Our World – Underwater Scholarship Society in North America

It’s funny – it seems like all of the sponsors of the scholarship are on the cutting edge of their area of the industry.  Lucky for me, when I visit them I get to see what’s coming next year and what new products will change the way we explore and experience the oceans.  Lucky for you, I’m happy to give a sneak peek!

After my rebreather course, I made my way up to Monterey to see the great folks at Light & Motion and to attend the BLUE Ocean Film Festival as their guest.  Light & Motion has been an innovator in the field of underwater videography with their non-penetrating infrared camera controls and professional-grade, compact housings for consumer-level cameras which I’ve been using since long before this year.  Recently, however, they’ve been focusing on revolutionizing the way we light our underwater scenes with their new line of Sola underwater lights.  What’s so different about these video lights is that they’re completely self-contained.  That means no battery pods and no pesky cables – just a compact, high-output light that’s durable and easy to use.  The first generation of these lights, the Sola 600’s, were more geared towards photographers as focus lights, with their red-light option which would allow a camera to focus without scaring away the critters.  With a 600 lumen output, they were best equipped for macro videography.  In addition to the original focus lights, the new line of Sola’s will offer a 1200 lumen video light and eventually a 4000 lumen video light; double the output of the current Sunray 2000X’s, which are still tethered to battery pods!  And to top it all off, they’re going to be introducing a line of Sola dive lights for divers interested in getting the most out of their night dives.  I’ve got a pair of Sola 600’s that I’ll be testing out, so stay tuned for more updates!

The breathing-gas economy has a lot to do with it (think about spending 8 hours underwater with only two 3 liter tanks), and the idea of doing surface intervals underwater is definitely exciting, but it was the lack of bubbles – the complete and utter silence – that really sold me on rebreathers.  On our first open-water rebreather dive, we focused on getting comfortable.  After doing about four hundred dives in the last four years, I feel very comfortable and confident in the water, but the first time I jumped in with a rebreather I was back to square one.  First of all, the buoyancy just felt all wrong.  Thanks to the counterlungs which trap our exhalations, the total volume of gas never changes.  On open-circuit scuba, I happily make small adjustments to my buoyancy by inhaling or exhaling, increasing or decreasing the total gas volume slightly to make myself either more positive or negative.  On a rebreather?  No such luck.  Your buoyancy has to be absolutely perfect, because once it’s set, it’s not changing that easily.  Ascend a foot or two by accident?  No problem, I’ll just exhale and sink back down.  Oh wait!  Before I know it I’m on my way to the surface.  By the end of the first dive I had the buoyancy more or less under control, and we spent the second and beginning of the third dives working on bailout procedures, sharing air with a buddy, and some other basic skills.

Once we took a break from our skills on dive number three to explore the depths and get a sense of how efficient rebreathers truly are, I instantly began to appreciate our bubble-free zone.  At about one hundred feet we ran into a torpedo ray.  I’ve been fortunate enough to have some pretty extraordinary animal encounters, but this was entirely unique.  The scene was absolutely surreal.  The ray was hovering three feet about the slope, completely motionless, suspended in the water column as though frozen in time.  Seven divers were kneeling on the bottom watching this electrified torpedo ray which, as Jeff aptly described, looked like an Imperial Destroyer (I guess he was a Star Wars nerd as well).  With a casual flick of its tail, the ray would propel itself gently towards one of these foreign creatures, investigating briefly before heading on to the next one.  I resisted the urge to reach out and touch it, wary of the powerful electric shock these rays can deliver.  For several minutes we stuck around, not a single bubble escaping our units, no sounds or vibrations to make our new friend nervous.  And when it was apparently bored with us, it turned around and made its way slowly towards the depths, in an unstressed, care-free manner that was entirely new to me.

Why do the bubbles make such a difference, you ask?  Well, creatures underwater are very different from the animals we encounter every day on land.  Sound and vibrations are extremely amplified underwater, and most aquatic animals live lives that are very fine-tuned to vibrations and disturbances in the water column.  Fish, for example, have what’s called a lateral line, a line of highly-sensitive nerves along each side of their body that can detect even the slightest movement (vibrations) in the water around them.  These lateral lines are what allow fish to evade predators and respond to quick movements happening around them (schooling fish, for example).  When a scuba diver swims along a reef, exhaling a flurry of bubbles every few seconds, it’s essentially like a marching band parading through your living room: you wouldn’t stick around either, would you?  Some fish are intrigued by bubbles and even attracted to divers as a result (the more musically inclined fish, perhaps), but the bottom line is that natural behavior is significantly altered when bubbles are thrown into the mix.  In our bubble-free zone, we were left to observe the oceanic critters going about their daily business as though we weren’t even there, which often occurred in very close proximity to our faces.  When we came upon a couple of open-circuit divers, the kelp forest seemed to clear out in front of my eyes.

