Best of Mike #13

I have to confess that I really don't have a good sense of direction and distance when we are on the boat.

It seems like we are always traveling vast distances to entirely new places.

But based on our Bahamas experience, I think that often may not be true.

Today's pix is the wreck of the Pretender.... a small boat laying upside down on the bottom.

After we had done a couple of laps around this guy, we swam over to the site of the Shark Dive, which was really just a few dozen yards away.

This made the 3rd dive that we did in this area.  All had different names and entry points.... but were within easy swimming difference of something we had done before.

Best of Mike #12

This is the other reason you dive Freeport.

I think it might still be the coolest dive that I have ever done and I am darn close to 700 now.

Early one morning we loaded into our dive boat and headed across the harbour to the dolphin facility.

I want to say, that they had maybe 30+ dolphins in residence at that time. The original two were wild capture and everyone that came after that had been born at the facility.

When we got there the dolphin handlers came on-board to brief us.... then the two boats headed out to sea, side by side.

The two dolphins that were joining us for our adventure just followed along in the wake of the two boats. Maybe enticed with the occasional fish treat tossed to them by the handlers but not tethered in any way ..... and that was just the 1st of many cool things that happened that morning.

After a half hour or so, we arrived at the site of our dive. About 45ft of water with an absolutely featureless sandy bottom.

I think there were maybe 6 or 8 of us on that dive. Once we were in the water and on the bottom they had us arrange ourselves in a big circle.

The two dolphin handlers and the stars of the show took up position in the center of our circle.

Over the course of the next 39 minutes we each had 4, one to one experiences with the dolphins.

First, one of the dolphins came to lay in the sand right in front of each of us and we were able to touch them (pet them really).

Then the handler would put a rubber ring on the rostrum (nose) of one of the dolphins and haD it bring that to the diver that she pointed at. Once that dolphin had returned to the handler she would send it back to retrieve the ring or maybe even instruct the dolphin (all done with hand signals) to take the ring from one diver and deliver it to another.

The 3rd trick involved each of us, in turn, adding a little air to our BC, so that we were floating a few inches off the bottom. Then we held an arm straight out to the side and one of the dolphins would come to put their rostrum in the palm of our hand and spin us in a circle.

But it was the last interaction was the coolest of all. We each, in turn, took the regulator out of our mouth and blew a small stream of bubbles. Dolphins love the bubbles, so they would come over and stick their rostrum into the bubble stream. Looking for all the world like they were giving us a kiss on the lips.

That, as the luck of photographers sometimes go, was the pixture I didn't get. But as sit here writing this I can see it just as clearly as if it happened yesterday ..... and hopefully now you can too.

If you're a diver.... definitely but this one on your bucket list.

If you're not a diver there are places in the world (Bahamas, Cozumel, Roatan and more I'm sure) that offer encounters with dolphins at the surface. I haven't done one of those but I have watched as others did and they were smiling almost as big as we did.

Best of Mike #11

The "medium dives" in the Bahamas often looked alot like this.

A smooth sandy bottom dotted with coral heads that seemed to sprout from the bottom.

And in some cases, even seemed to be floating.

I think that might be a characteristic of the northern Caribbean.

As I can remember swimming around a coral head much like this, in the Turks and Caicos and coming face to face with the Reef Shark that was rounding it from the other direction.

Best of Mike #10

"It's bad business to kill the tourists" ..... that's what I kept telling myself, over and over, on the boat ride out to our first shark feeding dive.

Before we got in the water, there was a thorough briefing of the do's and dont's for being an observer at a shark feeding.

I only really remember three things.

"Enter the water as a group". Sharks sense things thru electrical impulse and can't tell that it is a group of individual divers, they just feel that something really big has joined them. I liked the idea that the sharks thought I was the big guy.

"Keep your back tight to the chamber". Someone had sunk an old Decompression Chamber at the site. It was laying on it's side and we arranged ourselves in a line in front of it, so the sharks could not come at us from behind.

"No matter how excited you get, don't point and or wave your hands around". There are feeding fish and sharks everywhere and a waving hand looks too much like a stray piece of fish.

The guy you see in the center of this picture has a long metal cylinder with a heavy rubber seal at each end. It is filled with whole frozen fish that he takes out, one at a time and feeds to his hungry friends.

