We knew before we went that this was going to be mostly a wide angle trip. That was going to make it a bit different from our usual trips, as Julie and I both like macro. The area was visually stunning, and Carl’s Ultimate was probably the most beautiful dive site I’ve ever seen. When the current picks up, the amount of life on that reef is so overwhelming you don’t know where to start. But a lot of this lushness was hard to photograph, and more suited to video. At some point I just stopped taking photo’s and watched the splendor in action.

Nevertheless we did take a lot of images, and even managed to take some macro shots.

Here’s the two images. One is a Lemon Shark from the Bahamas. The other a Frog Fish at the St Croix pier.

In may Julie went on a trip by herself. She claims it’s to see the Oceanic Whitetip sharks, but by now we all know it’s because of the pigs. It’s quite difficult to find these sharks. As the name suggests they are usually found in the open ocean, so basically you have to use a lot of bait and hope for the best. Last year this trip got skunked (one of the reasons I didn’t feel like going) but this year they got some good action.

On a recent trip to the Bahamas Julie photographed some really cute pigs. These are wild pigs that live on an island in the Bahamas, and whenever a boat stops on the beach they come over to check out if there are scraps. They’ll come right to your lens, even if you’re waist deep in water. Julie actually went on this trip, meant to track down Oceanic Whitetip sharks, to photograph these pigs and she got some nice shots. Who needs Oceanic Whitetips when you can photograph small piglets!

We recently returned from a shark diving trip on the Shear Water. It was the second time we had done this trip and we’ll definitely go back. There is something indescribable about being in the water with large sharks like Tiger sharks or Lemon sharks all around you. These majestic creatures have ruled the oceans for hundreds of millions of years, evolving to perfection, and here you are, in their domain, on their terms. The first time I went, I was a bit scared when I first entered the water, taught to fear these animals by the media in all its forms. It took only a few minutes to realize that they are not the bloodthirsty killers they are made out to be.

The Future

These kinds of encounters may not be possible for my 5 year old niece. Humans are killing sharks at an astonishing rate. Each year hundreds of millions of sharks are killed, thus removing a top predator from a very precarious eco system that may never recover from this brutal attack. The most barbaric form this eradication takes is the practice of shark finning. Here huge factory ships drag sharks on board in large numbers, only to hack off their fins, and throwing them back into the ocean alive. They then slowly drown as sharks need to move to be able to breath. All so we humans can have a tasteless bowl of soup.

To show the staggering numbers we’re talking about I’d like to visualize this in a simple counter. This counter represents the number of sharks killed for their fins alone so far this year.

I quite like Brendan’s blog. It’s got a lot of interesting information for new writers and photographers. Information that is hard to come by if you don’t know how this world operates. I highly recommend it for anyone that’s interested in getting published.

Read Our Story on Brendan’s blog.

I’ll be joining Julie in 11 days for a second trip diving with Dolphins and Tiger Sharks.

The image is of a Lizardfish being cleaned by a small goby taken in the US Virgin Islands. It was a coincidence that I even took the image. We had entered the water to take photos of mating hamlets at dusk. On our way to the spot where we had seen Hamlets we crossed some coral heads, and on one of them I noticed a Lizardfish with its mouth open. At first I figured I was too late, but as I got closer it just stayed there. For the next 15 minutes the goby kept coming back to clean this Lizardfish, and I got quite a few shots. Eventually it became too dark and I stopped, but it was a very cool experience.

I’ve also made a WordPress widget, which allows people running WordPress to add the POTW to their blog. You can see that in action in our own journal.

We didn’t really know what to expect. We’ve photographed mating behavior of other species before, and some species, like for instances Dragonets can be really difficult to approach. So we were ready to stalk our prey and stop breathing. None of this turned out to be necessary. The Hamlets were completely oblivious to our presence and at times would actually swim within two feet of us by themselves. Their mating session lasted for about 30 minutes, during which they went up into the water column about a dozen times to mate. It was quite interesting to watch.

So here it is, my very first image, shot when they went up the first time.

Not only did we see cool stuff underwater, we also saw a Komodo Dragon in the wild. As it entered the beach we were anchored at we rushed to shore and took some photo’s. The dragon was quite nervous but let us get really close.

The Kararu explorer was a nice boat, even though it seems to lack a bit in maintenance. We had a lot of equipment failures, which was quite annoying. But the amazing wildlife makes up for it, so we’ll go back anytime.