On our third day of open-water diving, I was feeling comfortable enough in the rebreather unit to grab my camera and take advantage of this new silent tool.  We were able to get incredibly close (I’m talking 4-inches-close) to four-foot-long juvenile Black Sea Bass, capturing some incredible shots and becoming more and more addicted to the next generation of diving (see photos).

There are a few limitations to rebreather diving.  The first being gas supply, which can last more than 8 hours (not a huge constraint).  Then there are the no-decompression limits which, with a constant partial pressure of oxygen and underwater surface-intervals, aren’t a major limitation either.  Typically, the constraining factor is the lifetime of the carbon scrubber, which varies from 4 to 6 hours depending on the type of scrubber you’re using, the water temperature and the work load.  But in the cold waters off of Catalina, thermal protection was what threatened to get me out of the water fastest.  For the first couple of days I was wearing a 7mm wetsuit while getting comfortable with the rebreather’s buoyancy characteristics.  After an hour below the thermocline at 95 feet, I was more than ready to get out.  Once I was comfortable, though, I appreciatively threw on my DUI drysuit and went for a test run with the new heated undergarments.

In 50-degree water, under my drysuit I was wearing a 1mm-thick Stretchliner, gloves and socks (all electrically-heated, mind you) and wearing the same amount of weight as I had been in my wetsuit.  The difference was that I had increased mobility, and could have stayed well past the hour long dive times.  On the boat I was staying nice and cool while my fellow dry-dive buddies were sweltering in their thick undergarments.  When it was time to get in, all I needed to do was flick a switch and Ta-Da, I could instantly feel the heat radiating into my torso, hands and feet.  I was good to go for as long as Jeff was willing to keep us under, my fingers nice and toasty and ready to operate my video camera.  They always say that you really notice the benefits of a drysuit when you’re suiting up for your second dive.  That is, of course, unless you leave your drysuit on between dives in summertime in California, in which case what you’re noticing is the dehydration and heatstroke creeping in as you burn to death in an air-tight container with an inch of fleece around you.  I, on the other hand, had the best of both worlds!  My only bad experience with the heated undergarments was sending them back to DUI for their Demo Day tour up the west coast.

I’m in between San Diego and LA and I haven’t left the house in three days.  I’m staying with Jeff Bozanic, one of the most knowledgeable and experienced rebreather instructors on the planet, learning rebreather dive theory and spending hours in the pool getting comfortable on the units.  Closed-circuit rebreathers are complicated units, far more so than open-circuit systems (what you use on a recreational scuba dive, for example).  Every time you exhale on an open-circuit scuba system, you’re wasting a ton of oxygen.  Our bodies only metabolize about 4% of the oxygen in each breath, so open-circuit is wildly inefficient.  A rebreather, on the other hand, recycles each breath, scrubbing out carbon dioxide and adding oxygen to the loop as necessary to keep the gas we’re breathing at safe levels.  In order to do so, complex electronics are required to analyze the amount of oxygen in the breathing loop at all times and to automatically add oxygen when O2 levels drop.  The added risk inherent with diving rebreathers is that electronics don’t mix with salt water, obviously, so if the rebreather isn’t prepped properly, something could potentially fail underwater.  The difference between an equipment failure on open-circuit and closed-circuit is that you tend to know immediately on traditional scuba gear (there will probably be lots of bubbles) while problems on closed-circuit systems aren’t as apparent.  To make sure we’re diving safely and can address any problems that do pop up, we have to know the rebreathers inside and out, which means hours of learning what every piece of the system does and what would happen if it fails.  Thanks to some busted electronics that we caught in our pre-dive checks and the fact that I had been doing a heck of a lot of soldering at DUI last week, I got a bit more training than I signed up for!

We head out to Catalina Island tomorrow for the open water dives required for the certification, where I’ll be testing out the DUI heated undergarments and working on my skills on a rebreather!

Diving is a very complicated sport.  It’s not the skill set required for basic recreational dives that makes it complicated.  You could even argue that some of the most advanced technical diving is not so much complex as it is dive-table-intensive, or training-heavy.  What makes diving so complicated is the equipment that we rely on for each and every dive.  When you go skiing, you’re effectively strapping two flat sticks to your feet and sliding downhill.  When we go diving, on the other hand, we’re relying on a carefully machined system that provides us an exact amount of breathing gas depending on our depth.  And that’s just the most basic of open-circuit scuba systems.  Another critical difference between scuba and other sports is that the equipment we use quite literally keeps us alive.  Nonetheless, many divers do not fully understand the amount of care and precision craftsmanship that goes into perfecting the design of these life-support systems.  Instead, we simply rely on dive magazines to tell us what the top-rated gear in our price range is.

