Diving with... Dr Elodie Camprasse

DR ELODIE CAMPRASSE Diving with…

PT Hirschfield chats to Dr Elodie Camprasse, a marine ecologist with a love of Australian waters and a soft spot for Victoria’s spider crabs

Photographs by Elodie Camprasse, Carole Brassac and Matthias Klapperstueck

Dr Elodie Camprasse’s

passion is marine ecology. From her PhD research in seabird ecology to the current ‘Spider Crab Watch’ citizen science project she’s leading in Victoria, Elodie’s love of the underwater world is underpinned by her desire to understand the scientific interplay of species with other species as a foundation for advocacy.

Elodie started diving at 13 years old in France when her father was a lifeguard. From her first dive where she encountered sea slugs and fish, she ‘was sold completely’ on the idea of becoming a marine biologist. At age 16 she completed the equivalent of the Advanced Open Water course. Some of her earliest dive adventures included cenotes in Mexico and cave diving in France.

In 2009, Elodie was a ‘broke student’ doing inventory and tracking research on terrestrial animals and plants in Ecuador. With ten free days in her schedule, she made a decision to head to the Galapagos. She had no concept of how expensive liveaboards were until she arrived. ‘I approached a liveaboard with one last spot for the next day that they were advertising as discounted. I tried to

With ten free days in her schedule, she made a decision to head to the Galapagos

bargain but the guy realised I had peanuts, so he shooed me away. I couldn’t sleep that night, so I woke up and withdrew all the money in my account, determined to show up with my packed bags in the morning and take my chances. The guy behind the counter rolled his eyes when I turned up again. But I gave him my envelope of cash and got to dive with whalesharks, hammerheads, batfish, turtles and sea lions.’

Elodie did her Divemaster training in 2010 in the US, then completed her instructor course in Vietnam in 2013: ‘I was looking for a way to do my dive instructor certification as an internship because I still didn’t have much money. A lot of centres offered internships, but you usually had to commit to working there for at least six months. A dive centre in Vietnam took me on even though I could only commit to working with them for three months as they were struggling to find French-speaking staff. I couldn’t stay longer because my PhD had a set date that couldn’t be moved, so it was a win-win and again saved me lots of money’.

Elodie arrived in Melbourne in 2013 to undertake her PhD on individual foraging specialisations in penguins and other seabirds. ‘Individuals tend to display specialisations

in hunting strategies. Although a population of penguins or other seabirds can eat anything from worms and cephalopods to fish, individuals may have ‘preferences’ rather than go for the full spectrum. We think this is linked to increased hunting success. I was working to quantify the degree of specialisations in different species and why this might vary between species. It’s thought that individuals that are very specialised might not be very adaptable to changes in their environment as they might not be able to easily revert back to eating different things once they’ve optimised their hunting strategies.’

The same might serve as an analogy for many divers who develop a distinct preference for warmer waters, struggling to bring themselves to dive in colder waters which may be local to them but to which they aren’t acclimatised. But Elodie is strongly drawn to the temperate offerings of Melbourne’s massive, central bay where she is currently coordinating the Spider Crab Watch research project. ‘I had been thinking about spider crab research for a long time but it was very difficult to get funding to do that. It’s mindblowing that we know next to nothing about such an iconic species as the Great Australian Spider Crab.’

Again, Elodie’s perseverance paid off in the form of two successful research grant applications. Funding from the Victorian government, via Port Phillip Bay Fund and Coastcare community grants, allowed Elodie and her team to launch the citizen science programme at Deakin

Elodie is spearheading a project on spider crabs

Elodie can find marine life even topside

University where she has been teaching for eight years.

Beneath Rye and Blairgowrie Piers where the spider crabs are most commonly known to gather for their annual mass moulting events, fixed cameras have been deployed that take one still image every five minutes during daylight hours to help unlock the mysteries of the aggregations. ’There are two parts to the research: Citizen Science and traditional science. We’re trying to understand where they come from, where they go after the aggregations, what triggers the aggregations - is it full moon? Water temperature? Why do the spider crabs choose these sites? What are the aggregations made of - males? Females? Sizes? Does that vary from year to year? The traditional science is an ongoing monitoring programme and we’re hoping further funding will allow us to run the citizen science programme for years to come.’ With her background of lowbudget, exotic dive travel, Elodie believes that Australia’s temperate waters are highly underrated: ‘I’m saddened by how little people understand what’s in their own blue backyard. The biodiversity we have here and on the Great Southern Reef with 80% of species that are found nowhere else in the world is precious. Yet when the average Australian is asked to think about a productive, beautiful, biodiverse marine system they’ll probably think about the Great Barrier Reef.’

