At Sea
It¡¦s been a busy week. Seven days exploring the Antarctic Peninsula and seven dives, providing our guests with a window into the world beneath the ice. The seas here are highly various, just like terrestrial Antarctica, so each of these dives presented different scenes and a different side of the Southern Ocean.
It began (seems like a long time ago now) with a dive in the protected bay at Yankee Harbor. I had only dived here once previously and dropping down through the dark, cloudy water I reached the muddy bottom at just over 100 feet, deeper than I have been before. Here I was surprised to find numerous colonies of soft corals, each occupied by several strange Arcturid isopods, reaching out to gather their food from the current like animated claws.
Two days later, at Deception Island, I dove for the first time on Raven Rock, the site of the recent grounding of a small cruise ship. Navigating to this little pinnacle in the middle of Neptune¡¦s Bellows was very challenging, but I got lucky enough to find it and was able to record video and stills of broken and scraped rock, smears and chips of paint, and torn kelp where the ship had collided with this hidden hazard.
On Tuesday I made my furthest south dive ever, off the shores of Stonington Island at 68„a 11.3¡¦ South. This was an astoundingly rich site, a steep slope covered with extensive scallop beds, large anemones, beautiful little coral colonies and golden orange sea cucumbers. Sediment from the huge glaciers on the nearby mainland made the water very cloudy; by the time I reached 60 feet it was black as night. But this turbid water was also full of food, plankton and detritus, that nourished the wonderful community of animals living there; so I swam slowly, almost feeling my way, using the close focus ability of the camera to zero in on one remarkable creature after another.
There¡¦s no doubt though that the most exciting dive of the week, in fact one of the most exciting of my career, was at Booth Island. Just five minutes into the dive an adult male leopard seal found me and became very curious about what I might be. He made pass after pass, circling within arms reach and when it became clear that he was not going to move on any time soon, I slowly ascended, put my back to the rocky wall of the island, signaled to my safety Zodiac to stay close and filmed him for the next twenty minutes. As the encounter went on he became bolder and bolder, moving faster and closer until he decided to test me in the best way leopard seals can: with his teeth! On one of his last passes he opened his mouth wide enough to engulf the entire camera and nearly did as I tried to push him away! At this point I chose the better part of valor, called in the nearby boats and left the seal alone in his watery world.
It¡¦s been a GREAT week, and that¡¦s a dive I will certainly never forget!
It¡¦s been a busy week. Seven days exploring the Antarctic Peninsula and seven dives, providing our guests with a window into the world beneath the ice. The seas here are highly various, just like terrestrial Antarctica, so each of these dives presented different scenes and a different side of the Southern Ocean.
It began (seems like a long time ago now) with a dive in the protected bay at Yankee Harbor. I had only dived here once previously and dropping down through the dark, cloudy water I reached the muddy bottom at just over 100 feet, deeper than I have been before. Here I was surprised to find numerous colonies of soft corals, each occupied by several strange Arcturid isopods, reaching out to gather their food from the current like animated claws.
Two days later, at Deception Island, I dove for the first time on Raven Rock, the site of the recent grounding of a small cruise ship. Navigating to this little pinnacle in the middle of Neptune¡¦s Bellows was very challenging, but I got lucky enough to find it and was able to record video and stills of broken and scraped rock, smears and chips of paint, and torn kelp where the ship had collided with this hidden hazard.
On Tuesday I made my furthest south dive ever, off the shores of Stonington Island at 68„a 11.3¡¦ South. This was an astoundingly rich site, a steep slope covered with extensive scallop beds, large anemones, beautiful little coral colonies and golden orange sea cucumbers. Sediment from the huge glaciers on the nearby mainland made the water very cloudy; by the time I reached 60 feet it was black as night. But this turbid water was also full of food, plankton and detritus, that nourished the wonderful community of animals living there; so I swam slowly, almost feeling my way, using the close focus ability of the camera to zero in on one remarkable creature after another.
There¡¦s no doubt though that the most exciting dive of the week, in fact one of the most exciting of my career, was at Booth Island. Just five minutes into the dive an adult male leopard seal found me and became very curious about what I might be. He made pass after pass, circling within arms reach and when it became clear that he was not going to move on any time soon, I slowly ascended, put my back to the rocky wall of the island, signaled to my safety Zodiac to stay close and filmed him for the next twenty minutes. As the encounter went on he became bolder and bolder, moving faster and closer until he decided to test me in the best way leopard seals can: with his teeth! On one of his last passes he opened his mouth wide enough to engulf the entire camera and nearly did as I tried to push him away! At this point I chose the better part of valor, called in the nearby boats and left the seal alone in his watery world.
It¡¦s been a GREAT week, and that¡¦s a dive I will certainly never forget!
