27 minute read
Underwater Photography
from Scuba Diver #55
THE BARGE - YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY ONE-STOP SHOP
Mario Vitalini explains why a rather humble dive site in the Egyptian Red Sea ranks highly among his favourite dive locations
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Photographs by Mario Vitalini
The last 18 months have certainly been challenging
and some of us haven’t had the chance to get in the water as much as we wanted. Finally, borders are re-opening, and restrictions are being lifted so we can, at last, jump in at some of our favourite warm water dive sites.
For me, The Barge in the Northern Red Sea is one of those places. What makes this rather average-looking dive one of my top photo spots? Let me explain why I love diving here so much. I’ll introduce some of the subjects you are likely to find, and show how I like to shoot them.
The Barge
The Barge is an Egyptian photography favourite, located on Little Gubal island in the Gulf of Suez. It is a must stop for any liveaboard running a northern itinerary. As its name says, the site is marked by an old barge. Very little is known about the vessel’s history. Some theories say it was used to salvage the cargo of the Ulysses, a beautiful wreck located just around the corner that sank in 1887. Other people are more inclined to think the barge went down in 1973 during the Egypt Israel war. The truth is, there is not much left of the old wreck. Laying on a gentle slope between 9m and 15m, it offers plenty of bottom time and the deep waters north and east of the island ensure a constant flow of clear water. Currents are normally mild, but they can be a bit strong. If this is the case, just move to the shallow and more-protected areas.
What’s left of the wreck is home to a great number of species of fish and invertebrates. Because it is a regular stop for many liveaboards, the marine life has become used to divers and is relatively easy to approach. The surrounding area is packed with marine life and the drop off is regularly visited by dolphins. Cardinalfish, nudibranchs, octopus and scorpionfish are among the many friendly subject that make The Barge their home. It is this abundance of life that draws us, and why photographers now consider this site one of the highlights of any Northern Red Sea trip.
Lemon gobies live on a coral tree right inside the lagoon. This is a great place to photograph these shy and elusive guys An octopus hunting at night. I particularly love the fish in the background
Cardinalfish - After jumping from the boat, swim towards the wreck and quickly find large numbers of tiger cardinalfish and bigeyes. They hover next to the hull very close to the bottom. Look carefully and you may see some of the cardinalfishes with distended jaws. This indicates the fish is guarding its eggs inside its mouth, a great photo opportunity for portraits.
Patience is key. Once you have chosen an individual, move slowly and let the fish get used to you. Try to approach them from the front to get a good look at the eggs between their sharp teeth. Occasionally cardinalfish spit out their eggs and then grab them again. This is to allow better oxygenation. Be ready to capture the moment.
Lighting can be tricky. Because of the cardinals’ size, you will need to stay a bit further away than what you normally do for a traditional macro subject. If you keep your flashguns close to the housing, you will end up lighting the water column in front of the fish. Instead, push your strobe arms forward, straight in front of the housing as far as you can so your strobes are positioned closer to the subject at either side.
If you want to achieve a soft background or shallow Depth of Field, you will need to open the aperture This will let more light through, compensate by reducing the power output of the strobes and reducing the ISO on your camera. Alternatively, you can try a snoot to helps concentrate the light on the subject. Or, if possible, to frame the fish against the blue background.
Portrait of George, the resident moray at The Barge. By using inward lighting, I was able to accentuate the features and isolate the face Cardinalfish with eggs in its mouth
Morays - One moray has become a symbol of The Barge, and it has been affectionately named George. It’s been living on this site for years and is one of the biggest morays I have ever seen. George often hides in or around The Barge. There are in reality several large morays around the barge, who are easy to approach and offer great wide angle and portrait opportunities. They are great to use cross lighting or even inward lighting to great effect.
Peppered morays are also very common here. They tend to live on tiny holes and cracks and separate them from the messy background is challenging. A bit of spotlighting, perhaps with a torch or snoot helps to isolate them. Given the white colour of their body, backlighting can be very effective. Lionfish, and scorpionfish are easy to find all over this site. One curious thing about all of them is the size. For some reason, fish and critters in this site are consistently bigger than everywhere else.