‘What we have here in this temperate environment gets so overlooked. Even Victoria’s state marine emblem - the weedy seadragon - which people travel from interstate and overseas to see, we know so little about.’ www.inaturalist.org/projects/spider-crab-watch. n

Mustard’s

MASTERCLASS

In this installment, Alex Mustard explains how to get stunning fish portraits that will instantly connect with your audience

Photographs courtesy of Alex Mustard / www.amustard.com

Happily, I am coming to you from Sharm

El Sheikh. It is great to be back! I’ve run underwater photography trips to the Red Sea in June/July for most of the last 20 years, but after two summers away, it has been a long wait for this trip.

On the plus side, absence makes the heart grow fonder and I’ve been revelling in the magnificent reefs, captivating shipwrecks and awesome schools of fish that gather in the Ras Mohammed National Park. But if there is one thing that sends my heart soaring here it is the anthias. They may be small, but these joyous technicolour marvels shout ‘Red Sea’ to me. Right now, if I had to pick my favourite fish it would be small, orange and frequently spotted massed about coral heads. Truth be told, I can never settle on a preferred fish for long, there are just too many to love. But that isn’t a problem most of the population struggle with – the average-Joe-or-Jane-in-thestreet has never considered having a favourite fish. Which presents a challenge to us as shooters because fish are a major subject and we want to produce images that people are interested in. The solution starts with honesty. Much as we love them, we have to accept that scaly, slimy fish just don’t have the natural charisma of species like polar bears, pandas, or penguins. Nor are they A-listers like sharks, dolphins or turtles. We have work harder to create images that will really appeal. The solution is to to take the viewer beyond the scales and allow them to see an individual, a creature with character and personality. Unfortunately, fish aren’t always the most co-operative subjects, they are always on the move, darting in and out of focus, waiting for the exact moment we press the shutter to turn away and leave us snapping at their tails. Here in the Red Sea, fish really are everywhere, but stand-out photos are rare. On the plus side, if we can produce them, great fish portraits will really mark our work out. Photographing moving fish puts a lot of emphasis on autofocus performance, especially those like anthias that seem to dance constantly and erratically. Add to this the lower light levels and the low contrast of the underwater world and you have one of the toughest autofocus challenges in any branch of photography. If you are a compact shooter, this is probably the discipline that your gear has the biggest performance gap to others. Fortunately, if you target slow or nonmoving species then this difference in eliminated. The latest mirrorless cameras have excellent autofocus, and the top models now have eye-tracking focus, which could prove revolutionary underwater. I have not had a chance to try it myself, yet. On SLRs the best mode is the tracking focus used by sports photographers, although the movements of fish are a little less predictable! Lighting choices are reasonably simple. Most underwater photographers favour two strobes in classic 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock positions for fish portraits. Unlike human portraits, where a photographer might look to use uneven lighting to create shadows and emphasize the features of their sitter, most fish are streamlined and lack the lumps and bumps to be brought out by this technique. Even lighting is usually best to reveal their colours and details. But in muck-diving destinations there are a plethora of gargoylian species, like frogfish and stonefish that should be celebrated ‘warts and all’ with uneven lighting. It is less fashionable these days, but in the past many photographers preferred the look of single strobe for fish portraits, arguing that the small drop shadow created both helped the fish stand out from the background and created a more three-dimensional look. These days shallow depth of field is the trendier way to separation, where the limited focus makes the subject pop out from its surroundings. Finding the right fish or situation is also key. Shooting anthias in the Red Sea, I target them on shallow easy dives, rather than in a howling current on an oceanic wall. I really like the local sites around Sharm for this, such as Temple, as the fish here see training divers everyday, so when we are quiet and still we easily win them over. A mild

Add to this the lower light levels and the low contrast of the underwater world and you have one of the toughest autofocus challenges in any branch of photography