This week I had the pleasure of working at Diving Unlimited International to see first-hand just how much care goes into each and every drysuit they produce.  DUI is a sponsor of the scholarship, so I’m incredibly lucky to get to use what’s considered the gold-standard in drysuits this year.  What surprised me so much when I arrived at the DUI factory in San Diego was that it’s much closer to a small business than the huge company image that it has.  I had envisioned precision machinery cranking out dozens of suits an hour with a couple of employees drinking coffee and pushing buttons behind the scenes.  In fact, the DUI factory is filled with dedicated craftsmen (and –women), many of whom have been working there for over twenty years.  Each and every suit is assembled, stitched, and glued by hand, whether it’s a custom order or simply a stock size that will be shipped out to a dealer.  Hours of work go into each and every suit, reducing the total number of drysuits that can be produced per day, but ensuring that they’re of the highest quality and meet the highest standards possible (as Faith Ortins, Sales Manager and my host for the week explained, there aren’t really any set standards for equipment testing in the dive industry, but after 500 hours in a cement mixer one can reasonably assume that a product is durable).

DUI has been a leader in the dive equipment industry, from developing the first hot-water suits to their numerous innovations and revolutionary products that make modern drysuit diving what it is today.  While I was in town, I was privileged to be helping out with what will no doubt become another innovation in diving dry.  One thing that plagues drysuit divers is bulky undergarments.  If you’ve ever been diving in freezing-cold waters, you know exactly what I mean.  Sure, it’s better than diving in a wetsuit, but there’s something about climbing into that inch-thick, fleece teddy-bear suit which really makes you question how much you want to go diving today.  The reduced mobility is one thing, but the thirty pounds of weight stuffed into weight pockets and mounted on tank straps in every possible way to avoid destroying my lower back with a weight belt that should have a safety warning is what really kills me.  But there’s just no way around it.  We can’t go diving in 40-degree water with a dinky little undergarment, right?  Wrong!  This is where DUI comes in.

For years, divers have dreamed of heated drysuits.  They’ve taken chemical hand & foot warmers and shoved them by the handful into their undergarments and their socks in an attempt to stop their extremities from freezing solid.  Well, now the problem is solved.  DUI has developed electric-heated undergarments which will drastically reduce the number and thickness of layers required under your drysuit on cold dives.  A heated Stretchliner, essentially a millimeter of fleece, will get the same job done as a jumpsuit that’s almost an inch thick.  For a week I’ve been working with the engineers and product development specialists at DUI cranking out prototypes and production models for testing, and I have to say: this is going to be big.  Imagine diving into 50 degree water with your drysuit on and wearing less weight than your buddy with a 7mm wetsuit!  The heated suit will keep your core warm while allowing you the flexibility and range of motion to dive freely.  Heading to Antarctica?  No need to worry about frostbite: the heated gloves and socks will keep your fingers and toes toasty, allowing you to take photos right up to the end of your hour-long dive.

The demo models are still going through some finishing touches to make sure they’re streamlined and easy to use, but check out a DUI Demo Day near you and you might just be lucky enough to try out a prototype heated suit (if you’re a DUI owner, of course)!  I’ve got one of the demo models (which I made!) with me now and I’ll be testing it out at Catalina Island during my rebreather certification’s open water dives – I’ll let you know how it turns out next week.

While Cape Town was an unforgettable experience, nothing could come close to the excitement of the Sardine Run.  Every year, cold currents push their way up the eastern coast of South Africa, bringing with them millions of sardines that typically reside in the southern waters of the country.  It’s unclear where the sardines end up, as they basically disappear once they pass Durban.  Nevertheless, for several weeks each year, shoals of sardines that can surpass twenty kilometers in length are found moving north along the Wild Coast.  Not surprisingly, the Indian Ocean empties its predators on this stretch of coastline, turning an annual migration into an absolute feeding frenzy.  To experience this unique event, I was hosted by the legendary Michael AW, founder of Ocean Geographic, and Sardine-Run guru Walter Bernardis, owner of African Watersports.

The thing about the Sardine Run is that it is incredibly inconsistent.  Some years it happens in late May, other years in June, and sometimes you won’t see a single sardine until July.  So you can understand why showing up for nine days and hoping for the best can turn into a bit of a crapshoot.  But, as you may have guessed by now, we were incredibly lucky.  In fact, Michael, a seasoned Sardine Run veteran, exclaimed that this was by far the best Run he had ever seen.