A special treat
Swim away from the barge heading towards the shallows. You will see a sandy alley and a small shallow gap on the reef, this will lead you to a shallow lagoon. The corals around this small channel are gorgeous and being incredibly shallow it is a great place to try some split levels or dappled light photos.
Swim into the lagoon for a few metres in you will see a lonely coral tree. This is home to several lemon gobies. These beautiful little fish are relatively rare and very shy but here is not difficult to photograph them. Toward the back of the lagoon, in just 3m of water, there are some old dead coral heads, in there you can spot a relatively unknown species of blenny, known as unicorn blenny. Its funny face is great to practice your super macro skills.
Night dives at The Barge
Right before dusk, hundreds of fusiliers start gathering around the wreck creating clouds of fish. These schools are not easy to photograph but if you jump at the right time and with a wide-angle lens, you can experiment with very long exposures to great effect.
If you prefer a more straightforward experience, there is plenty around to keep you entertained. Many species of nudibranchs crawl along the bottom and small morays that hide during the day are now out and hunting. Night is also a great time to look for the resident octopus and try to get some great shots of their eyes (Please be kind to the creatures and do not blast them with hundreds of flashes, they do not have eyelids to protect their eyes).
On the sides of the wreck, you can see some beautiful soft corals, look carefully between the branches and you may spot a candy crab. These little guys are relatively common in the Far East but not so much in the Red Sea.
A word of advice: when diving at night at the barge, be extremely careful with your buoyancy. Hundreds of long spine urchins crawl around and if you get too close to the bottom there is a risk of getting stung.
A blue spotted stingray swim around The Barge Using a snoot, I directed the light right to this peppered moray face creating a glowing effect
Bottlenose dolphins use the bay at night to rest. It is not uncommon to encoutnter them in the afternoons
Welcome dolphins
In the afternoons, keep an eye out for dolphins, these magnificent creatures live in the area and after a day hunting in the open water they generally come back to spend the night in the relatively protected waters. Is not uncommon for them to pay a visit and play for a few minutes with the divers.
The Barge may not be known as one of the best dive sites in the world. Let’s face it… it lacks the adrenalin or drama of other well-known locations. But this humble site is a photographer’s one-stop shop in every aspect. It has an impressive variety of subjects all year round, the marine life is relatively friendly and relatively easy to approach, the visibility is good, and the shallow depths give us plenty of bottom time. For this reason, I always make The Barge a mandatory stop on all my Red Sea workshops. I can’t think of a better place to dust off those cobwebs from your kit and get back to take some great underwater photos. n
As with scuba diving with sharks, remember - these are wild animals, you are not in a petting zoo, so stricly look but don’t touch, even if they approach you very closely. Also, before you commence freediving with the sharks, it is worth spending some time just floating on the surface and letting them get used to your presence. It is advisable to wear only dark clothing, including gloves, and remove any items that are reflective, as the flash of something metallic or a bare hand, can easily be mistaken for a tasty fish - the normal diet of a blue shark.
For me, one of the
positives of the short 2020 diving season was the increased willingness of new divers to try the British coast and all that it holds. Many enquiries were made by new would-be divers who would no longer be going abroad to learn and were still after some adventure and thrills, but now good ole’ Blighty seemed the only option.
Many of those who tried the diving were surprised how good it was and booked on trips and courses through 2021, making it a good year for acquisition and retention of a new demographic of divers that historically would have travelled abroad to learn and experience the sport.
