Diving with Denizens
Chapter 15
April, 2004
Kona, Hawaii

Howard Hall

Green turtle being cleaned ©Michele Hall

Lance Milbrand and Richard Herrmann unshackled the camera from the large davit that had lowered it from the upper deck of the M/V Kona Aggressor. The camera settled gently beneath the surface as Richard and Lance struggled to push it down. Lance had replaced John Dunham on our crew. I was going to miss John, but at the same time I was happy for him. He had been offered the distributorship for a new light sport aircraft being imported from Germany. It was a great business deal and an exciting new career for John. He runs his new business out of a hanger filled with unusual flying machines (including my own ultralight) at the Carson City airport. He lives in a hanger loft like Dirk Pitt. I’m sure he was missing the diving, but not much. Lance was a great replacement. He had been a crewmember when we made Island of the Sharks at Cocos Island in 1998.

I turned around and watched Richard and Lance as they brought the camera slowly down. Behind them Mark Thurlow was bringing the lights and Kendra Choquette, our local guide, was helping with the cable. Peter Kragh and Bob Cranston were on the bottom waiting for me to lead them over the coral to the Turtle Pinnacles. All the worry I had experienced during the last few weeks were dissolving away. I had only one worry left.

I had flown into Kona alone a day ahead of my crew. Michele had stayed behind to care for her mother who had taken a bad fall a few days before we were schedule to depart. I rented a car, and on the way from the airport stopped along the coast adjacent to where the Turtle Pinnacles lay submerged a few hundred yards offshore. The Kona Coast in April is often rough with gale force winds and pounding surf. In conditions like that, filming at the Turtle Pinnacles could be impossible. Standing on the rugged lava shore looking out at a calm sea I found myself taking a huge deep breath and letting it out with a long sigh of relief. If I failed to get the sequences we planned to film here in Hawaii, it would not be because ocean conditions had made it impossible. It would be because I completely screwed up the camerawork, or the turtles didn’t show up.

I paused in a sandy patch about thirty yards from the turtle cleaning station. The water was clear and I could see both Pinnacles silhouetted against the sky-blue water. And I could just make out the cleaning station between the Pinnacles. Immediately, my apprehension changed to near panic. Not only was there a turtle in the cleaning station being cleaned, there were four or five of them! It was happening right now! I spun around to see how far behind me the crew was with the camera. They looked to be about a hundred feet away. Moving that camera was so damn slow! I turned to Bob and Peter and held up my hand signaling them to stop. I keyed the microphone on my rebreather mouthpiece. “It’s happening over there right now, big time. There are at least four turtles. Let’s not panic. Let’s get the camera ready here before we move over.” Of course, neither Peter nor Bob showed any sign of panic. I was coaching myself and they both knew it.

Richard and Lance finally arrived with the camera. I had resisted an almost overwhelming impulse to tell them to hurry up. Kendra and Mark arrived with the lights and the team busied themselves with mounting the lights and adjusting the lamp heads. Then I went through the process of powering up the camera and checking the focus and aperture controls. Finally, I turned on my light meter and, hoping to film the turtles from about four feet away, looked for a clump of coral about the size of a turtle to aim the camera at for light meter readings. “Bob, point the camera at that coral head right there,” I said then pointed to an outcrop of coral in the sand. As Bob and Peter moved the camera into position I watched one of the turtles leave the cleaning station a hundred feet away. “About four feet away,” I said to Bob. The light meter read f-16. Next I checked the video image in the viewfinder composing the clump of coral as if it were a turtle. “We’ll shoot it from about this far away, focus set at four feet,” I said keying my microphone.

“Okay, okay,” Bob replied.

Setting up the camera had taken seven or eight minutes. During that time I avoided looking over at the cleaning station. I struggled to be patient. We have a week here, I told myself. If they leave today we’ll get plenty more chances. But despite all the logic telling me to be patient, there was the Wildlife Cameraman’s Rule of Luck that screamed at me to hurry.

Luck results from the combination of opportunity and preparedness. As a wildlife filmmaker, you won’t be lucky if you’re not prepared. And, of equal importance, luck will fail you if you are not presented with opportunity.

Many years ago we were in the Bahamas making a film about Caribbean marine life for National Geographic. On the way back from the dive site late in the afternoon of our first day, we passed through an enormous swarm of thimble jellyfish. “Wow, look at that,” Bob said leaning over the side of the small boat. Thousands of amber color jellyfish pulsated in a dense swarm about thirty feet across and extending ten or fifteen feet below the surface.

