Capturing the Moment

Purple and Yellow wildflowers   What can I say? San Francisco was absolutely beautiful during our spring visit this Easter. Heidi and I scheduled a four day layover here to visit with friends in the Bay area on our way east from Hawaii. I wanted to head out to some of the hiking trails to get views of the coastline and the Golden Gate bridge, and was surprised to get blooming wildflowers and sunshine as an unexpected bonus. Heidi in front of the Golden Gate Bridge   The first spot we hit was a place called Lands End. This is where the San Francisco Bay dumps out into the Pacific Ocean. A famous surfing beach called Ocean Beach is nearby, there are hiking and biking trails along the cliffs, and you get several beautiful views of the Golden Gate Bridge looking back towards the city.   The wildflowers were in full bloom as we looked over the old baths and the famous Cliff House. Purples and yellows accentuated our first views of the Bay area. This was the beginning and endin

Kelly looking pumped Heidi hovering over the colorful reef   I realized recently that I've gone scuba diving all around the world, on four different continents, but the closest I have come to diving in the Atlantic Ocean was Puerto Rico...which is still pretty much the Caribbean. This all sounded pretty crazy to me since I grew up in Savannah, GA right on the Atlantic Ocean! But I also grew up not hearing about anyone diving in the murky, organic ocean water there. Even though I have spent countless hours and days playing in the ocean water of the Atlantic its underwater world has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Nate and Kelly to the rescue! Fish and diver Shark heading towards Nate    While Heidi and I were planning our Florida road trip to see our friends in Miami, Nate mentioned a possible shark dive while we were there. I had definitely heard of a muck dive spot in Jupiter called the Blue Heron Bridge but a shark dive was news to me. It didn't take a

Manatee, or 'Sea Cow', stare down Manatee Pics for Sale Swimming with manatees and photographing them underwater has been high on my list for some time now. I've heard stories and seen pictures coming out of some part of Florida so I had an idea that this was the place to start looking into achieving this goal. With a road trip to Miami in the works to see our good friends Nate and Kelly, I seized the opportunity to make this dream a reality.      It turns out that Crystal River, on the Gulf side of Florida is the place to go to for manatee encounters. It is one of the few places left in the world that run tours to see the manatees and let you get in the water with them. The manatees aggregate here during the winter months in the relative warm waters seeping up through fresh water springs. These springs also bring an unusual clarity to these otherwise turbid brown waters. These manatees are big! Heidi is in the background Heidi and her manatee friend

A humpback whale doing a peduncle throw   While relaxing in the Hawaiian Islands after a winter of working on a small adventure cruise ship, Heidi and I decided to head out in slightly smaller boats to explore the waters around the islands. We went out on our favorite whale watching boat, the Ocean Adventurer with Pacific Whale Foundation and our good friend Captain Ben. Heidi hovering over the deep blue Brown Booby overhead   Maui is one of the best places in the world to look for humpback whales, especially in March. We had a great show with active whales and even a flyby from a brown booby. There has been a lot of talk about the number of humpbacks in the area this season not being as high as usual, with the possibility of many whales staying up in Alaska. It will be interesting to see if the whales are more dense than usual up in Alaska when I head there next month. While I didn't get any great breach pictures from this trip we did get a close up view of a whale

Yellow-headed Moray Eel   I've never had much fear sticking my camera in the face of moray eels, although lately there have been a couple of things that have given me pause to reconsider this. We saw a massive 7ft green moray in the Atlantic that was so wide and girthy that I didn't know what I was looking at at first. Then there are the stories. a rare Dragon Moray Eel   So in all my time underwater I've never been bitten, attacked, or even feinted at by a moray eel. But our friends over at Kona Diving Co. gave us a few stories of friends getting bitten, usually after pointing at the eel or something nearby with an extended finger. I don't take too much stock in stories about friends friends though so it took a little more, and a little more I got. Portrait of a White Mouth Moray Eel A Tiny Dwarf Moray Eel   One of the divers at the shop pointed to two small scars on her neck that looked like a vampire bit. Then she turned and showed us other sc