As well as Britain being famous for its seal colonies and historic wrecks we have around our shores, it is less known that we also have regular shark visitors. One such shark, the blue shark (Prionace glaucais) is an open-ocean, pelagic species that visits British waters mainly in summer months. They follow the Gulfstream from the Caribbean and return there following the Atlantic North Equatorial Current. Blue sharks, as you would expect, predatory and feed on mostly mackerel and herring, as well
as squid, and sometimes hunt larger fish such as cod, pollock and coalfish. They have been Females give live birth, and recorded at depths of up to 350m, and the largest blue shark ever caught in UK seas was over three metres long. litters are known to rarely They are a slim shark. They look a little like whitetip and blacktip reef sharks, but have a metallic blue colour on top and white reach sizes of more than underneath. These beautiful-looking nomads are, for us in the UK, spotted around the South and South West coast of England and 100 pups South West Wales in the summer months, normally ten-plus miles offshore. They prefer water temperatures between 12 and 20 °C, but can be seen in water ranging from 7 to 25 °C, so the UK is ideal. Our 2021 trip was 24 to 27 miles offshore and the water was about 18 degrees C. The best way to dive with them is snorkelling or freediving, and I would suggest the latter is certainly the better way, as you can be with them on their terms rather than casually viewing from the surface as an onlooker.
Blue sharks visit our shores in the summer months, and as Steve Millard found out, being in the water with these stunning creatures is an awe-inspiring experience
Photographs by Steve Millard
Into the
The blue sharks approach without fear
A migratory breed, blue sharks are found all over the world, except the polar circle. Blue sharks have a slim, torpedo-shaped body and are graceful swimmers. They reach up to three metres in length and can weigh up to 450 pounds.
On our recent trip to Plymouth, Gemma Care, conservationist and YouTube Shark Talk presenter said: “The trip to see the blue sharks this year was absolutely fantastic - two days of diving and sharks on both dives with up to four around me at any one time on day two! I think this trip is a fantastic way to enjoy some of the wildlife that the UK has to offer. On our way out to the dive site we saw mola mola and common dolphins too, which made the trip even better.
“Freediving with blue sharks is something really special - they are so curious and swim so close to you that you really get to appreciate how beautiful they are and see them at their most inquisitive, while feeling safe the entire time. I thoroughly recommend this trip to anyone and if you’re scared or unsure of sharks, this is a great way to replace your fear with an unforgettable experience and see first-hand that we are not at all on the menu! I found it especially gratifying to swim with them and to then be able to spread the message
Sharks of all sizes come to check out the divers
that you can have peaceful encounters with sharks.”
Globally, the blue shark is listed as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List. In the UK, it is a Priority Species under the UK Post-2010 Biodiversity Framework. The plight of this shark is that they are caught commercially in their millions. Blue shark meat is not highly regarded, but the skin is used for leather and the liver for oil. The dorsal fin is also used to make shark-fin soup. After these parts of the shark have been taken, the remainder of the carcass may be thrown back into the sea or processed into fishmeal. An example of this commercial exploitation was outlined in 2018 when a Spanish fishing vessel, the Virxen da Blanca, was detained by the Irish Naval Service and found to have 1,250kg of shark fin on board, along with an incredible 164,250kg of blue shark on board – the equivalent of around 5,000 individual blue sharks.
Louisa Funder, Apneists UK club member, said: “From documentaries and other peoples’ experiences, I knew that sharks are peaceful creatures and since I started learning more about sharks I always wanted to see and experience them in their own habitat myself and not just on a screen or in a book.
Dive with sharks
If you would like to see our trips, visit our website and have a look at the calendar, blogs and course details. www.freedivers.co.uk
“Sharks fascinate me because of their nature and behaviour, they are so different to what a lot of people think they are. During the trip I was surprised how gentle, nosey, and interactive the sharks were. It was an incredible experience with great people and even greater animals.”
Blue sharks go on these long migrations to reach areas of dense food resources and to find potential mates. For most of the year, males and females of this species live in different places. Only during the mating season do they come together, briefly, and reproduce via internal fertilization. Males may aggressively bite females during mating, so females have thick protective skin to prevent injury when they meet males. Females give live birth, and litters are known to rarely reach sizes of more than 100 pups.
