The Last Shot

David Brenner used to do a routine on the things we say when we’ve misplaced something.  My favorite  was, I bet it’s going to be in the last place I look.  “Of course it’s going to be in the last place you look,” Brenner would shout, “who finds something and then keeps looking for it!”

Hmm.  Going through the shots I took this weekend, I noticed that in every sequence, the last shot was the best.  Always.  And it didn’t matter how many there were in a sequence – 17 of a massive group of nudibranchs feeding and mating, 10 of a lobster hiding under an anemone, 3 of a crab climbing a sponge-encrusted hydroid, 21 of a humongous nudibranch moving Godzilla-like from one hydroid to another – invariably, the last shot was the sharpest, or the best lit, or the best composed. 

And I have no idea why.

In the bad old days of film, when shots were so limited, so precious, I had a strict ten-shot rule: I wouldn’t take a single shot of something unless it was worth taking ten shots of.  I still use that ten-shot rule, but for the opposite reason: with almost unlimited shots now available, anything worth shooting is worth shooting the crap out of.  But the laws of quantitative analysis are clear: any shot in that sequence should have the potential to be the best.

So why does that last shot so often outshine the others?  I wish I knew – then I could just jump right to it.  Then again, maybe Brenner’s logic on finding misplaced objects applies to underwater photography, as well.  I mean, who gets their best shot and then keeps shooting?

The last shot in the sequence I took of Nudzilla

Nudibranchia

Nudibranchs just know how to live.  These guys are eating, mating, and laying down eggs, all at the same time.  If they had TVs, they could go for the quadfecta.  Here are a few shots from today's dive.

 

 

Not What I Was Looking For

I dove earlier this week hoping to find two specific species of nudibranch – Dendronotus robustus and Flabellina salmonacea. Neither is rare but they’re definitely uncommon. Still, I had high hopes. It's the right time of year, other divers have recently seen one of the species, and I was feeling lucky.

Twenty minutes later, though, I had found neither and could feel my spirits starting to lag. But just then I looked down on a kelp bed and saw something in deep, wrapped around one of the kelp stems. I worked my way in and saw it was a scale worm, circumnavigating the stem diagonally with its body.

All of a sudden, in the close confines of the fronds and the stems, a stream of eggs started to rise up from the worm into the water column like so many miniature helium balloons. It must have wrapped itself around the kelp to separate the scales on its back and give the eggs an open path to rise up and drift away.

So, what was it I was looking for again?

Socially Networked

There I was last week, sitting at my desk, minding my own business, when a Facebook friend request came in.  I didn’t know the sender but saw that we had a dozen or so mutual diver friends and so I hit the ‘confirm’ button.  

Less than an hour later, a message appeared from my new friend suggesting that I change my profile photo.  Why?  Because my mask is pulled down around my neck in it, setting a poor example for new divers and making me look like a fool.  He said this “with all due respect.”  That’s right, he pulled a Ricky Bobby on me! 

Ah, the joys of Facebook.  But has there ever been a better tool for divers to communicate, collaborate, and commiserate?  I think not.  And this from someone who’s deleted his Facebook page three different times over the years! 

In the past 12 months alone, though, if it weren’t for Facebook, I wouldn’t have been slobbered on by Diver Ed’s massive dogs while sleeping on his couch, spent long minutes in Joe George’s silty slipstream up in Canada, or received Anne Dupont’s guided tour of Blue Heron Bridge’s miniscule invertebrate life.  And I wouldn’t have missed any of that stuff for the world.  For all its faults, Facebook works for divers, plain and simple. 

As for my latest friend’s photo suggestion, I immediately started typing my own “with all due respect” response, but quickly decided to just hit the ‘de-friend’ button instead – another great Facebook innovation!

The Best Dive Magazine Ever

Back in the early 90s, the Washington Times, of all publications, hired me to write an article on the then barely remembered technology of rebreathers. (And, yes, when I got paid, the check did have the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s signature on it.  For those of you too young to remember the reverend, you’re just going to have to google him.)

Anyway, the sum total of what I knew about rebreathers was what I could remember from reading Hans Hass books back in junior high.  (If you're too young to remember Hans Hass, I guess you’re just going to have to google him, too!)  The technology had to have improved in the interim and so I started researching.  And that led me to a guy named Mike Menduno.