The right pose or gesture can transform a picture

The right pose will suggest emotions

Special shots come most readily when we meet a scaly supermodel, which is a particularly friendly fish that just wants to pose

current is ideal as this will line up the fish and if we position ourselves slightly up current then the fish will swim towards our lens. Special shots come most readily when we meet a scaly supermodel, which is a particularly friendly fish that just wants to pose. Examples from my last week’s diving include a territorial lionfish that kept charging my camera, a farming sohal surgeonfish on the wreck that wanted to keep me off its veg, and an amorous yellow boxfish that was swimming right up to divers’ masks, fuelled by hormones and the desire to find a female. Whatever the cause, a fish that will repeatedly pose is an opportunity never to pass up. Fortunately, and especially so here in the Red Sea, many fish are incredibly beautiful and need only be shot in a simple id-style to create a visual feast. The veteran fishsnapper Roger Steene, whose photos fill many of the staple identification books, was the master of this approach. Although some are condescending to this ID style, Steene’s best images demonstrate how aesthetic the simple celebration of nature’s beauty can be. However, when we want our images to reach beyond the converted, then our focus must shift to character. The golden rule here is strong eye contact, which peaks when we bend our back and get right down to the eye level of the subject. You’ll know instantly when you get strong eye contact, and if you have to ask whether a photo has eye contact - then it doesn’t! Some fish species have forward facing eyes and we should try and photograph the species from head on. This naturally arranges the fish’s features with their eyes, above a nose, above a mouth, forming a recognizable face.

Once the viewer can see a face they won’t see a fish! Instead, they will see an individual they can relate to and will project character, emotion, or personality onto the subject. Even when it isn’t there! You may already have a fish photo where people say the subject looks grumpy, surprised, or curious. This is exactly what you want; it means your subject has transcended being a scaly, slimy fish and has become a character. Memorable fish portraits are not about really about photographing fish, but photographing faces. n

LIVE TO DIVE ANOTHER DAY

PT Hirschfield’s 1,531st dive – and the boat trip she was on - ended up being memorable for all the wrong reasons

Dive 1,531 (19 March 2022) brought me closer

to death than anything else in my life. It’s a dramatic story with lots of lessons learned, and writing about it here is helping me to process the enormity of what did - and didn’t - happen.

This year, I’ve been spending a lot of time exploring Australian waters that are new to me. I reached out to someone whose underwater photos I’d seen on Facebook. After meeting in person, I was invited to join a dive adventure on his private 40-foot catamaran, which he had owned for the past year and a half.

I told the owner captain that I was a writer for scuba magazines and he said ‘Great! Maybe you can write an article to help me to find new crew members’. The crew onboard the boat when I embarked consisted of the captain and three novice divers, whom I’ll call Adam, Teddy and Adam’s girlfriend, Amy. I awoke after the first night on the boat to the captain in the galley kitchen, looking at a weather app on his phone and shaking his head. ‘Conditions look much worse today than predicted last night’. ‘So no diving today?’ I asked. ‘No other boats will be leaving this marina today. Everyone else would think I was crazy for going out’.

‘So dives are cancelled today then?’ I enquired again. ‘I think we can get out to the dive spot early, then head back before it turns too feral’, he answered. As someone unfamiliar with the waters of this region, it didn’t cross my mind to challenge his judgement as we made the one-and-a-half hour boat journey out to the site.

When we reached the site, the captain elected to stay on the boat with Teddy, instructing Adam (with 40 dives) how to navigate his girlfriend Amy (with 30 dives) and myself through the dive site and where it would be safest to surface under the prevailing conditions. I was not privy to the dive briefing, nor the fact that Adam (who had only dived the site twice before) was distracted by not being able to find his hood and wasn’t paying adequate attention to the instructions being given. As we began our descent, it became apparent that Amy’s tank was slipping loose from her BCD. After Adam tried

