We fell in love with the ocean as young kids in Maine and vowed to each other then that we would make a living in the ocean someday. Over 20 years later we've made our fantasies into a reality. We are professional underwater photographers living on Maui and traveling the world!
This Blog is dedicated to our Family and Friends who enjoy reading about our adventures. It is because of you all that we are able to Follow Our Dreams each day!
Thanks for reading! -Aloha! - John & Dan
Today was a lot of fun. Another trip to Molokai with the hopes of seeing a Hammerhead shark. Molokai is such a special place for sharks because we don't feed them at all, they are just there! If you dive, and you want an adventure, come visit and we'll show you how to see wild sharks. It is so cool.
One shark came so close today that it actually scared the crap out of one of our younger guides, Chelsea. It was hilarious. In retrospect, I should have filmed the whole event so that I could have embarrassed her a bit more, but I only filmed the shark. It was great though, the shark turned towards her and was curious enough to swim right at her, when it got about 10 feet from her she turned and swam as fast as she could in the other direction. My mask filled with water because I was laughing so hard.
We were diving out at Molokini Crater, which was beautiful for the most part. Although, the beautiful glassy seas that we've been enjoying for the past few weeks officially passed on. We had our normal relatively calm seas with our light Maui tradewinds. The diving was great, and the water was very clear, I think that the visibility was about 175 feet. We saw tons of the usual suspects, and we even had an above average showing of White Tip reef sharks. Unfortunately, the good and happy news is not what I am reporting today.
At the end of our first dive on the Ene Nui corner of Molokini Crater, I swam over to a familiar little rock that houses a special black sponge. On that special black sponge we've grown accustomed to finding two special little Nudibranch friends.
For almost a year we have been visiting this black sponge a few times a week to visit a pair of Glossodoris Atromarginata Nudibranchs, which are extremely rare. One of the local Nudibranch experts, (who is actually famous worldwide and in the diving hall of fame), Pauline Fiene told us that there hasn't been a sighting of a Glossodoris Atromarginata in over 7 years, which makes our little guys very special, (obviously they are not only ours, the other local divers watch them too). We showed the pair to every diver that we could, and over the last year that was a lot of different people! We even named the little guys "Chocolate Margin" Nudibranchs because the name was more fun.
But, today was different. When I approached the little rock and searched the sponge, I only found one little guy and the other was no where on the sponge or in their usually hiding spots? Since these Nudibranchs are only about an inch and a half long they can hide anywhere, so I wasn't too worried about not seeing the other one today. It wasn't until I began to swim away from the rock that I found the other little creature.
On a rock about two feet away from the main rock, one of the little Chocolate Margins was sitting all along up on top of the littler rock. Upon closer inspection, it was obvious that the little guy was either dead or dying. It had been bitten or chewed up by something, but that didn't seem to be the reason it's life was coming to an end. It actually looked like this one had crawled out away from the sponge to die, maybe to keep the scavengers who can smell decay away from it's home on the black sponge? Maybe it did this to protect the one Chocolate Margin who still lives?
It was very sad to see one of our special Nudibranchs in such bad shape today. We are not sure what the effects will be felt by the one Nudibranch left behind. I don't know a lot about the species, but I think that they can live on their own and reproduce a-sexually. Although, these two have spent over a year together on that sponge. We have watched them lay eggs together, we have watched them eat the sponge together, and sometimes when we show up they are just sleeping in a crack together. So I can't imagine that the remaining Chocolate Margin will do very well alone.
It will be interesting to watch, and I will do my best to keep you updated.
For those of you who don't know us, we spend most of our time working with Lahaina Divers. We are all captains and scuba diving instructors on the island of Maui. We've been living out here for almost 7 years. Anyway, we are out on or in the ocean almost every day, teaching and sharing the ocean with new people all the time. Well just the other day (9/16/09) we had an amazing encounter with some False Killer Whales. We got to watch an adult teaching a youngster how to catch a Mahi Mahi, which is an open ocean fish. It was so cool. Check it out below...
I should also mention that it was a really cool day because we were also teaching a small underwater photography class with David Fleetham. David Fleetham is a famous National Geographic Photographer that lives here on Maui. It was really cool to spend the morning with him and get to witness the False Killer Whales with him. It was awesome to see someone like David Fleetham get just as excited as us to see the rare False Killer Whales. What a cool guy.
Today Mike got to dive Molokini, and he said it was beautiful. He ran into the office quickly to say hi to Dan and I and change camera batteries for the Night dive. He's the captain tonight, but he likes to keep the camera ready just in case something cool swims by the boat. You never know when a False Killer Whale hunting a Mahi is going to swim by.
Dan had the day off but decided to come into the office anyway for a little while to work on some projects. I think he was also waiting for me to finish up so that we could go dirt biking today! I spent the day working on the website projects, linking the blog to the facebook page, linking the Vimeo video's to all the other pages, etc... It's amazing how this stuff all works, and it's very cool that you can be in touch with so many people in so many places.
All right, it's time to go ride! Maybe we'll convince my wife, Gwen, to come out and ride with us.
Mike, Dan and I just thought that it would be fun to share our world with anyone who felt like following along with us. We're three scuba diving brothers who are attempting to achieve childhood fantasies of making our obsession for being underwater into a career that will enable us to share our passions with you.
Here goes:
Today we split into three directions.
Dan woke up around 6 A.M. to drive an hour to Wailea and exhibit our Fine Art Photography at the Four Seasons Resort. He goes and represents us each Wednesday from 9-1:30, if you're in the area you should go say hello! It's a cool program that exhibits 7 local artists each day, we were very lucky to get selected, some artists make a whole career out of their 1 day a week at the Four Seasons.
Mike and I woke up around 5 A.M. to get ready to work the dive boats at Lahaina Divers. Mike went to Lanai today, and I went and dove Molokini Backwall. Mike took pictures of all of the divers and the dive-sites and I made a video of my trip.
I had an awesome day out at Molokini. I dropped down to 120 ft. with my group and ran into 6 Grey Reef sharks hanging out in the current. My divers were so excited. I had a great group today, and I had already dove with most of them in the past few days. In fact, I think I had the exact same group at Molokai yesterday when we went looking for Hammerheads.
Anyway, now it's about 6:30 PM and we've finished making all the movies and the photo's for the day. We've been trying to learn this web stuff so that we can share with everyone, so I took on the Blog for the first day. Mike was trying to work on a Facebook page for us, and we're getting into Youtube and Vimeo so that we can share our video's too. I should have a new one for Youtube in the morning...
Well it's off to dinner for me. It's wednesday night, and that means that we're all heading to the Cellar to watch Dan play in his band. It is a fun night because we all get to hang out with the divers that are visiting Maui this week, plus we all get to get out of the office and do something different once a week! Maybe someday we'll see you there!