“Maybe we should get a shot of this!” I said. Then I looked up at the sky. “Too bad the sun is so low. The light’s not very good.”

“Shoot ‘em tomorrow,” our dive guide said. “These damn things are all over the place. We see swarms like this all da time every day. You be get’n sick a get’n stung by ‘em ‘fore this trip is over.”

So I didn’t make the dive. And we didn’t see another single thimble jellyfish until six months later in the Cayman Islands.

So what if the turtles don’t show up tomorrow? What if a storm blows in? “Let’s go!” I said lifting the right side of the camera and pushing off the bottom. Now, finally moving toward the cleaning station with the camera lights set up properly, the lens pre-focused at four feet, the aperture pre-set at f-16, I looked to see how many turtles were still there. I counted three. The next step was to pick a turtle that was in a decent position to be filmed.

The turtle cleaning station is an amazingly small area about forty feet across extending between the two Pinnacles. Much of this area is covered by lava rock garnished with hard corals. Next to the smaller Pinnacle is a narrow sand patch. Closer to the large Pinnacle is an area of dead coral rubble about fifteen feet across. I wanted to avoid damaging the living hard corals. This is no easy feat when filming coral reef marine life with a camera what weighs 1,300 pounds. I knew that filming at this cleaning station every day for a week would really wreck up the hard corals if we didn’t limit ourselves to using either the narrow sand patch or the rubble patch to work from. Fortunately, the turtles seemed to prefer the rubble patch and one was being cleaned at its edge.

Green turtle being cleaned ©Michele Hall

I pointed at the turtle and keyed my mic, “Let’s go for that one,” I said. “Let’s move around and approach from here.” After releasing the microphone key I indicated the approach I wanted to make. Bob and I swam a wide arc around the rubble patch and then moved in slowly to attempt a head-on shot. With every foot closer we moved I expected the turtle to lift up off the reef and swim away. Certainly, the massive camera, the bright lights, the half-dozen divers all moving toward it had to be frightening to any wild animal. Certainly, it would bolt and any moment. But the turtle didn’t bolt. The turtle could not have cared less.

At four feet from the turtle’s face Bob and I settled down on the rubble and struggled to steady the camera with the turtle squarely in the viewfinder. I triggered the run switch and waited for as the camera ramped up to speed. Then as the camera accelerated the 1,000 foot roll of 70mm film up to a satisfying roar, I looked into the view finder to see if I was lucky. I was.

The turtle just closed its eyes and sat there in ecstasy as a swarm of bright yellow tangs cleaned algae from its shell, its flippers, and even the top of its head. It was amazingly beautiful. I looked through the viewfinder and asked myself over and over, “How can I possibly be screwing this up?”

Thirty seconds into the shot two other turtles swam into the cleaning station. One swam over the turtle we were filming. It was a sneaky move designed to steal away the cleaner fish that had been so eagerly cleaning the turtle sitting on the bottom. It was a strategy that worked. The school of fish swam up to the passing turtle and Bob and I followed the action. The turtle turned and settled on the bottom right in front of us. Twenty seconds later the camera stopped running. I looked at the numbers at the top of my viewfinder. I was out of film.

Of course, one roll of film was nowhere near enough to absorb all the adrenaline and anxiety my body had generated in the previous months as I calculated and re-calculated our chances of success at filming this behavior. So we spent five more days filming every aspect of green turtle cleaning behavior before moving on to other sequences.

During the rest of our Kona Aggressor expedition we spent our days filming triton trumpet snails and our evenings filming manta rays. Michele joined our crew in time for the last night of manta filming. She had not slept in two days and had taken a red-eye flight out to Kona. She arrived in a state of consciousness that alternated between delirium and schizophrenia. She was certainly in no shape to dive. But when she saw the manta rays gliding through the huge HMI light we has suspended below the Aggressor’s stern she insisted on making one dive.

Michele strapped on her diving gear, grabbed her digital camera, and stumbled off the stern. On the bottom she was dazzled by the sight of great winged raptors sailing through the artificial moon light. She blazed away with her digital camera without a moment’s regard for shutter speed, aperture, or focus. When her battery died, she stumbled back aboard, dropper her gear, and fell in her bunk. When she awoke late the next day she remembered none of it. Her photographs were so badly exposed they offered no reminder.