Turks and Caicos Explorer

In 2008, I went full in and got a Nikon D300 camera body, a 105mm Nikkor lens, and a Ikelite kit that included housing for the D300, a DS-125 strobe, and all the accessories to make it a working rig. With an old DS-50 strobe I had from before, I was ready to take my photos to the next level.

Getting to Turks and Caicos from New York was a breeze. We boarded the Explorer at Providenciales. It took us around the cays for a week. We were still diving air at the time, not having graduated to breathing oxygen-enriched mix from our tanks yet. It was during this trip that I first experienced DCS. It was a minor occurrence, but I had to stay dry for a day, to be safe.

Looking back at my photos from that time, I can see how I had not just figured out how to frame subjects. I was clearly trying different things, and many of them did not work at all. It was a struggle sometimes to have only the 105mm lens. When encountering animals of the size of Caribbean Reef Sharks, which can be 5 or 6 feet long, it would be best to have a wider lens to be able to capture the whole animal, and not just a detail. But I had fun anymay.

On one occasion, a number of sharks stayed with us for a while, circling us, and watching us, as I snapped picture after picture. We could all hear the high pitch sound of the capacitor recharging in the strobes, after each flash. I really thought that it was the sound that intrigued the sharks, however, they may have also been detecting magnetic signals from the electronics. We didn’t feel in danger at the time, as the sharks didn’t seem to be threatening us, but in retrospect, perhaps we should have been afraid, and we were lucky that nothing bad happened to us.

The Explorer had a tall structure that caught the wind well and caused to swing slowly from one side to another in a large bow. We dove directly from the dive deck, and most of the dives were in 15 to 30 meters of water, so there was no shallow spend time to degas at the end of dives. The boat had a line hanging from the dive deck in the aft, and we would catch it and hold on to it to do our 3 minute stop at the end of each dive. Everyone thought this was great fun.

Here are my best photos from that trip: Best of Turks and Caicos 2008