Menduno was a treasure trove of rebreather info.  He was also the editor and publisher of his own dive magazine, aquaCORPS.  I had never heard of it and so he offered to send me a few issues.  The truth was that I didn’t want them.  Did the world really need another vehicle for articles such as “Passport to Palau,” or “You Better Belize It,” or any of the 50 or so tropical dive destination stories these magazines have been recycling for the past 40 years?  No, it did not.

Nevertheless, the magazines arrived a few days later and I decided to give them a cursory glance before trashing them.  A few hours later, I had read them all cover to cover, more than once – and there wasn’t a single destination piece to be found. 

In fact, comparing other dive magazines to aquaCORPS would have been like comparing PC World to Wired – one is about products, the other a lifestyle.  Menduno, it turned out, was the guy who coined the term “tech diving” and that’s what aquaCORPS centered on.  A typical issue contained stories on guys making dives to depths in excess of 500 feet in South African caves, on the British team that first dove the wreck of the Lusitania, and on the latest in one-atmosphere suits.

It wasn’t long before I was writing for aquaCORPS and, once a month or so, Mike would fax me a list of story ideas and tell me to pick one.  All of them would be fantastic.  Almost all, however, would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to write.  For example, one idea was a story on the Russian Navy divers who had supposedly recovered a lost nuclear warhead from a depth of 2,000 feet in a top-secret mission.  Sorry, not on aquaCORPS’s budget!

But there was always at least one idea that was doable. Over a few months, I wrote stories on the Royal Navy divers who had tested the principles of submarine escape by making free-ascents from a depth of 600 feet, on just about everything  Robert Ballard had done underwater (he was a big fan of the magazine) from the Titanic to his work with the NR-1, on Graham Hawkes’s take on man vs. unmanned exploration, and with Bill Hamilton on the extrapolation of oilfield saturation tables into something scuba divers could use on only marginally shallower dives.

Not all of Menduno’s creative ideas worked out.  I still laugh remembering how happy Brian Skerry was when he found out his shot was going to be the cover of aquaCORPS’s wreck diving issue – until he saw that Mike had superimposed the face of a transvestite named “Sushi” over his photo!

Unfortunately, though, as we all know, the good die young, and aquaCORPS was no exception – Menduno was just a better visionary than a businessman.  Most of my own stuff didn’t even make it into print before it folded.  The submarine escape article did.  And some of the other stuff found homes in foreign publications.  But it was great fun while it lasted and I’m forever grateful to Mike for aquaCORPS.  If you ever come across an old issue on ebay or in some used book store, my advice is to grab it. 

RIP, aquaCORPS, you were the best dive magazine ever published.

There We Were ...

Years ago, I was making a solo dive at Folly Cove.  It was mid-week, early in the spring, and I had the place to myself.  As I recall, it was mid-tide and there were some decent rollers hitting the beach – more than enough to stir up the bottom.  And sure enough, on the way in, I couldn’t see the rocks I was stepping on, got caught in an awkward position, got hit by a wave, and went down like Joe Frazier after taking a right hand from George Foreman (in a Howard Cosell voice, think, “Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!”).

As luck would have it, I was wearing doubles that day.  And so there I lay on my back, turtle-like, fins in one hand, a few thousand dollars worth of camera gear in the other, getting pounded by the surf.  And every time I almost made it back to my feet, I’d get hit by another wave, slip on another rock, and go splashing down again.

The one thing I had going for me was that no one was up in the parking lot watching and laughing their ass off.  And then it occurred to me – maybe there was.  Someone could have pulled in right after I had walked down to the water.

As much as I didn’t want to look up, I had to know.  And so from a lying position, I craned my neck back as far as I could and got a clear, albeit nearly upside-down, view of the parking lot.  It was empty except for my car – on which the passenger side door was wide open! 

That did it.  In a fury, I made it back to my feet, turned around and – waves, slippery rocks, and double tanks be damned – humped it back up the beach.  The memory of the day still causes me to grind my teeth.

My point?  Diving’s a lot more fun with buddies than it is by yourself. 

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying a buddy could have helped me out of the above debacle.  But if any of my usual buddies had been there, the moment would have lived on in comedic infamy (friends laughing at you is different than strangers).  Damn, it would have been funny!  All right, it was funny but with a friend or two around, I could have appreciated the humor, too!