Blue sharks are an important species to marine tourism as divers, photographers and other groups enjoy encountering them. In rare instances, individuals have bitten people, but this happens only very infrequently - only 13 such incidents between 1580 and 2013. The blue shark has one of the largest geographic distributions among the sharks and was historically one of the most-common pelagic sharks in the world. Its wide distribution and dense population structure make the blue shark a target of fisheries in some areas and a common accidentally caught species in gillnet and longline fisheries targeting other species. The blue shark’s numbers have decreased by as much as 80 percent in some areas. Therefore, it is important to continue to monitor the targeted and incidental catch of this species and to update its population trends as new information becomes available.
Colin Christian, Apneists UK Scotland member, said: “I love sharks and my first up close experience was cage diving with none other than great whites in South Africa. I had never seen such a majestic, powerful and misunderstood creature. “Ever since this life-changing experience I have wanted to get closer to and interact with sharks in the open water, free of the limitations of a cage.
“Blue sharks are ideal for this due to their inquisitive but peaceful nature. We were fortunate to be surrounded by five relaxed individuals for several hours - each taking turns to calmly get up close and personal to inspect these aliens floating around in their natural habitat.”
Two areas where we have had success in viewing and diving with these sharks are Plymouth with In Deep and Pembrokeshire with Celtic Deep. We find the best month to go is August, but there are sightings either side of that window. There is also settled weather then too. n
Blue sharks shoaling below
Blue shark just beneath the surface
Commercial diving jobs vary in pay according to risk, duration, and other variables, but generally, a diver’s base pay is usually supplemented with ‘depth pay’. The further down they go, the more they can make.
Veteran recreational and technical instructor trainer Phil Short is a major proponent of always learning new skillsets, and in August, he entered the world of surface supply commercial diving
Photographs by Brad Wakefield and Phil Short
One of the things that has kept me driven and
enthusiastic in diving over the last three decades in the diving industry is variety. My first instructor told me that diving was like a tree, where being underwater competently is the ‘trunk’ and above are a mass of different disciplines that are the ‘branches’.
So, for some time, I have endeavoured to undertake some form of training or experience outside of my ‘norm’ but still under the general ‘umbrella’ of diving. In addition, there is an oft-used phrase ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’… well, I disagree and this year I took one of the biggest steps ever outside of my diving ‘norm’ and, as an ‘old dog’, learnt an enormous amount of new tricks by undertaking my commercial diver training in the form of Surface Supply and Offshore Top-Up with Commercial Diver Training (CDT) in Fowey, Cornwall.
Firstly by way of explanation… why? I’ve always aimed to progress my knowledge and, where needed, qualifications in a direction where I will immediately or later on use the new skills, and often find myself combining skill sets for a given ultimate objective - as an example, learning vertical rope technique for ascent and descent added to my caving, cave diving and rebreather skills led me to be an exploratory diver on Bill Stone’s 2013 J2 expedition. With the decision to undertake commercial dive training, the purpose was slightly different. In the last decade I have worked as a safety diver, rigging diver, diving safety officer and diving operations manager on numerous institutional scientific diving projects, including the 1495 Danish Gribshunden wreck in Sweden, World War Two aircraft wrecks in Croatia and Sweden, and numerous ancient maritime archaeology sites in Greece. These projects and this work has slowly lead to a more and more commercial approach and future planned projects will head in that direction even more, so after discussions with my projects manager Dr Brendan Foley of Lund University, Sweden, and other members of our team, I decided to proceed with my training for early 2021.
Now, the best plans do not always work out and due to travel restrictions caused by the pandemic, I was unable to attend my booked April dates as we moved our 2021 projects (A B-17 bomber survey outside of Trelleborg Sweden and the year’s archaeological project on Gribshunden) to run almost back to back to minimalise travel and ‘bubble’ our team members. This worked perfectly and CDT were able to move me to the August course. So, early in August, I was picked up in a car park in Fowey by a RIB and taken out to DSV Hambledon for the next five weeks of a whole new diving world!
