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Aug 22, 10 Comments (0)
Good morning friends, sorry about the morning mail again, I just can’t seem to get these out in the evening lately, there’s just too much to do. Yesterday we all had to go into work as we had a family of four wanting to take a tour in the sub and Saturday was the only day they could do it. We ended up not leaving till 1:00 but after I got my dive gear ready and met some friends again at Vaersenbaai for an afternoon dive. The downside was, it was the worst visibility I have ever seen in Curacao but who cares when you have a macro lens in your hands. I found tiny creature after tiny creature and kept busy the whole dive and for once I felt like I brought the right lens. I found this juvenile Cleaning Goby perched high on top of a blade of Maze Coral and was shocked at how brave he was. This little guy was only around 1/4th of an inch in length. I laid on the sand and moved in as close as I could and he never moved, he just sat there watching wondering what was going on. I am not real sure what kind of Goby this is, it’s not a Sharknose for sure and even the Cleaning goby has a Sharknose type face as well, let me know if you have any ideas.
This morning I am taking the dogs for a long overdo walk at Saint Joris so I better get moving, talk to you again soon, Barry
Aug 21, 10 Comments (0)
Good evening all, how was your day? Mine of course was busy and fun starting out with doing some more photos from inside the sub at around 400 feet. We did about a two hour tour looking for the most beautiful scenic areas we could find and once located we would stop and do little photo shoots along the way. We found two big Lionfish hanging out together at around 185 feet under a giant anchor and also found the new Nicky fish today at around 300 feet and not just one, lots of them. Later in the afternoon we did a fun deep dive down to 132 feet. We swam straight out in front of the substation and down we went as I wanted to check out some sponges and corals I saw from the sub earlier that morning. On our way back up to safer depths I found this Graysby Sea Bass sitting inside a Netted Barrel sponge being cleaned by a Sharknose Goby. Normally this Sea Bass spends all day chasing and eating smaller fish but would never think about eating this little guy. This Sharknose Goby has a free “you can’t eat me card” as this is a cleaner fish and without them we would have a lot of sick fish on the reef! Talk about a great home as well, it’s a sponge with a million dollar view! I laid here for quite awhile and watched, there is just so much activity happening on the reef, you just need to slow down and look!
That’s about it, I have to work tomorrow as well, we have a family of four doing the sub at 10:00 but will probably go do something fun after.
Have a great weekend, Barry
Aug 20, 10 Comments (0)
Hello friends, it’s almost 9:00 in the evening and I am sitting here as tired as can be and seem to have a bad case of the non-stop yawns! I had a busy day at work. I did two sub dives for walk in customers, one in the morning and one in the afternoon and in between I trained my new person mostly on PhotoShop. After work I geared up and took off on a fast one hour ride but just didn’t have my normal energy, diving and biking do not mix!!
Here’s a little tiny Juvenile Dusky Damselfish I found the other day while shooting macro at Vaersenbaai. These little treasures start their lives out being very colorful fish but will grow up to be an ugly dull black color. As an adult this fish will become very territorial and is known to frequently chase away divers and fish that are much bigger than they are! These are also the fish that are currently doing so much damage on the reef by making those “coral gardens” I have told you about, they just don’t seem to have many enemies! This guy here was about the size of your fingernail, super tiny and very hard to photograph!
