It’s an unsettled kind of morning on Chedabucto Bay of Canada’s east coast. The sun is shining—it’s really quite pleasant—but there’s a brisk wind blowing from the southwest. What that translates into here in the waters between Cape Breton Island and Nova Scotia is heavy seas. We’re pounding through four to six foot swells in a 25-foot rigid hull inflatable boat.
Long after the jet lag and the first day back to work, you slip into your favorite dive T-shirt eager to keep the essence of your most recent underwater experience pulsing through your mind and body. Proudly wearing large print logos across your chest is a way of celebrating your passion for diving and sharing it with the rest of the world.
I first spoke with Sheck Exley in the summer of 1991. I had begun publishing aquaCORPS: The Journal for Technical Diving, a year earlier and I was working out of the office at Capt. Billy Dean’s dive shop in Key West, Florida, the first technical diving training center in the United States. “Technical diving”, a term we had just coined to describe this new style of diving, was just in its infancy.
“Thank [beep] for that! How lucky were we? We better not do that again.
Don’t tell anyone though, we don’t want to look like amateurs...”
The rather dark reputation of Humboldt squid has been readily reinforced by various wildlife television programs and other media which present these creatures as giant animals hungry for blood or ruthless monsters, uncompromisingly attacking their prey.
In order to create images with point-and-shoot digital cameras that are a step above snap-shots, we have to use the same techniques used with DSLR cameras. By using a few different techniques, one can get outstanding results no matter what size camera is used.
One of the dreams of any naturalist is to be the first to find and detail the life of a hidden or unknown animal first hand. Since 2003, scientific divers with the Greenland Shark and Elasmobranch Education and Research Group (GEERG) have begun to unravel the mysterious life of the Greenland shark, which at over seven meters in maximum body length and exceeding a ton in weight, is the second largest carnivorous shark after the great white.
Move over human divers, you’re not the only ones who love to dive. Apparently, divers these days are not just of the hominid kind—American photographer, Seth Casteel, has captured the astounding and often humorous side of our canine companions who love to dive underwater.
Travelling poses some real dangers, and they should not be ignored. Travellers have paid the price over and over again, many with their lives, many with lifelong suffering, and the main reason is ignorance. That’s right, ignorance.
Box jellyfish have four morphologically different types of eyes. Two of these eye types called the upper and lower lens eyes, are camera type eyes with spherical fish-like lenses.
My first experience diving with mating squid was in September of 2000 during a rare late summer event off La Jolla Shores of San Diego in the U.S. state of California. To date, it still ranks as one of my all time favorite dives.
Three of world’s best shark spots are located far off the coast of Central and South American, in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The least known of them, the tiny Colombian island of Malpelo, together with Galapagos and Cocos, create a “golden triangle” for big fish fans.