Many years previously, I had completed my HSE SCUBA training to enable me to work in the UK. under the HSE Media and Scientific ACOPs, so I joined the course at the close of that phase and the start of Surface Supply training - breathing your air supply via an umbilical fed from a primary and back-up supply on the surface to a helmet (‘hat’) or band mask with an additional isolated but accessible bailout on your back, and on into Off Shore Top Up training. To summarise, the Surface Supply allows the diver to work in inland or inshore waters (Civil Engineering ‘Civils’) and the Off Shore Top-Up covers the diving side of being able to dive, as the name implies, ‘Off Shore’. At this level that makes the diver on completion a 50m Surface Supplied ‘Air Diver’ and with the Top-Up able to use Hot Water Suits
Phil ready to get stuck into learning some new skills
Thumbs up from a dressed diver
Manning the panel
Prepping the diver
Surface crew
(Wow!) and Wet Diving Bells, but more about that later.
Now, CDT run an extremely ‘hand’s on’ course with huge amounts of dives and in-water time well in excess of the required training minimums. The days start early, end late and are full on to simulate the reality of the workplace post-training, so after being shown my cabin, given a safety briefing and having dinner, it was off to bed ready for an early doors start to commercial diving day one.
Next morning saw instructor John Duffy introduce us to the Kirby Morgan Band Mask 28, which consists of a frame, lens and neoprene face seal with a side valve assembly, regulator, free flow knob and auxiliary/emergency gas supply valve built into a zipped neoprene hood and held in place by a five-strap head harness or ‘spider’. This mask is often used for the stand-by diver and also preferred on ship inspection dives as it is much lighter than a full ‘hat’.
The first dive was simple, acquaint to the world of Surface Supply and loss of gas exercises, where the Surface Supplied gas is isolated by the Supervisor, the diver then notices a tightening of breath and switches over to the on-board (backmounted single cylinder plumbed into the mask) and notifies the Supervisor ‘on-bailout’… we did this rather a lot of times, just as I would teaching technical divers gas shutdowns in twinsets or open circuit bailouts on rebreathers!
Once happy with the mask and loss of gas use, we moved right along to diver rescues, alternating as rescuer and simulated casualty. Here the rescuer on command from the Supervisor follows the diver’s umbilical, checking for ‘cuts and fouls’ to the diver, then on approach checks the area for personal risk and safety to proceed and checks the diver’s conscious state and if they are breathing. The rescuer then holds the casualty securely by the harness, running both their own and the casualty’s umbilicals between the two divers, and ask the Supervisor to haul them both in via the casualty’s umbilical… very hard physical work and a fair degree of fitness needed, especially as Graham Weston (our chief instructor) made (as he should) us do them again and again and again!
Diver in Kirby Morgan helmet
A few days on and we were introduced to our first ‘hat’, the Kirby Morgan Superlite 37, identical in use and operation to the band mask but built into a carbon fibre-reinforced fibreglass helmet shell. To don this type of ‘hat’, a neck dam is fitted over the dressed diver’s head (basically a neoprene neck seal as on a drysuit fitted into a metal hoop with an O-ring around the outer edge) then the ‘hat’ is put on like a motorcycle helmet and the dam seals inside the base and is locked by collar latches. We also started learning ‘tools’ and started actually doing some underwater work… the purpose of commercial diving.
First tool was the airlift, now I’ve used a lot of airlift and water dredge systems in my archaeological diving to remove sediment and clear localised visibility… the key being a gentle and gradual approach. This was not that! Rather it was a large diameter pipe fed with air from a diesel road compressor to dig a hole.
Now as all of this training and experience grew, the thing for me with 6,000-plus dives over 30-plus years was having no computer/depth gauge/timer and being entirely under the control of the Supervisor for when to leave bottom, when to stop during ascent to decompress, and for how long…
Diver being lowered into the water
strange! On these early dives in the class, we were training from the CDT Mid River/Harbour pontoon in up to 10m of water so I was not too concerned but knowing that later in the course we would conduct 45-50m decompression dives, I did wonder how that was going to feel.