Off to bed, thanks for all the great notes, Barry
Aug 18, 10 Comments (0)
Good evening friends, tonight’s photo is dedicated to our friend Arjan who we worked with for years and recently moved back to Holland to start a bed and breakfast getaway. At around 300 feet out in front of the Curacao Sea Aquarium there is a big rock with the most beautiful yellow and red Deep Water Gorgonian on it that you will ever see! Arjan and Dutch first found this place while diving here many years back, and yes you read that right, they used to dive to this place with tanks! Ok, not just any tanks, they used mixed gasses and carried multiple tanks at once and would have to spend hours decompressing on the way back to the surface. Remember folks, for most people diving to 100 to 130 feet is considered the maximum for regular scuba diving but these guys went a step further and trained how to go super deep, it’s called tec diving and it can be very dangerous but also very rewarding. So apparently Arjan was the first to discover this place and now it’s one of the many stops we make during “The Beauty Run” in the new Curacao Mini-Sub. This is Kendra on the left and Nicky on the right this morning during a super fun tour we took exploring the reef and looking for new creatures. Our goal was to find a new deep water fish that lives at around 400 feet that is being named after Nicky but we never found one. You just can’t imagine all the beautiful stuff there is to look at way down below the Earths surface, creatures and fish that only a handful of humans have ever seen! You can see the little red numbers above Nicky’s head reading our current depth, I love watching that thing as we go deeper and deeper and just can’t believe how lucky we all are to see such things! Our Beauty Run tour lasts around an hour and starts out at about 185 feet. We usually go to a giant sunken anchor first that is just filled with fish and teaming with life. We then fly over fields of beautiful sponges on our way to the two sunken tug boats then drop down to a place called “Jeff’s Ledge” which is exploding in colors to beautiful to even describe! After that it’s down deeper to “Arjans Rock” and then deeper to 400 to 500 feet exploring the walls and sandy patches for new and unusual creatures. We had two ladies today from England who took this tour as well in the afternoon and just loved it,! So again for those of you visiting Curacao or already here stop by or call us to make a reservation, you will not be disappointed! Again it’s www.substation-curacao.com or call +5999-465-2051 and remember you get a photo shoot with me as well underwater included in the price, I can take your photos inside or outside it’s all up to you!
Aimee had the day off and took the dogs to Saint Joris for a great morning of fun in the sun! Unfortunately we no longer have a day off together any more, I am hoping that we can eventually fix that once the sub station gets more under way.
Off to bed, see you tomorrow, Barry
Aug 18, 10 Comments (0)
Good morning all, look what I found yesterday! Cool huh? Months ago Mark, from the World famous Dive Bus Hut and I were diving the Superior and he found one of these but at the time I was holding a 10.5mm wide angle lens and the most we could do was take pictures in our heads! So yesterday as I was out waiting for the sub to come out of the channel I looked down and spotted another! I again had the wrong camera but at least this time I had another diver with me. What I did was hand my camera off to my friend and gently scooped him up with a little piece of plastic and slowly carried him back up to the surface. Once at the sub platform I yelled for someone to grab me a plastic container with holes, I then set him in there and left him under our platform in the sand while I got out and prepared another camera with a macro lens in another housing. I think I was only out for around five minutes. I again jumped in the water, swam down to the bottom with my new camera and gently picked up my colorful nudibranch (who was crawling all around the inside of the plastic container). I then swam back out the channel and down to 50 feet to the exact spot I had found him and let him out for his little photo shoot. Once released he went right back to his feeding and I shot away. This little Caribbean beauty is only a 1/2 an inch long by 1/4th of an inch wide, he’s tiny!! There are more than 3,000 known species of nudibranch, and new ones are being identified almost daily. They are found throughout the word’s oceans, but are most abundant in shallow, tropical waters. Their scientific name, Nudibranchia, means naked gills, and describes the feathery gills and horns that most wear on their backs. I wish I could give you a name but so far I haven’t found it, if anyone knows please drop me a line, it’s another first for the Browns.
My other exciting thing that happened yesterday was that we almost flooded a camera! We started using an older Nikon D-200 yesterday that will be used mainly for the sub. Well, we had already had the camera in the water when I found the nudibranch and it was fine but the second dive it started to leak and it started to leak bad! Thank goodness my friend Kevin was with me, he pointed to the front of the camera and the dome was quickly filling up with water but had not hit the lens let! I shot to the surface and held the camera up out of the water and at the same time un-clipped one of the main body clips and released the water! I then re-clipped it and swam to the rocks were people on shore raced over and grabbed it and took it back to the sub-station. The good news is the camera never got wet, we saved it but we don’t have a clue where it is leaking, that’s on the to-do list today. I have flooded 3 cameras since I have been doing this and finally have learned how to save them. Get that camera to the surface, keep it up-right at all times and release the trapped water as fast as you can, it works!
After work I met 3 other friends for a fast one hour bike ride, other than breaking my chain in half it was a great ride!
