| Great White Shark Photo Gallery |
The Great White Shark Extravaganza of 2010
After recuperating from a February 2008 cardiac unpleasantness, I was delighted to fly to South Australia in December of 2010 with my buddy Geri Murphy.
I thought that no new adventure could equal the spectacular time we had in July of 2007. Could we possibly find sharks to equal the display that Moo, Kal, Lefty and Tinker put on three years ago?
The short answer is—you betcha!! My new Hero Shark is Big Bro, who put on a display of persistence and aggression I’ve seldom seen in 34 years of doing these expeditions.
Big Bro
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Rodney and Andrew Fox hosted us on their well-equipped vessel, the Princess II, with the invaluable Ian Patterson as our chef and “Let me help you into that new dry suit” champion. Their knowledge and hard work delivered a spectacular experience for us, as it does for all their groups.
The one problem with which we constantly struggled was the weather. This Summer in Adelaide was just like the awful Winter I returned to here in Las Vegas: clouds, wind, rain showers and a deep wave surge that had the boat (and our cages) constantly churning. Our dives were often just like the rinse cycle of a washing machine.
When the cage was being bounced around by the surge, it introduced clouds of little cavitation bubbles into the water around us. I lost a lot of my pictures to the bubble cloud, and was saved in my photography only by a few sessions when the Sun came out and the water calmed down. It was then that Big Bro, Little Bro and five other sharks entertained us with their finest performances.
We even had another sea lion experience like the one that thrilled us in 2007. In this instance, a mature female sea lion harassed the hapless Little Bro, dive-bombing the shark with evident disdain. It was a convincing demonstration that full-grown great white sharks must rely on stealth (and reduced visibility) to have any chance to prey upon the agile sea lions.
Sea Lions
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Another fascinating aspect to this festival of sharks was the ubiquitous Pole Cam, a full-sized digital SLR camera in a housing mounted on an aluminum pole. With it, the Canadian photographer Mark Enarson shot countless pictures right next to my cage while hardly getting his feet wet. His pictures of me with Big Bro are a grand souvenir of the cruise.
Mark Enarson shots of Carl Roessler in the cage.
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A final thrill on this adventure was photographing great white sharks in 3D! Ten days before the trip, my friend Howard Rosenstein introduced me to a RecSea housing for the brilliant new Fuji 3D WD camera. It is an astonishing compact camera with two lenses and a bright viewing screen. Even in a bouncing cage it was perfectly controllable. Big Bro even came in at me from dead ahead a few times, fitting nicely into the 35 mm lens’s frame so I could capture all of him with the 3D effect.
I believe I may be the first person to take video of my favorite marine predator with 3D, which at my age is pure fun.
Of course, if you don’t have a 3D TV or computer monitor you will see only a 2D version from the left lens. Stay tuned, though—the price of 3D is coming down fast!
All in all, this was a magnificent way to get back into the water after a health hiatus. I can’t wait for my next opportunity to dive with the great white shark!
Carl’s buddy Geri Murphy, for many years the cover photographer for Skin Diver Magazine, has now joined the ranks of enthusiastic shark divers!
Carl's pictures of Geri in the cage.
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Shark diving can be frustrating, grueling and boring!
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