With 4 days between my return from “the cruise” and back to work day, I decided to go to Kailua-Kona, HI, to do the dives I had been wanting to do: the blackwater dive and the manta ray night dive. But I also figured I may as well dive during the day as well when I am there… what else is there for a boy to do?
In case you don’t know, the blackwater dive, sold as “Pelagic Magic Dive” by Jack’s Diving Locker, is a night dive in the open ocean with the sea floor 5,000 feet beneath you and no reef or other structures; Just the boat, the ocean, and you. Oh, and a bunch of cool, little critters that migrate up from the deep to feed in the shallow water every night. It is called the world’s largest migration as it happens all over the world wherever there is deep ocean. What is unique in Kailua-Kona is the proximity of the abyssal drop-off to the shore; You only have to go out about 3 miles to be in 5,000 feet of water. Due to the small size and what I rightly expected to be a lot of fast action, I did not take pictures on the blackwater dive, only 4K video at 120 fps (frames per second) using the Macromate +15 or the +10 close-up lens (larger animals) and handheld 5000+ light. Shooting at 120fps would allow me to slow the video down 4 times, so if I was only able to get a critter on screen for one second, I could turn it into 4 seconds with the video still looking smooth at 30 fps. So when you watch the Pelagic Magic video, keep in mind that everything you see is ¼ normal speed. I ended up slowing all of the blackwater footage down, and even so, much of it is still very fast. If I did not shoot at 120 fps, I don’t think I would have gotten any useful footage at all.
For the Manta Ray dives and the reef dives, I mainly used the wide angle lens, but did use the close-up and macromate lenses as well. And I used both the 5000+ and 2500 light on the tray and arm.