unsuccessfully to secure the tank at the relatively calm surface, Amy aborted the dive and swam back to the boat. That loose tank probably saved her life. I continued the dive with Adam. He seemed a competent diver, apart from his dive profile repeatedly going deep (maximum 23m) then shallow then deep again, creating potential risks for equalisation and nitrogen levels. After the dive, his computer dive profile graph showed at least eight red marks, indicating where he had violated best practice rather than starting deep then slowly levelling up. The dive itself was pleasant and mostly uneventful. Lots of fish and wobbegong sharks punctuated the increasing surge. An enormous numb ray slept on the sandy substrate. Adam indicated that it was time for us to commence our safety stop, so I clipped my camera to my bcd and slowly began to There was no way I could climb the ladder ascend. I started to feel a mild reverse block in my left ear, so I descended slowly until it resolved with fins on or remove my own fins. I raised before rejoining Adam on the stop. We completed the three-minute safety stop at 4m without incident, my right foot above the surface and yelled not far from the rocky point where Adam had planted the marker buoy he’d been towing for later retrieval by the boat. Leaving the marker there seemed odd to me, but I assumed it was part of some prearranged protocol between Adam and the captain. Upon surfacing from the 72-minute dive, we were met with pounding three-metre waves, dangerously close to the rocks, making it impossible for the 40 foot catamaran to retrieve us. We lay on our backs and kicked as hard as we could away from the rocks, making little to no progress against the powerful waves forcing us repeatedly back towards the rocky point. I could only occasionally see the boat through the towering waves as the captain made several attempts to manoeuvre it close enough to attempt a rescue without getting too close to the exposed rocks. Adam caught the smooth white rope Teddy threw to him and was towed then pulled into safety, leaving me bobbing alone on the violent surface. The boat circled into position and the rope was thrown to me three times over 20 minutes. Each time

it escaped my gloved hands like teflon. ‘Grab onto the rope!’ Teddy yelled to me over the waves. ‘It keeps slipping through my hands’, I screamed.

In disbelief, I heard Teddy call back to the captain ‘She doesn’t want the rope!’ and I corrected him at the top of my lungs, ‘It keeps slipping away!’ I put my reg back into my mouth as the next thunderous wave pounded over me. Thank God I had surfaced with half a tank of air. I knew it might be hours before the water would calm enough for them to be able to collect me if the smooth white rope failed me again. I knew I couldn’t wrap the rope around my hand, having read articles about people having hands amputated by ropes during games of Tug of War. I finally managed to grab and maintain hold of the rope with both hands the fourth time, as now the crew had tied knots into it to prevent it escaping my grasp.

I was towed through the relentless wall of waves further from the rocks and towards the relative safety of the boat. ‘Just hold on tight,’ I told myself as waves smashed my face and crashed over my head, knowing full well that panic is a primary cause of diver death. Staying calm would increase my chances of getting out of this dangerous water.

Then, without warning, I was under the catamaran, its massive bow rising ten metres above the raging sea, while the solid stern crashed down less than a handspan from my face. ‘I’m going to die now,’ I realised with absolute as they unclipped my camera and dumped it face down on the deck. ‘Move up onto the next step!’ they urged me. ‘I can’t move’, I either yelled or whispered, utterly spent. ‘Take the tank off my back. Do not drop it on me.’ They removed the tank and I begged them to keep dragging me up, still in imminent danger of toppling back down into the raging sea. ‘Don’t let her fall asleep!’ I heard Teddy tell Adam. Somehow I inched my way onto the next step, then slumped onto the deck. I vomited while the captain berated Adam for losing the marker buoy and not following his instructions about where to double back away from the rock point to end the dive. ‘I didn’t listen properly’, the novice diver confessed.

Adam had dived that site and dive path twice before. But he was too inexperienced to understand that the old dive plan could be deadly under the treacherous new conditions that had developed on the surface. I sat on the lounge behind the captain with my eyes closed and my head in the spew bucket for the two and a half hours it took us to battle the monstrous sea back to the marina. I was beyond thankful to be uninjured, but my camera port now had a deep scratch across it, rendering it unusable without time-consuming repairs. That night as we ate ramen and played Monopoly Deal as though denying our collective state of shock, our conversation kept reverting to round-table debrief of the near-deadly dive. ‘Well, thanks everyone for saving my life

I finally managed to grab and maintain hold of the rope with both hands the fourth time, as now the crew had tied knots into it to prevent it escaping my grasp

certainty, waiting for the boat to crack my skull or send me unconscious to the ocean floor. Despite my instinct to raise my arm to cover my head, I tightened my desperate grasp on the rope. Somehow I was either dragged by rope from above or propelled by surge below or both, out from beneath the backend of the boat. I found myself clutching a wildly flailing, narrow ladder as it threatened to smash, crush or sever whatever part of my body was closest to it at any given moment.