And yes.... he is wearing a "chain mail" suit. Not because the sharks want to attack him. But because in excitement to get fed, they could see just about anything as food.

The fish (there are more than just sharks here) swim in a big circle. Past him, hoping for a treat.... and then directly at us and over our heads to get set up for the next pass.

The term "feeding frenzy" totally does it justice ..... and I would go again in heartbeat.

Best of Mike #9

In April of 2000 Linda and I went to what would prove to be our last McDonald's Operators Convention.

When the Convention ended we zipped over to the Bahamas for a short dive trip.

We were diving with the Unexsco people out of Freeport.

They have three signature dives (a deep dive, a shark feeding and a dolphin encounter) more on them later. Everything else they call "medium dives".

Those medium dives, have the reputation of being kind of boring. But like all dive operations they like to start you with the boring stuff, so they can access your competency in the water.

Linda and I had decided that we would focus our attention on the "macro (little) stuff".... anytime we were doing a medium dive.

So, off we go, there were 18 people on the boat for that first dive in the Bahamas. When we got back on the boat 16 of those people were talking about the 6 big sharks they had seen during the dive.

The other two (Linda and I) had been so focused on the little wee stuff that we didn't even see the sharks.

But if we had, I bet they would have looked a lot like this.

I know this, because it's a pix I took at the same site, later on that trip.

Best of Mike #8

On one of our last days on Grand Turk, we walked around until we found a small cafe for lunch.

As I remember it, we ate in their very old and well shaded courtyard.

This was a scene that we gazed at for our whole lunch.

I don't think this machinery had any purpose any longer but it really captured the mood of the place.



You may have noticed that in this series there were lots of pixtures from the surface and not many from underwater..

I was still a little overwhelmed by my technology.... and did a much better job of thinking about that on land vs underwater.

I was still new enough to diving that diving with "one hand" (because the other one was full of camera) was a big challenge. Frequently all I could do was dive and good pixtures went untaken.

I also took a lot of bad underwater pixtures that I didn't keep.... but such is the nature of a learning curve.

If you are following this blog to see the underwater stuff, stick with me. The percentage of those shots will go up as the tour continues.

This is the last pix from Grand Turk, next stop, The Bahamas.... where we are going to dive with the both sharks and the dolphins.

Best of Mike #7

The dive shop we used on Grand Turk had a small but well stocked gift shop.

One of the things they sold there were greeting cards that featured the pictures of one of the guys who dove with them regularly.

In that collection were two photos that caught my eye.

One was a picture of that photographer reflected in the eye of a Humpback Whale. (He had taken it while snorkeling with the whales from a liveaboard, on the Silver Banks in the nearby Dominican Republic).

The other was a shot thru the gate in front of the dive shop and out to sea.

I didn't  dive with any whales (and still haven't).... so no replica of that shot.

But I was able to duplicate the other pix that struck my fancy. Although, I used the gate in front of the local museum instead of the one in front of the dive shop.

This is one of my favorites from all the pix I have taken.

For a long time it hung in my office at home.... and I often traveled, in my head, thru this gate and into a Caribbean adventure.

Best of Mike #6

These are the pixtures from my very earliest days of underwater photography.

They are not the "best" pixtures in my collection but there are many "firsts" here.

This is the first really good shot I got of a Scorpionfish.

If you are a follower of my emails and blog you know that they are one of my favorite subjects and that there are many more in my collection.

But this was the first.

This is "before strobes" so I was using a filter (orange) to compensate for the blue of the water.

These fish can change color, to blend in with their surroundings.

But I am thinking that the rich red color, you see here, has more to do with that orange filter than any plan on the fish's part.

Best of Mike #5

Have you ever noticed that history cycles, at least for some places.

We lived in New Mexico in the late 1990s, when it was the poorest state in the union.

But there were times in the past - when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the Pueblo Indians built their cities, pioneers traveled the Santa Fe Trail and Butch Cassidy and the Hole in the Wall Gang lived in the area. And all of that is part of New Mexico's ast and glory. 

Grand Turk seemed a like one of those places that was waiting for it's "next turn". 


It is one of the places that claims a visit from Christopher Columbus on this way to discover America. And, it has a rich seafaring history that dates back to pirate days and various nations efforts to secure holdings in the Caribbean.


When we were there, a lot of the buildings and structures had clearly seen better days in the past ..... and hopefully would again in the future.