St. Thomas USVI
We stayed at a great place, These photos were taken from the dive boat's dock, and from our veranda
, so even though Chris Sawyer was not affiliated with our resort,
it was just a short walk across the beach.
Diving with Chris Sawyer off St Thomas's east side with was spectacular!
Lush reefs teeming with life! Although we saw a shark, turtles, rays, and
a HUGE lobster, there were not many large fish. I had BOTH cameras fail
me on this trip. Nikon had a recall on my strobe in Dec. BUT, I figured since I
wasn't leaving until May they would be able to get the new one to me in time. WRONG!
They had over 180,000 to replace, I was too far down the list, and they
wouldn't return the one I had sent.
I borrowed an Ikelite from my late friend Jacques Fourie, who did tons of UW photography all over the world.
He hit the nail on the head when he jokingly said "...And don't forget, Anything that
goes underwater, won't work!" How prophetic. The synch cord had an open in it.
It worked perfectly in the normal gravity of air, but when in the weightlessness of water,
no flash. It took 2 dives to figure it out though. On the second dive before I
figured out what was wrong, I took 4 shots in a row from the water of the captain
to prove it wasn't working. HOWEVER......The best photo-op was on this dive
with the Nikonos in shallow water. I had plenty of ambient light for the shot without ANY flash.
It was an 8'Lemon shark. I snuck up around the backside of a rock,
to see a huge school of silversides like a tinfoil backdrop flash up. A turtle came up into
the foreground from the bottom. The shark rounded the rock and came towards me................
unfortunatelly, I didn't know I had just run out of film.
This is a photo of Perry's hand I unwittingly traded for that one!.
So the next day I changed to my
Wife's MotorMarine II, which she uses when snorkeling. Unknown to us, It had a small spring under
the shutter that was broken. As it is only needed at
depth to compensate for the pressure, she had never noticed it as a problem.
Under 25 ft. it would go down once, but not come back up.
Here are the only 2 decent pictures I got. If it weren't for Jim I wouldn't even
have a picture of me!
Click here for the next trip!
