Sunday, June 22, 2014

Back Beach Night Dive

First night dive of the year.  I've been waiting about 9 months for this.  And what a beautiful night, with a sky full of stars and air temps just right.

Went in about 10:30 hoping to find squid.  And squid I found.  Not a lot -- certainly not as many as we'll be seeing later in the summer -- but I did come across five or six.  All were medium-sized and curious enough to come in close and stick around.  Of course, there were also a lot of lobster about, as well as sleeping cunner and a couple of big ravens.



As always on night dives, at the end I came up so that I was looking straight up at the sky and could see the stars while still underwater.  I love that.  And when I came out, I turned around on the beach and took a shot back toward Rockport across the water.

The funny thing is, for years when I've dived here at night, I've noticed faint beams of light that seem to cut their way horizontally through the water.  I've always wondered what they were, and at times thought they were just my imagination.  But looking at the photo (below), it suddenly became obvious: they're the lights of Rockport reflecting across -- and through -- the water.

Great dive. Can't wait to do it again.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Old Garden Beach

What a beautiful day.  It's been a while since I've dived here but I didn't want to fight the low tide rocks at Folly, or feed the meters at Back, so that left Old Garden.
    

When I got up to the beach at 9AM, air temps were already up in the 80s.

I went in and headed out to the big ledge, did one circumnavigation of it, then swung out over the boulder fields.  Lobsters everywhere.  Ditto for pollack.  But it was the sea ravens that took me by surprise.  I came across six of them, all of varying shades of red/yellow.

At the end of the dive, spent a long time lingering in the shallows, not wanting to come out.  Just a great day to be in the water.




Friday, June 13, 2014

Fish Faces

It's that time of year again, again.  The fish are back.  The little guys -- nudibranchs, worms, etc --  are either gone or hidden under blankets of seaweed.  Time to switch camera lenses to a wider zoom and then pray for good viz.  All right!






Thursday, June 5, 2014

Nudi Review

It's that time of year again -- June.   Nudibranch season is pretty much over here in southern New England. Of course, there are still some stragglers out there but, for the most part, unless you head up to northern Maine or Canada, they're gone until next winter.  Here's a look back at a few nudi shots from 2014.











Tuesday, June 3, 2014

The Way Of The Dinosaur

Years ago, I was working on a story about the overfishing of horseshoe crabs for Wildlife Conservation Magazine.  It was an irresistible excuse for a road trip, of course, and so my wife and I drove down to Chesapeake Bay together.

On our first morning there, we pulled into one of the main horseshoe crab landing spots and watched as a handful of them fought their way up through the surf and onto the beach.  But it was early in the season and there weren’t all that many of them yet.  Indeed, at one point, four horseshoe crab fisherman bounced out of a truck, looked around at the sparse pickings, and drove off without even taking any.  Before they left, though, one of them stopped to stare at me and my camera.

Later that morning, my wife and I went into a diner for breakfast and who should be there but the four fishermen.  And it didn’t take long for the one with the staring problem to ask what I was doing there, and for us to get into a debate about the health of the horseshoe crab population.  I brought up the short-sightedness of fishermen picking up tens of thousands of horseshoe crabs as they came up the beach, before they’d had a chance to lay their eggs.  I also mentioned a few studies that had found declining populations, as well as the simple eye test – right there on the walls of the diner, black & white photos taken just 30 years earlier showed stunning numbers of horseshoe crabs on the beach, way more than could be seen now.

My new friend was unimpressed.  “Horseshoe crabs aren’t going anywhere,” he said.  “They’ve been around since the dinosaurs.”

Before I could answer, another of the fishermen, the guy who looked to be the oldest of the group and certainly the alpha, leaned in close to his buddy.  “Seen any dinosaurs walking around lately?”

And that was that.  Suddenly, the other three had nothing to say.

I still think of that guy – usually when I’m looking at a horseshoe crab.  Of course, horseshoe crab numbers continue to plummet.  Here in the northeast, we don’t get anywhere near the numbers of them that they get farther south, but you can still see them.  And now is the time of year to do it.  The smaller males are hanging around in the shallows, waiting for the bigger females to come by.  They'll then latch on and the two of them – sometimes three of them (sea creatures just know how to live) – make their way up onto the beach to lay and fertilize their eggs.  It’s a pretty cool sight.  And an ancient one, too.  After all, they've been doing it since the dinosaurs were around – for whatever that's worth.