Training continued from the pontoon with introduction to hydraulic tools for cutting and grinding, to sub-sea assembly with the building of a cube from 12 short scaffold bars and 16 clamps (This became rather competitive in a friendly way to see who could build the most cube-shape cube and rig it for lifting within the allowed dive time!) - not as simple as it sounds on a muddy harbour bed. And then the fun really began, with a surface demo and practice of the Broco-Gun for underwater hot cutting!
The Broco ultrathermic cutting rod produces a temperature in excess of 5,000 degrees Celsius enabling it to cut through metal and concrete! You actually get to make fire underwater! The system has a supply of oxygen passed down the inside of the rod and an electric circuit to spark the combustion of the rod. Our task was to cut through large chain links strung under the pontoon and we did this on one of our required night dives, which looks really impressive
from the pontoon above while tending another diver.
The next phase saw us head out to sea from Fowey harbour to complete our deep dives, cage dives and chamber use training. The cage is lifted up and over the side of the Diving Support Vessel (DSV) by the Lifting and Recovery System (LARS) and takes two divers. Once in the water the cage is lowered down wires to a ‘clump weight’ at the dive depth where the cage door can be opened and diver one exits to begin their tasks. Over the week we progressed from 30m to 50m dives - the first time for over 15 years I had dived in the 40m to 50m range on air! On one dive in exceptional visibility, a mola mola (sunfish) swam towards and past our cage as we prepared to leave the seabed - the first time I had ever seen one underwater. As part of our deeper dives we learned how to operate the LARS, operate the chamber and run the divers panel and were also introduced to SURD02, where the last phase of ascent is made to be de-kitted, undressed and recompressed in the chamber in under five minutes to then complete the last of the deco on oxygen in the chamber dry and warm… With CDT, it really was ‘full on’ training, always something to do and plenty going on under the watchful eyes of Graham and John.
I’d signed up for both Surface Supply and the Offshore Top-Up, so the final phase saw us exchange the cage for a Wet Bell and our drysuits for hot water suits… Yes, I did say hot water suit! Wow! So I love my SANTI heated vest, suit, gloves and socks, but this was a whole new level of comfort. You wear a thin wetsuit and over that what seems like a drysuit with no wrist seals, no boots and no neck seal. Within this suit is a network of perforated pipes to arms, legs and torso and an inlet and control on the hip. Sea water is pumped into a diesel heating unit on the boat and then down a hot water hose that is part of the diver’s umbilical. It really is like diving while wearing a hot tub with arms and legs!
Ready to descend
On the job Diver returning from a dive
Fully kitted surface supply diver
The Wet Bell dives involved a large umbilical to the canopy of the wet bell then inside the dome roof control panels to feed air, hot water and communications to each diver via their own umbilical. When at depth, diver one will exit the bell to go to their task while diver two tends the umbilical out and back while also monitoring the control panels. A big part of Wet Bell training was diver rescue, which required the Bell Diver/Tender to pay out a sufficient length of their own umbilical to then leave the Bell, follow the diver’s umbilical and effect a rescue by hauling both the casualty and themselves back to the Bell, securing the casualty and then stowing the umbilicals of both divers to prepare the Bell for surfacing… intense!
So after five weeks living aboard the DSV Hambledon and Loyal Watcher, I found myself qualified as an HSE Surface Supply Offshore Top-Up Air Diving. I cannot thank CDT, Sal, Tamsin and especially Graham Weston and John Duffy for an intense, enjoyable, highly professional and rewarding experience. And to bring the story to a close, I’m writing this during the middle of a three-week job (my first!) using my new qualifications for a civil engineering job on the River Avon in Bath, where much like driving lessons and test, the learning continues under the guidance of my supervisor Ben Coker and his team. So it seems that you can teach an old dog new tricks - and long may it continue into my fourth decade as a diver. n