I need to get moving, have a wonderful day, enjoy the nudibranch he’s just for you! Barry
Aug 17, 10 Comments (0)
Good morning all. Last night after work we immediately went with some friends out to the airport for dinner to celebrate a new restaurant that just opened, WENDY’S!!! It’s the first time I have had a fast food meal in years and it was great! The only bad part of the whole mission was once we got there we found out they didn’t have their World famous Frostys yet! But they said it’s on the way! Yesterday I stayed pretty busy at work. I first started to train a new person then went snorkeling for three hours and finally we did a sub dive which I took photos of. We have a channel of sorts that the sub comes in and out from and yesterday we spent some time removing some big underwater rocks with the crane. Those of us in the water helped our diver by bringing him big ropes to tie the stones with and then once tied we would give the signal to lift, the stones were then set in a better area. Curacao was hot yesterday, it’s starting to look like the rains are gone now for quite awhile! I am back to my routine again of hauling water out to the desert for my birds each day filling up the bird baths we made, they seem to love them!
Here is another shot from our trip to Vaersenbaai. This is a colony of Warty Corallimorphs that I found at around 35 feet out on the reef. This is actually something we don’t see to often especially in big number like we saw there. For those of you thinking you have seen thousands of these at the Superior site in the shallows, those are different, they are called Sun Anemones. Corallimorphs are very easily confused with Anemones! The best visual clue to the orders identity is the arrangement of the tentacles, which form two geometric patterns concurrently. The tentacles radiate out from the center of the oral disk, like spokes, and form concentric circles which progressively increase in diameter from the center.
I got up at 5:00am just for you guys today so never let it be said I don’t love you! I apologize for not posting the frogfish on my website yesterday, not sure how I forgot that but it’s there now.
Time to get ready for another big day, be back tonight, Barry
Aug 16, 10 Comments (0)
Good evening friends, I am sitting here wondering just where did my weekend go?? It’s like “poof” and it’s gone! I am not sure I told many of you but I have been teaching/training a young friend of mine in the fine art of mountain biking for the past few months. His name is Stiyn and he is one of those kids who has a natural gift for biking, especially rough technical single-track. Well today he had his first race and he WON!! He rode like a champion and made us all proud, it was a great race! I ended up riding my bike home from the race at around 10:45 and it was scorching HOT!! I rode as fast as I could to get home but still ended up getting burned a bit, guess it was a bad day to wear a sleeveless jersey. At 1:00 in the blazing heat I did something I rarely do, I loaded the dogs and drove top speed to the beach! We have a beach called the Dog Beach over by Jan Thiel and that’s where we spent the afternoon! When we got there I made a bee-line into the water and the dogs followed at top speed, we all had a wonderful time! That’s pretty much my day, I made a fun dinner on the BBQ for Aimee and now everyone is relaxing.
Here’s another first for yours truly, this is a Longlure Frogfish swimming in mid water! Yeah can you believe it? Check out his Lure floating out in front of him. I was photographing this yellow beauty when all of a sudden without any warning he jumped off the coral head he was perched on and swam to another! Those of us watching were screaming underwater, it was just so cool to watch! As you can see Frogfish do not swim like a normal fish, he had to use his four flippers/legs to swim with and this took quite awhile for him to get to the other coral head.
Thanks for all the compliments on yesterdays shot, that really is something you probably won’t see anywhere else! Hope you had a great weekend, see you tomorrow, Barry
Aug 14, 10 Comments (0)
Hi friends, check out this cool shot, talk about one in a million! Today at around noon I picked up my friend Stiyn and we drove to Vaersenbaai where we met two other friends, Rob and Ke-chi, both who work with me at the Sub- Station. Our main purpose for coming here was to find a new frogfish that another friend (who was here from Holland) just found and told me out. Most of the time when something new is found those that know these reefs can usually find the said item just from a brief description of the reef and the depth. Well the frogfish was really easy to find, it was exactly where I was told it would be. It stood out like a sore thumb with it’s glowing yellow body sitting high atop the reef motionless waiting to catch lunch! We stayed there for quite awhile, I ended up with some great photos and even got to see and photograph him or probably a her leaping from one coral head to another swimming in mid-water, it was so cool! The reef is starting to look a little better at Vaersenbaai. I found a cluster of Purple Stove Pipes that is amazing and will be going back next weekend with a model to shoot that. Well on the way back in just 15 feet of water there is a big rectangular chunk of rock just sitting all by itself surrounded by nothing but sand. Since I can remember this little micro-reef has been home to thousands of reef creatures like fish of every kind, shrimps, crabs, anemones, and corals of all kinds but mainly baby fish. In fact it’s a nursery of sorts. Well today while I was laying in the sand shooting a new shrimp that we don’t have photos of Rob signals me and points to a just born juvenile Smooth Trunkfish the size of pea! I couldn’t believe how small it was and how brave he was?? As we both watched this little trunkfish (who normally stay in one area) swam all over the side of this reef area, he was so brave. In fact at times he was moving around so much and so far from his original home that we both lost him but re-found him on and off. Well, while trying my best to keep a pea-sized creature in focus he suddenly left the confines of the rock reef and swam out towards me, maybe thinking I was another big chunk of rock with possible caves to hide in? On his way out to me, he was immediately met by a school of new-born French Grunts, they were only about 2-3 inches long but to him they were monsters! They immediately thought this was a floating piece of food and tried over and over to eat him or at least taste him which when the trunkfish baby felt this he went swimming full blast back to the safety of the reef! I only got one shot as it happened so fast, one of those, if you blink you would miss it kind of things, it was really cool to see! So again, you never know what your going to see on the reef, I will check on him again next weekend and let you know if he is still there.
