the other side of the seamount.

The black shinny mass beneath us starts to break up, the herring resuming more normal individual distances and expanding their school upward and outward, once again enveloping me in darkness that slowly lightens to the deep green of the start of our dive. I swim up to my teammate and join her in a hover. We move to the down line and ascend to our deep stop. Being out of the lee of the seamount now, the current is rather stiff, we tie off with our Jon lines, wait a minute and then ascended to our 20 foot stop.

Decompression complete we signal the Zodiac, the Coxswain waives us off as he was heading to pick up our other two comrades at an alternate surface float. Once back in the Zodiac everyone talks excitedly about the tuna. There had been a big school of them working the herring and every one of us had been blessed with a good long view.

 

[scottitheduck]

I have had several "WOW" moments while diving....

1) Whaleshark in Honduras..... though not diving, snorkeling on top of one of these giants is a memory I will NEVER forget

2) Manta Ray on Oahu YouTube - Manta Ray on Oahu, Hawaii.

3) Monk Seals playing and posing then KISSING one of my divers on the Head! YouTube - Monk Seals on China Wall

4) The look on my wife's face when we first did the Manta Dive in Kona a few years ago!

G

 

[Black_3000psi]

man oh man love the eels. would have paid money to see that.(dont know where i would have got the money though).

monk seals are the coolest characters in the sea, such personality under water.

Thalassamania was that you? the diver telling the story? that made for some cool reading. the way it was written i take it that it was published as a story also ? had to be an awsome monent once you discovered the reason for the black out. something like that could have easily caused a panic in a lesser diver.
thanks all for sharing.
next. come on dont be shy.

 

[Thalassamania]

...

Thalassamania was that you? the diver telling the story?

Yes

that made for some cool reading. the way it was written i take it that it was published as a story also ?

Thanks. I just like to write. An excerpt is in consideration for the paperback edition of, Tuna: A Love Story" by Richard Ellis. (don't wait for my contribution, get it now ... it's a GREAT BOOK).

had to be an awsome monent once you discovered the reason for the black out. something like that could have easily caused a panic in a lesser diver.

It doesn't matter who you are or how much experience you have, that sort of thing scares the bejesus out of you, I was lucky to not have to be cleaning my suit in private.

I think one of the things that etched the tuna so clearly in my memory was the adrenaline rush of the blackout, there's a well known human phenomena wherein emotional arousal has been shown to enhance declarative memory suggesting a close association between memory enhancement by emotion and visual memory. (Kazui, Mori, Hashimoto, and Hirono, Jour. of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 2003; 15:221?26)

 

[ReefGuy]

This past summer, our team was called out to search under a bridge for a child that had possibly been tossed over the side. Most of our dives are done in 0 vis, to the point that I mostly do working dives with my eyes closed. This one was different, though. The harbor had been calm, and the vis was about 1', so I felt obligated to search with my eyes as well as my hands.

The pylons on the brige are shaped like a box about 9' on each side. Below the box are 6 pillers around the outside and one main piller down to the sand. This made a little maze that had to be searched for each piling.

The search continued past dusk and into the night. As dusk was falling, the inside area of the pylons was pitch black. Starting faintly, then getting stronger and stronger the water started flourescing from my bubbles, to the point that every breath was like a bright green fireworks display in front of my mask against a black canvas. It may have been the dichotomy of finding such beauty while performing such an ugly task, but it was the most beautiful sight I have ever seen.

It got so engaging that I had to close my eyes to continue the dive as I was getting distracted from searching. I did, however, take a few minutes while we were switching out to the next team to admire the show again.

 

[Kydonia]

26 sharks

Shark Dive: Stuart's Cove, Bahamas.... no cage..

 

[Thalassamania]

Picture's worth a thousand words ... thanks.

 

[Black_3000psi]

well i have to say you paint a very clear picture in your writtings was an enjoible read.

yea the shark pic needs no text though would love to know if thats what was expected brfore they got in. was that a cage dive ? didnt see any bars.
one of these days il have to tell about how i met the sting rays in kewalo basin harbor back when i was doing boat bottoms.
yeah reefguy theres just no way to tell what we will see or when we see it. im sure you felt like it was bad timing though . cause of the reason you were there but beautiful none the less.

refreshing conversation. thankyou all

 

[MauiScubaSteve]

My last windows machine has a couple sets of pictures currently not accessible, one being 4 pictures of a 14-ish foot tiger shark that took a peak at a large octopus photo session among the tires near the Saint Anthony (solo scooter dive). Not great photos but decent proof! Next time I will go for the scooter before taking the pictures. The other set is over 30 minutes of scootering side by side with a medium size manta ray around Ulua Reef (is it solo if the ray was always there?). Not only did I get a couple shots of the manta over the turtle being cleaned, but my favorite was when we spotted a large sting ray out in the sand. As I swooped down to get a vertical shot of both rays he thrust his tail up in the barb maneuver that killed Steve Irwin; I will get those images off that hard drive eventually.

Here are a few shots that are accessible;