Obviously, it’s important to dive with people who take care underwater.  But it’s just as important to dive with people who have a good time and don’t take themselves too seriously (which is why I don’t dive with Joe George any more – hee, hee).  There’s just no reason to ever leave a dive without having had at least one good laugh.   

Book Review -- On A Farther Shore, William Souder

Rachel Carson is barely remembered today but through the 1950s and 60s, her name was as recognizable as that of any movie star or pro athlete. The author of four books -- the first three, beautifully written treatises on just about everything then known of the oceans; the fourth, a world-shaking attack on the overuse of pesticides -- she was just as likely to be the topic of conversation at any family dinner table as at one of President Kennedy’s press conferences. She was big.

I’ve always had a bit of a mixed relationship with her books, though. On the one hand, from the first time I picked up a copy of The Sea Around Us in junior high, I loved the thought of Rachel Carson. I loved that most of what she wrote centered on the ocean. I loved that she made it seem possible to have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of a vast subject. I even loved the somewhat dowdy photo of her on the back cover of the book.

On the other hand, I have to admit that I was never quite able -- then or now -- to make it all the way through any of her books. As beautifully written as her ocean books are, they’re too general for me. I prefer more detail over a smaller range. As for Silent Spring -- her attack on the overuse of pesticides -- I found the fact that such a book even had to written too maddeningly frustrating.to stay with from cover to cover. (But the truth is that you can still hear the ignorant blaming Carson for the deaths of millions from malaria.)

Through all these years, though, Carson herself remained a shadowy figure about whom -- with the exception of that back cover photo -- I knew little. When the biography On A Farther Shore came out, I decided to rectify that.

The book does a decent job of showing us that much of Carson’s early adult life gave little hint of the success she would have or the mark she would leave. An above-average student from a poor family, she graduated from a women’s college with a degree in a biology, and wound up at the Bureau of Fisheries, a federal agency that would eventually become the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Her job was not as a scientist, though, but as a writer, taking scientific reports, distilling them down to their essence, and then writing them in language a layman could understand.

The work brought her into contact with countless marine scientists, many of whom she developed working relationships with, some of whom encouraged her toward work beyond what she was already doing. Her first step in that direction, the book Under The Sea-Wind, was a minor success at best. The second, however, The Sea Around Us, spent months on the best-seller list and catapulted Carson to fame. Its follow-up, The Edge Of The Sea, did almost as well.

The details that emerge of Carson during this period are a study of contradictions. She did little to dissuade the misperception of herself as a scientist and a diver (she had made one helmet dive off the coast of Florida, during which she never let go of the boat’s ladder). The combination of ill-health and inveterate re-writing meant that her books were generally finished years behind schedule. She sought almost no publicity for herself. She never hesitated to complain to her publishers about even the slightest of grievances she felt had been committed against her books. When she agreed to the making of a documentary based on The Sea Around Us, it was produced by Irwin Allen, of The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure fame. It won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1953 but Carson hated it as overly sensational. Before it was made, though, she had had the chance to work with a young Jacques Cousteau instead. She decided against it.

The picture that emerges of Carson is of an exceedingly private, quiet but confident woman, who seemed an unlikely protagonist in the war against the giant chemical industry. Silent Spring -- the events that eventually convinced her to write it, the research that went into it, the years it took to finish it, and the battles that were fought after its publication, take up nearly the second half of On A Farther Shore. And, for me, that imbalance is where much of the difficulty of the book lies. By comparison, the details of the research, the trials and tribulations, and the thought processes that went into Carson’s three ocean books are barely touched upon. And since that’s where my interest lies, it’s a disappointment.

Still, On A Farther Shore does a good job filling in the blanks of Carson’s life. And it’s a life that should be remembered because, without her and Silent Spring, the environmental movement as we know it today probably wouldn’t exist. More importantly, the way in which Carson first staked the battle against the chemical industry and its close ties with its supposed regulators, and the manner in which she then calmly defended her work against a barrage of blustery attacks -- weirdly reminiscent of those used today against anyone raising environmental warnings -- provides a strong intellectual blueprint against hyperbole and in defense of the environment.

It was published in 2012 by Crown Publishers.