That’s pretty much my day other than doing two hours of trail sweeping this morning with the dogs. I hope everyone is having a great weekend, see you tomorrow, Barry
Aug 14, 10 Comments (0)
Good morning all, I had a busy but fun day of diving yesterday and once home we went to a friends birthday party, so I got home late again. Today after walking the dogs I am meeting some friends for a dive at Varsenbaai in search of a new frogfish that was recently found. I really don’t have much for you this morning, it’s hard to think when your still half asleep.
This was a small school of Goatfish I found the other day all hanging out together. I often notice fish swim in a certain order or rank like largest on top and the smaller ones below. I have always considered Goatfish as the “calm” leave us alone fish. They really keep to themselves and are always seen swimming in small schools. Much of their day is spent digging in the sand, they use two fleshy whiskers called “barbels,” located under the tip of their chin, to search for prey hiding in the sand. These fish are Carnivores, they feed on shrimp, crabs, bottom-dwelling invertebrates, clams, and clam worms.
Dogs are waiting to go, talk to you tonight again, Barry
Aug 13, 10 Comments (0)
Good morning everyone, Aimee here. This is a great photo of our Michelle (at the front) doing a program called the DSE (dolphin scuba encounter) with some of our Dolphin Academy team, MC and Papito (yes, we have an employee and a dolphin named Papito). The dolphin is Romeo. In 2007 when I was put in charge of training the 5 new dolphins I was told to train a new program; one that was not a swim, encounter, snorkel or therapy. Tough one. So, we decided to do an underwater encounter on scuba with the dolphins. This would give anyone the opportunity to see the dolphins up close, face to face, get to hear them and their many sounds and learn about the animals in their own world. It took many months to get them used to all the equipment and to be relaxed with all the divers and hands and fins. One of the funniest and toughest things was to teach them to not float up, but to relax and stay close to us, right off of the bottom. Romeo seems to be doing an awesome job! Before we put divers in the water we give them a 20 minute briefing talking about dolphin anatomy; most people don’t think about a dolphin belly button or ears or follicles where they used to have hair! We teach them about sounds and echolocation. Once they are underwater they get to see and feel all these wonderful things right at their fingertips. They also get to participate in an echolocation demonstration. The trainers swims off a bit, sends the dolphin back to one of the guests with a triangle and then the dolphin returns to the trainer. We then put eyecups on the dolphin and ask them to retrieve the triangle from the guest. Everyone gets to not only see the dolphin locate the triangle but gets to hear the echolocation clicks as they are finding it. For me, it is always the highlight of the dive, so cool! Well, we have been doing this program for about 2 years now, but it is a new program for us over at Dolphin Academy. It is just great letting our new colleagues experience such a fun new thing. Barry called so excited yesterday after this dive telling me how great it was and how wonderful Michelle and Romeo were! He just could not stop buzzing about it! That is just awesome. Michelle had never even touched a dolphin before she started working here. You would never know it now! She seems like an old pro who is just a natural with the animals. I am very lucky to have found her. Well, now all you locals who know about this have to come and join us, and you divers from other places, this is just one more “carrot” to get you down here. Come visit!
Busy but fun day ahead, Aimee
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