It’s important to understand just how incredible a natural event the Sardine Run really is.  There is nowhere else on the planet where anything even remotely similar occurs.  While millions of sardines are moving several hundred feet below the surface, similarly massive groups of common dolphins are arriving on the Wild Coast.  So-called superpods can be spotted moving in, thousands of dolphins strong and literally reaching as far as the eye can see.  As engineers of the famous bait balls, the dolphins are the workhorses of the Run.  They dive deep to reach the sardines, separating a ‘chunk’ and herding it to the surface.  These chunks can reach more than sixty feet in diameter; a solid, churning mass of sardines.  The dolphins periodically attack the bait ball from the sides and from below, taking advantage of the sardines’ natural schooling defense mechanism and forcing the ball to keep its shape.  When the bait ball is pinned against the surface, the gannets arrive.  Circling the ball from one hundred feet above, the gannets suddenly tuck their wings in and dive, making a colossal ‘thud’ as they hit the water.  As many as sixty gannets can hit the water per second, creating a machine-gun-like effect underwater and what Walter jokingly refers to as a white tornado above.  I had originally thought that a gannet’s dive was something done at random, but it’s the complete opposite; they seem to find their mark before they hit the water, snatching up a sardine seconds into their dive.  Even more incredible, if a gannet misses its mark, or isn’t satisfied with only a single sardine, it doesn’t have to get airborne again.  Watching these birds as they hunt underwater, flapping their wings almost as though they’re still flying, seemingly just as comfortable underwater as in the air, is one of the most unique and astounding things I’ve ever seen.

As if the dolphins and gannets aren’t enough, then come the sharks.  Diving down to the bottom of a bait ball for the first time can be a bit unnerving.  Dozens of silky, dusky and bronze whaler sharks can be found taking advantage of the dolphins’ hard work, skimming the sides of the bait ball or disappearing right into the thick of it.  As a casual observer of the sardine run, it’s best to stay outside of the bait ball, where a sudden flash of sardines provides warning that something bigger than you with lots of teeth and an open mouth is on its way out.  However, the sardines tend to have different plans.  They seem to recognize almost immediately that scuba divers, although loud and no doubt very strange, mean them no harm.  It’s not unusual to find yourself directly in the middle of a bait ball with no idea how you got there as the sardines take refuge around you.  This is not a good place to be.  While the sharks mean no harm to divers when there are thousands of sardines trapped right in front of them, it wouldn’t be hard for a shark to accidentally bump into a diver on its way through the ball.  In fact, last year an unlucky diver who had a shiny silver camera pushed up against his face in the middle of a bait ball had his nose bitten off; but accidents like this are rare.

So – dolphins are constantly attacking the bait ball from the sides and from below, gannets are hitting the water at sixty-birds-per-second, and sharks are going into a frenzy down below, leaping out of the water after particularly vigorous assaults.  Just when it seems like it could not possibly get any more exciting, a Bryde’s whale (pronounced Broodah’s) lunges from below, swallowing half the ball with an open mouth that could take on a school bus without any trouble.  With visibility reaching thirty feet only on the best of days, the only warning that a Bryde’s whale is emerging from the murky depths is a flash of sardines, easily mistaken for the usual shark or dolphin.  It quickly becomes apparent that this is neither a shark nor a dolphin as my peripheral vision is filled with a blue mass.  Each time a Bryde’s whale lunges through the sardine ball, as close as six inches from me, I tend to have two thoughts in quick succession.  The first is ‘how lucky am I that I wasn’t just swallowed, and how many times will my luck hold?’  The second is ‘oh shit’ as I look down to see its tail – as wide as a car is long – beating with a ferocity I’ve never seen before and with 90,000 pounds of muscle fueling each stroke.  Nevertheless, the Bryde’s whales always seem to slip by without inflicting so much as a bruise.  Hanging to the side of a bait ball sixty feet in diameter, watching dolphins scream through the sardines, sharks come flying towards me with open mouths, and 50-foot whales lunging just inches away from me so often it’s impossible to tell how many are actually here, I feel like I have truly experienced everything the Sardine Run has to offer.

But why am I here?  What is it about this experience that is educational and not simply exciting or entertaining?  How will the Sardine Run help me achieve my future goals of protecting the world’s oceans and how will the Sardine Run help change the way people live, help fix their bad habits that are destroying our natural places?  I’m here for the same reason that Michael is here, taking photos for the pages of Ocean Geographic, which will hopefully reach the hands of a businessman in Beijing, a farmer in Lima, or a CPA in Arkansas.  We’re here to capture a natural event so incredible that it’s impossible to ignore, an event so impressive that even those with no interest in the ocean will stop and say ‘Wow.’  We’re here to show the unadulterated glory of one of nature’s most extraordinary events to someone who would otherwise never know it even existed.  And now that they know it exists, they’re one step closer to caring that it’s still here tomorrow.