Coral dive diary

If you scroll down the page here Howard Hall, a documentary maker for IMAX, details his company's production of a feature on Coral Reefs. I came across this whilst looking for an image of bull sharks (ie below). The way he writes is clear and engaging without seemingly attempting to make more of events than are necessary. I'm not overly interested in marine life; I find it interesting, but I'm no expert. The text here however really shows how the beauty of the underwater world can hit you - how stunning and varied it is.

"Most of the time, once the camera has been mounted, I look through the lens and decide the composition is not right and we have to disassemble everything and repeat the entire process. Of course, with all this heavy activity, the ribbon eel immediately retreats to the far depths of his hole. So we all hang around waiting for the eel to reappear. It took us two dives and three hours underwater to get a very simple shot of a blue ribbon eel that would take your average sport diver about ten minutes to shoot with his video camera. This is typical for underwater IMAX� production.

The exciting thing about the ribbon eel dives was that the outside leg of the tripod was planted only two inches from the edge of an underwater cliff that plunged hundreds of feet below us. Completely assembled, the camera on the tripod is about one hundred pounds negatively buoyant. If the tripod leg were to slip off the ledge, it would have been very difficult to keep the whole thing from falling into the abyss. Crush depth on the housing is about 200 feet. It would have been a real race to arrest the camera's fall before it deformed and flooded.
The coral reef surrounding Wakaya is essentially dead. Something terrible happened here. The die-off occurred before the La Nina set in, so elevated water temperatures don't explain the destruction. There are almost no living hard corals on the reef. Rob and Cat say that this reef was alive and vibrant only two years ago. It just reminds me how fragile coral reef habitat is. If something we can't even identify can kill an entire reef, then it becomes easy to imagine how global warming could destroy all coral reefs within our lifetime. A very frightening thought. "
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