There was no way I could climb the ladder with fins on or remove my own fins. I raised my right foot above the surface and yelled to Adam, ‘Get my fin off!’ He removed the fin and I managed to put my foot on the ladder’s bottom rung. Exhausted and with a 13-litre aluminium tank on my back, I was still being pummelled by ferocious waves. ‘You need to pull me up!’ I didn’t consider dropping my weights to make their task easier; I would have had to let go of the ladder to do that.

Somehow Adam and Teddy dragged me up onto the first and second step of the boat and I face-planted on my belly, pinned down by the tank and weights. The boat was still rocking like a demented see-saw. When it tipped again I would surely slide right back into the violent waves with no strength or strategy to survive another rescue attempt.

‘I’m going to die,’ I told my unseen rescuers over and over, with no other way to communicate that my life was still very much in their hands. ‘No, we’ve got you’ they promised today’, I told the three men at the table. ‘I had to,’ the captain replied, ‘They would have come after me if I didn’t. I’d be in court with years of paperwork.’ This genuinely seemed his primary concern.

I asked why they hadn’t thrown me the round life buoy that remained firmly in place on the back of the boat. ‘There’s no rope attached to it’, the captain replied, but I suspect tossing me the life ring hadn’t even been considered in the frenzied chaos of the rescue.

‘You could have descended when you saw how bad the surface was,’ the captain suggested, ‘Then ascended again further from the rocks to make it easier for us to reach you.’ Maybe. And maybe such a move would have compounded the life-threatening challenges. Or created new ones.

‘Or you could have just swum further away from the rocks during your safety stop?’ On our ascent we’d had little to no indication of how dangerously the surface had changed since we had entered the water. Sure it looked a bit lumpier from below than when we had got in, but the safety stop felt perfectly calm. Neither Adam nor I had felt any cause for alarm until after we had broken the surface. A moving safety stop away from the rocky point could well have made our return to the boat a significantly safer proposition. n

Read the rest of this salutary tale online: www.scubadivermag.com/dive-another-day

Discover Fiji’s best dive regions

Fiji’s colourful reefs are a bucket list dive for all dive enthusiasts. Balmy oceans and great visibility are just part of the reason why you’ll log memorable adventures here. The regions below are known for outstanding diving.

CORAL COAST, BEQA LAGOON

The Coral Coast is the stretch of coastline that runs from the Village of Sigatoka to the captial city of Savu, located on the southern shores of Viti Levu.

Travel time from Nadi airport is anything from 1 to 2 hours. Beqa Lagoon is one of Fiji’s original soft coral wonderlands. The lagoon not only offers stunning soft corals, but it is also world renowned for its shark dives. Usually calm, this shallow lagoon teems with marine life, and you can expect pinnacles, swim throughs, large overhangs, wrecks and a plethora of colourful corals. There is also plentiful reef fish, sharks and other pelagic visitors like turtles and even dolphins.

Some of the most famous dive sites include Shark reef, Purple haze, Edge, Bordello and Sundance.

The lagoon can be easily accessed from Viti Levu – from one of the many resorts that are dotted along this spectacular stretch of coast, as well as offshore Beqa Island. Accommodation and other adventurous topside activities like rafting, ziplining and off-road expeditions are plentiful in these locations.

Popular resorts for divers in the area include the Fiji Hideaway Resort and Spa, Mango Bay Resort, Pearl South Pacific, Waidroka Bay Resort, Beqa Lagoon Resort and the Uprising Beach Resort. n

Topside Adventures

• Explore the Arts Village • Go River Tubing on the Navua River • Catch Some Surf at Frigate Passage • Go Ziplining! • Go White Water Rafting on the

Navua River • Take a Self-Drive Dune Buggy Tour • Take a Trip to Suva • Jet Boat on the Navua River

Guide to Fiji

Flying – There are flights from most major Australian and New Zealand cities Direct to Nadi. From Nadi the Suncoast - RakiRaki region is around a 2-hour dive.

Diving – is all year round, but rainy season is from November to April. The winter months between May – October are the main diving season with the best visibility from July to December.

Currency – The Fijian Dollar (AUD 1 = FJD 1.5)

Entry/Visas – Fiji has done way with most COVID 19 restrictions but it is always best to check what the current travel rules are on an official website or with a travel agent. Visas are not needed for visits of up to 4 months providing you have an onward or return ticket. For business you will be granted a stay of 14 days on arrival.

Electricity – Fiji has the same voltage and plugs as Australia and New Zealand.