A brand new addition to my online gallery, this is Sea Fan Garden AE photographed near Culebrita Island in Puerto Rico just last week.
As we embarked on our month long Caribbean cruise in April, I assembled the underwater housing setup prior to our first dive of the trip, but when it came time to test it out, the camera itself failed irretrievably and was now a brick for the duration of the voyage. I had three more cameras with me, but the broken one was the only one that fit the underwater housing!
Nevertheless, despite its foreign flavor, one of the advantages of being in the US Virgin Islands (as opposed to the nearby British Virgins and Spanish Virgins) is the availability of at least some of the infrastructure of home, including the United States Postal Service! So I ordered a second underwater housing to fit a different camera, then lingered in port awaiting the arrival of our package. Interestingly enough, packages shipped USPS from the mainland to USVI are considered local and not subject to customs or duty. But for whatever reason, shipping via UPS or FedEx from the same departure point in California, is considered to be foreign transport and triggers the customs inspection delay.
With each dive I became more familiar with the operation of my new system, and by the time we made our dive at ‘The Caves’ near Culebrita Island, I had things well in hand. Fortunately so, because this was one of the most beautiful underwater scenes I have encountered since I started scuba diving in my teens! We never made it to the actual caverns as we were so smitten by the scenic gardens of sea fans, thousands of them, in a multitude of vibrant colors ranging from mint to lavender to mustard. In great profusion the fans coated an underwater landscape of tumbled oversized boulders, swim-throughs and alleyways, waving back and forth gently in the current, alternating between light and shadow as they caught the rays of sunshine in the watery depths.
In post process, this image leaped off the screen as it conveyed the essence of the scene as I remembered it.
Sea Fan Garden AE is available for purchase HERE.
Sony a7RII, 1/350 sec at f/2.0, ISO 125, 28mm (FE 28mm F2 lens).
Photo is copyrighted and registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. Please respect.