Macro Round 2

I decided to take advantage of the beautiful, sunny morning at Back Beach. I got there early with my macro setup and spent an hour in the water before work. My only objective today was to get good exposures and get a couple of 'portrait' shots of whatever critters I came across. Enjoy!

Flounder 

Rock crab

Windowpane flounder

  Hermit crab. The space between his eyes was about 1cm. 

Cunner boasting a snaggletoothed pout.

Macro Test

It had been raining for days, but I was determined to jump in Folly Cove and play with my macro setup on my last day of vacation. What's usually a stream running into the cove, was more like a river turning the water a brown rusty color. The visibility was awful and it proved exceedingly difficult to carry my camera equipment, lights, and dive flag all by myself. I was able to fire off a couple of good shots in any case. I'm still getting used to setting correct exposures underwater, as a result some of these came out a little hot, but they look cool nonetheless.



 A flounder face. This guy just sat and stared at me for quite a while, I think we were both wondering why the other looked so goofy. 











Orange tunicate looks amazingly complex close up. You see this bright, invasive tunicate in small bunches in shallow water. It looks out of place because you don't see much in the way of bright orange around here.

 The leg of a sea star. On the left (ventral) side of the leg, you can see the suction cups clearly. This one was resting on a sponge. Below are the incurrent and excurrent siphons of a tunicate. To give a sense of scale, there is approximately an inch between the two siphons. 

Wreck of U-853

On August 6th, Chuck, myself and a crew from the New England Aquarium dove this German u-boat that fell 7 miles east of Block Island. The submarine was torpedoed and mined days before the Germans surrendered in May of 1945. All 55 crew members died in the attack.

We set out of Point Judith on the "Canned Air" with Giant Stride Dive Shop, the owner, Red, dove with us. The boat felt more like a rocket sled as it was much faster than anything I was used to. Everyone took glee in my lack of sea-legs. I must have wiped out 10 times during the ride out to the wreck.

The wreck sits in the muck about 130' down. With such fine sediment everywhere, visibility quickly dropped to about 6 feet. All of the muck and detritus in the water column looked like snow. It would have been very disorienting without a wreck reel.  It was almost impossible to get any decent pictures in these conditions, but video proved to be a little more forgiving.  Below, Chuck just tied off his reel to the conning tower where the mooring line was. You can still see where the periscope came out of the boat (not pictured). The shaft of the periscope is stainless steel and looks uniquely out of place as it is shiny and looks brand new against the decaying metal of the rest of the wreck. 

There was some serious invert growth all over the wreck, but we didn't see much in the way of large fishes. We were able to find two of the three blast holes in the hull of the ship, a very sobering reminder of what happened to this boat and the people on it. The holes were not a big as you would expect, I would imagine the people on board had some time to think about what was happening. It was incredibly dark inside the wreck with even less vis, but in one spot we could see the ballast tanks on the inside. After a long surface interval and a very short second dive, I had to call it a day. This is an incredible dive sight given the history of the wreck. It's going to take several return trips to really get a feel for what is down there.