Tag Archive: strange


A Day’s Long Dive at Porteau

Blue Lingcod

I can’t say I’ve ever seen a greenish-blue Lingcod before…

Josh and I set out on this dive with a bit of a mission. I really enjoy wide-angle photography of wrecks, but given the bad visibility and the limitations of my camera (It’s not a DSLR, so I can’t slap a fisheye lens on it) I haven’t taken too much. Enter Hugin Panorama Photo Stitcher. Using that utility, I can snap a series of photos and stitch them together into a wide-angle-like photo!

The catch is that the photos need to be taken from the same spot. On the surface there’s a bit of leeway, but given the poor visibility underwater, photos need to be taken very close together so that each shot doesn’t have differing visibility. Likewise, the difference between dark on the bottom and the sun coming from the surface means a high-dynamic-range exposure shot.

Moon Jelly

A Moon Jelly. I did a blur of the water around it to get rid of the backscatter, and got a cool glowing effect.

To tackle the challenge getting a solid reference point for photos in a mild current, we experimented with deploying and anchoring an SMB a few meters above the bottom. The reference concept went well, the execution of anchoring it was a leaning experience. The photos themselves didn’t turn out good enough to stitch together (we chose a bland part of the Nakaya, more to try making a reference than get actual photos). Regardless, we came away with some really good data-points and I’m confident that I’ll be able use this method to make some interesting photos in the future.

After half an hour on the Nakaya, we headed in shallower and explored the other usual suspects at Porteau. I noticed a dead starfish, of a different species than we’d observed at Whytecliff in the previous weeks. This one I believe was a Giant Pink Starfish. Interestingly, I saw another one maybe 10-20 meters away that appeared to be normal. I’m unsure if it’s related to the mass die-off of other species or not, as one a statistic does not make. (See the next post for a greater discussion of what we observed on a dive a week later)

There were also several dead salmon scattered around the dive site as well, as it’s spawning season right now. Luckily it wasn’t littered with them!

Dead Starfish

A “dissolving” starfish. (Giant Pink Starfish)

Not too much else to say about the dive, other than the fact that we ended up staying under for 92 minutes! I’m not sure if I’ll be able to manage such long exposures in the winter when the water cools down a bit.

All in all, it was a great, well-executed dive where we tried something new and learned a lot in the process. Can’t ask for much more than that.

Some random photos in the gallery below.

 

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carnage3

A dead Starfish

In an earlier blog post, I’d mentioned that we had observed a large amount of dead starfish out at the Cut at Whytecliff, which was corroborated by a news story about a mass starfish die-off. Diving at Whytecliff again today, again we noticed pieces of starfish at around 10 meter depth on the right wall (although not quite as concentrated as they were at the cut last week). It appears to have hit only a couple species of starfish (Morning Sun Stars?), although I didn’t notice too many of the other usual suspects in the area apart from a healthy-looking slime star at depth.

The decomposition (disintegration?) appears to have greatly progressed into a grey-slime kind of state, although to be honest the grey-slime may be completely unrelated. I’m not entirely sure. Interestingly there appeared to have been some dead crabs in the area as well. I didn’t check to see if it was simply the case that the a couple of crabs had moulted in the decomposition pile, or if they were actually dead crabs.

A quick video clip (with horrible white-balancing) of an area saturated with the grey slime, and some photos of the carnage are below for documentation purposes. If any marine biologists happen to be reading this, I would appreciate an expert weigh-in in the comments below.

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An Unknown Nudibranch...

An Unknown Nudibranch...

Admittedly, this article wasn’t published anywhere near March 3rd, the date the photos were taken. But, in keeping with the the tradition, I’m forcing the post dates to the dates of the photos, making it easier for viewers to correlate conditions and what can be seen by date.

Anyways, I’ve been doing a lot of diving without a camera this month (Taking GUE Fundamentals), and I haven’t had a chance to get these photos processed until recently. On that note, I’ve been playing around with a program known as “Darktable” for processing RAW photos. Darktable is an open source (read: Free) alternative to Lightroom. I’m still learning the ropes of the new software, but I like what I see so far. The images in this post were all processed in Darkroom, however I must admit they weren’t the best exposed photos I’ve taken, which is perhaps why I’ve taken so long to edit them and upload them. I couldn’t seem to make them look decent in UFRaw and GIMP, however Darktable made it easier. Or perhaps I’m just more motivated towards the end of the month.

