Dinner Time

In The Departed, Jack Nicholson’s character tells Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, “You can learn a lot watching things eat.”  He then proceeds to squish a spider.  I think he eats it, too, but I’m not sure.

It's definitely a good way to pass the time underwater -- swimming along, safely ensconced at the top of the food chain, watching other creatures being devoured.  At moments like these, I should probably be thinking something like, there but for the grace of God ... but I'm usually focused on just trying to get the exposure right.

 

 

Waterproof G1 7mm Three-Finger Mitt Review

The last time I wore wetsuit mitts with a drysuit was way back in February, 2001.   I came out of the water, my fingers, as always, painful and cold, and knew something had to be done.  I went home, packed up the suit, and sent it in to have dry gloves attached.

Problem solved, right?  Wrong.  In the 13 years since, anytime water temps dip down into the 30s, my fingers are only marginally less cold than they were with the wetsuit mitts: not exactly the great leap forward I’d hoped for.  There just isn’t enough room inside dry gloves for sufficient insulation to keep fingers warm. 

Obviously, after 13 years (13 YEARS!), it’s time to try something new.  And that something would be the Waterproof G1 7mm three-finger mitts. Technically, these aren’t wetsuit mitts.  They’re semi-dry mitts.  By definition, though, semi-dry means wet, but … whatever.  When you’re desperate, you’re desperate, and coming off the coldest diving winter I can remember, I’m desperate.

I’ve now worn the Waterproof G1 7mm mitts on four dives, all in the 60-minute range, all in water hovering around 38 degrees, and I have to say that I’m speechless.  I am without speech.  At all times during these dives, my hands were very comfortable.  Had I made these same dives with my old dry gloves, my fingers would have been stingingly cold.

These are sensational mitts and a quick look will tell you why.  They’re as well made as a glove can be, with well-stitched seams that are in no obvious hurry to unravel, tough neoprene seals that minimize water flow, and soft, flexible lining material that makes them easy to get on and off.

Not only were my hands comfortable, but I had enough dexterity and tactile sense to operate all camera controls.  Working the shutter release and various dials is a no-brainer, but even pushing the focus selector buttons on the back of my housing – five small buttons arranged in a circle approximately 1/8 of an inch apart, is not a problem.

If you’re a northeast diver, you may not be familiar with this company, Waterproof.  I know I wasn’t.  And that’s a shame.  There seem to be only two shops in the New England region that carry their line.  Please … this has to change.  Few things will consistently keep a diver out of the water like being cold.  Conversely, few things will consistently keep us in the water like being warm.  Waterproof’s G1 7mm mitts are a huge step forward in this direction and I can’t wait to try more of their stuff.  Next up in a week or so, their G1 5mm 5-finger gloves.

The G1 7mm mitts come in six different sizes and retail for about $80.  I highly, highly recommend them for cold-water diving.

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.