Diving in the Bahamas.

The date was set. October 19th 2004. Six nights in the Bahamas diving with dolphins, sharks, turtles, octopus, wrecks, and corals all in pristine clear water. This diving trip was arranged with the owners Andi and Lars of digideep.com. They run an underwater housing specialist website. I had already met these guys from a previous underwater photo safari in the red sea last year. We booked the MV Shearwater liveaboard which is run by Jim and Anna Abernethy. They are well known in the underwater photographic scene and are both enthuastic underwater photographers themselves. Jim Abernethy’s Scuba Adventures (www.scuba-adventures.com) has looked after divers from such names as national geographic to the BBC. Jim has written articles and won competitions in underwater photographic and video production himself.

We all met up in West Palm Beach, Florida, which is where scuba adventures are based. After seeing so many pictures from people diving on Jims itineraries online and meeting him in person, I must say I felt that this was going to be very special dive holiday. I introduced myself and told him I was from Ireland. The first thing he said to me was “Basking Sharks!!” He is fanatical about them. Sharks.
The boat was full of underwater photographers with lots of equipment. There were 11 divers and 4 staff. Of the 11 divers 10 would have laptops with them to download their pictures. It was gadget heaven on the boat, from firewire cards to TTL S2 digital SLR cameras. The crew, on the M.V Shearwater were great. If anyone had a problem, they could fix it. From fixing breakfast any way you wished to fixing faulty video housings. The company has become so popular it is booked out for all 2005. It’s mainly word of mouth how people find out about this dive centre. They also run daily boat dives from West Palm Beach.

So what’s so special about the liveaboard itinerary? Well sharks are the main puller. People want to dive with sharks. How about diving a site with 20 + reef sharks swimming frantically around you, or a photo session with a tiger shark and lemon shark, snorkel with dolphins who will smile at you when they glide past you. Throughout the week we did all that and more. Jim would give a briefing before the dive and explain the safety precautions when diving with sharks. He would also give advice on camera settings and what might work best for the dive, which was very helpful.

I have recently made the move from a Canon S50 (5 mega pixel) consumer camera to a Digital SLR system (6.3 mega pixel). This allows me to change the lens to take different type of pictures i.e. macro or wide angle. I have been acquiring the complete setup for nearly a year now and only got the last few parts to make it a useable system, a few weeks before the trip. I had no time to test it underwater before the trip. Basically it’s a Canon 300D SLR housed in an Ikelite housing with twin Inon z220 strobes. There is so much equipment that goes part and parcel with digital photography. A laptop is pretty much essential when away. Everyone shot in RAW format. These file sizes are roughly 6 or 7 Megs a picture. It didn’t take long to fill my 1 GB card. RAW format is like a digital negative. When you load raw files into a graphics program like Adobe Photoshop CS you can change some colour/exposure settings without any loss in quality. I never used to use this format on my older Canon S50, preferring the normal jpeg files. I can see now that RAW is certainly the way to go. With the new camera and setup, in my opinion, I have taken some of my best pictures yet. While you will always get pictures that don’t turn out the way you wanted them, there is always that one that can be tweaked a little to give great results. The healing tool in Photoshop is a great tool for getting rid of small bits of backscatter. The colour adjustment in the RAW dialogue box is very powerful.
Charging batteries and clearing compact flash cards were the order after each dive. Having a backup of these is really essential for you to continue shooting throughout the day. Cleaning the O- rings of the housing is important too. One girl flooded her new 5 mega pixel camera the first day on the first dive. Not a good way to start the week. Fortunately, Andi from digideep had some test underwater housings and cameras so she was able to enjoy the week of photography with the rest of us. Accidents happen all the time. This week was no exception, with minor floods into a 10D Jonah housing, full floods, strobes not firing, cables leaking in water, torches blowing up at safety stop. We did about 4 dives a day.

On the day of the tiger shark dives at tiger beach dive location, we tossed out crates of dead fish to attract the sharks. One of the crew would wrangle fish bait on a line and let the sharks try get a bite. Then the divers were staggered into the water with a detailed briefing before hand of what to expect. We were handed white poles for protection if the sharks got too close. It was pretty nerving for most of the divers. Tiger sharks are classed as a potentially high risk to divers and are one of the most dangerous sharks in sub-tropical and tropical waters. It is often described as the great white of the tropics. Initially no tiger sharks would come in close for a photo shoot. Then as time passed under the water in about 5 – 8 meters, appears one of Jim and Anna’s favourite tigers – “Baby Cakes” was her name. Of course we didn’t know that at the time. She has a distinct marking on her side which is how they knew her. This tiger shark was like a tame gentle puppy. It was amazing to watch as she approached the divers lined up with their cameras and flashing strobes. Her eyes were constantly moving, looking at all of us individually (as if she is deciding which one to eat). She passed by me within 1 foot of my camera, my heart pounding with shock and joy. First her huge bulky head, her eyes piercing my eyes, then the gills, then the awesome body with grey markings similar to tigers and then to top it off was the huge caudal fin!! “WOW” I said to myself. This was my first close big shark encounter and I was hooked! I stayed in the shallow water for 1hr40min until my memory card was full. I got out, downloaded all the pictures, reloaded the camera, batteries and returned to the sea. I would stay for another hour taking pictures of this amazing predator. A lemon shark appeared but did not hang around too long. Baby Cakes had made the day a success for everyone… After a day diving with tiger sharks I said to Jim “They seem very weary of us and complacent” Not like the killers I had come to think of. Jims reply was slowly “DON’T TELL ANYONE” It was one of my best dive experiences I have done!! In my mind now, sharks are not interested in humans as food. They will come and check us out if they want to though. We just don’t meet their food requirements (thankfully). The fear factor will always be there though.

Throughout the week we spotted only a handful of turtles and dolphins. Some of the divers were hoping for that special encounter with the dolphins throughout the week. We did have a brief one during the week but the dolphins were not in the mood for playing too long. It’s our last dive of the week and we visit a shallow blue hole which starts shallow but goes down very deep and with the tide sucking in the hole can be quite dangerous. Luckily it was not too bad that day, some nice pictures but overall not much to write about. Then without notice, a pod of dolphins swam right into our path. I counted 15 dolphins and these guys seemed like “players”. It was amazing to see a dive totally turned around in terms of interest....all divers swam directly to the zooming pod. The dolphins did a twirl then went out of site. Jim was ecstatic!! Signalling his two thumbs up, for everyone to swim back to the boat NOW!! We were going dolphin searching. We all got on the boat and the M.V Shearwater roared its engines. Dolphin fever had hit us !! We had a smaller zodiac boat out on the chase too. Jim shouts to everyone “Get ready, Masks, snorkel, Fins! Get ready. Port side, Port side, Now, Now GO,GO NOW, NOW” We all fell in off the back of the boat. For the next hour we swam with the dolphins enjoying the beautiful warm clear water. The dolphins were great and I tried to get some decent pictures but they are too fast.

Jim’s passion for diving also comes across to helping people with their photography. Throughout the week, he helped back up raw image files I had, onto a DVD writer, so I could fit more files on my laptop. He helped with editing files in Photoshop and even loaned me a macro lens to try out on a few of the night dives. This is why JASA is successful as a dive operator. Its one thing to run a diving business but to see his eyes open wide on every dive and speak passionately about diving is an inspiration.


I will be back to dive with Scuba Adventures (sometime). There was talk of places available next April 05 for a shark expedition. Other options will be thailand and or El Hierro :-)