Hairy Spined Crab

A Hairy Spined Crab

On to the actual dives!

I went out to Whytecliff for a couple of dive swith a new buddy with whom I would be taking GUE Fundamentals in the coming weeks. Although I haven’t always had much luck of getting great shots of cool critters at Whytecliff, I was pleasantly surprised on this dive with a wide variety of crabs. Some of the cooler crabs which I’d never seen before were the Rhinoceros Crab and the Hairy Spined Crab, both very unique and funky crabs.  Unfortunatley I couldn’t seem to expose them quite right, so the photos aren’t as good as they could be. Also of note was the large number of HUGE Tanner Crabs, which appeared to be mating.

The full gallery is available below:

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A Winter Day’s Dive at Porteau Cove

Red Dendronotid

a rather large Red Dendronotid

hermitcrab

A Black-eyed Hermit Crab

After scraping the ice and snow off of my Jeep this morning, I made my way down to Porteau Cove with one of my dive buddies. It was a nice day hovering around zero, with a light dusting of ice and snow on the ground. Perfect for drysuit diving in cold water!

I’m pretty sure my computer measured the water at the surface at about 39 degrees F, but thankfully at depth it warmed up to about 44 degrees F. We managed two good dives, about an hour long each. My new Santi hood managed to keep me much warmer than my old hood did, so I didn’t get too chilled. For the second dive I did have to throw on an extra 4 lbs of weight so that I could inflate my drysuit some more…

I managed to get some nice pictures on this dive that I’m happy with. Without further addoo, here are the photos:

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Lions Mane Jellies at Porteau

img_3322-toilet

When you gotta go, you gotta go. Unless there's a plumose anemone living on your toilet.

Another dive at Porteau Cove. This time I had the wide-angle lens on, which in retrospect was probably was not the best choice for the dive given the poor visibility.  There were a lot of particles in the water, and the sun was shining bright causing both flaring on the lense in the shallower waters, illuminating particles even if I didn’t use the flash. I’ve still got to figure out how to mitigate those issues. I ended up taking the lens off part way through the dive.

Even though I’m not overly happy with the technical aspects of the photos I took on this trip, it’s all a learning process so I’m taking notes for the next dive. That said, I did get some interesting photos, which hopefully show some of the interesting things that can be found underwater, whether natural or man-made!

img_3336-auto-level-jelly

Lion's Mane

One of my favorite photos to date is the one to the right of the Lion’s Mane Jelly! As we were swimming back towards shore to end our dive (We don’t like surface swimming, we vastly prefer to head back along the bottom using a compass) we came across a couple of these large alien-like creatures.

Unfortunately the camera wasn’t set up to take both raw and jpeg at the time so I was stuck with using the Gimp’s level tool to fix up the white balance. Using the “Auto Level” function (The lazy/easy way), I ended up with the reds really being brought out. While the real Lion’s Mane wasn’t quite as red, I found the effect so surreal and awesome that I decided to leave the photo like that. The observant reader will notice that this photo is the basis for this website’s background. (At least as of this typing, I may change it in the future)

Between snaps of the Lion’s Mane, I managed to get a short clip of it swimming. If you look carefully you can almost see how long it’s tentacles are!

More photos after the jump..

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Strange… Things.. at Whytecliff at Night

We went on a night dive at Whytecliff in early January. The fact that it was the dead of “winter” meant that we didn’t have to get into the water super-late, either. Much unlike Alberta where we’d get into the water after 10pm in the summer so that it would be dark enough.

Near the end of our dive, returning into the shallows we did see a lot of strange.. Things.. swimming about in a very peculiar fashion. I didn’t manage to get any good photos of them, but did manage to get a video showing their unique, rippling swimming motion:

At first paranoia set in, and I thought they were carnivorous earwigs of some sort attempting to swim into my ear and eat my brains. They were very interested in us, but in retrospect they may have just been attracted to my 10 watt HID. It’s a very nice dive light, I know.

After some sleuthing, Steffy figured that they were some sort of polychaete, which was confirmed by an e-mail to Andy Lamb, an expert in marine life of the PNW. Very funky creatures indeed!

I had my quasi-wide-angle lens on (Fantasea Bigeye), so I struggled a bit to try and get decent photos. I didn’t get too many, but I’ve uploaded a few of the good ones. Click below for the Gallery.

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