Start MUCKING around!

Muck diving is not for everyone. Turns out it’s pretty much what it sounds like, no matter what Diana (and especially her photographs) will try to tell you. Fortunately, at least in Lembeh Strait, Sulawesi, the water’s warm and the visibility is just slightly better than the name conjures. If you go with a dive resort, normal dives times are around sixty minutes. Unfortunately (for me) we didn’t have that restriction, and due to regrettable advances in battery technology and Diana’s ability to forego breathing for extraordinary lengths of time, muck dives with her can run over two hours. I have a bit more blood to keep oxygenated, so I typically get a (usually pleasant) half hour nap in the dinghy at the end of the dive. So not quite two hours in featureless gloom, scouring the rubble and muck for creatures mostly too small for my aging eyes to see even when they are pointed out to me. 

And yet, I would spend a week in the muck anytime, for the chance to see, in person, two Painted Frog Fish holding hands twenty meters deep in the Celebes Sea. I’m so very happy to live in a universe where that is a thing.

Lembeh Strait 1 (Volumes 2 and 3 to follow soon!)

In Lembeh, Diana arranged for a guide which was crucial. Sandro, who’s from Sulawesi, was delightful to hang out with us for six days of diving, easy-going but also a very motivated, perfectly happy to squeeze into Namo with tanks and gear for three divers and wallow across the strait at dinghy speed while the professional dive boat he would normally have been on whizzes by. He did occasionally wonder aloud about what might happen if we came up and Namo wasn’t there (with no one to tend to her), but otherwise he was fine diving without a dive boat and happy to stay under for two hours if Diana’s batteries lasted that long. He’s been guiding in Lembeh for years, having worked his way up from being the personal gardener for the dive shop owner, and he’s obviously still fascinated with muck diving. He carried an erasable slate and enthusiastically wrote down names for what he was pointing out to us (often with the proper Latin name). He has a particular interest in photography and works with Lembeh Critter’s camera operation (training other guides and shooting in his spare time) so besides spotting unimaginable, tiny camouflaged creatures buried in the muck, he also was able to help Diana learn how to use the snoot on her strobe light, which gives some of these photographs their dramatic look.

It’s basically impossible to adequately describe how difficult underwater photography is. Start with the idea that literally everything is approximately seventy-nine times harder to do underwater (except maybe peeing in your wetsuit). Buoyancy is super tricky because if you stir up the muck you can’t take photos anymore, and there are seriously dangerous creatures buried invisibly in the sand where you would like to brace your knee. Looking through the viewfinder with goggles is significantly tougher than it might sound (and it should sound impossible). Sony’s “smart” autofocus system hasn’t been down there before either and typically just throws its hands up in the (water?) unless it’s really lucky to recognize an eye. Many of the creatures who’ve developed their camouflage over literally billions of years of evolution are also smaller than a dime, so depth of field is harrowingly scant (breathe and you’ll miss the shot). You’re wearing gloves (for safety), so adjusting things like your f-stop, shutter speed, strobe power or ISO is extra fun. And, of course, though some of these critters do sit still, there’s the usual unpredictability that comes with photographing wild things. I could go on. Basically it’s like the mosaic work Diana does, in that it requires an intensity of focus and bull-doggedness that lies far outside of any normally agreed upon bounds of sanity.  

Enjoy the photos (comments are welcome), but also watch the behind the scene’s video I made of Diana and Sandro doing their thing, so you don’t get the wrong idea. ~MS