Seasons in the Sea

by Howard Hall

©Howard Hall

   I felt bound up rather than dressed up. I've owned the tailor made wool suite for six years and have worn it as many times. My muscles wouldn't relax. If I assumed a comfortable posture I was certain something would pop or tear or I would strangle in my nice silk tie. I had the intense feeling that I really didn't belong here.

   Dr. Sylvia Earle paused for a moment and the large international crowd fell silent. I became aware that a broadcast television camera was suddenly aimed in my direction. "SEASONS OF THE SEA", she announced and the room descended from applause into darkness. As the lights dimmed, the Wildscreen 90 logo faded from the screen. A single opalescent squid appeared carrying her egg case through the cold winter darkness one hundred feet under the sea. It seemed a strangely incongruous combination, the large auditorium filled with people and that lonely squid on the ocean floor. In the darkness of the auditorium I was gripped by a sense of unreality, suddenly aware of the two lives I lead, the film producer wearing a suit and tie; the diver kneeling in the fine sand on the ocean floor.

   As the squid moved across the sand, I was engulfed by the memory of the dive I had made to capture the image. I remembered seeing it through the lens. And as the soft music accentuated the gentle movements of the squid, I couldn't help reliving the dive once again. It was like being disturbed in the middle of a puzzling dream, almost waking, then slipping into another.

   Filming squid on those cold winter nights more than three years ago had been uncomfortable and fun. It was sometimes fun because it was uncomfortable. Bob Cranston, Mark Conlin, and I laughed ourselves hoarse as Norbert Wu dropped his blanket and began dragging on his ice cold wet suit. By the time he got it zipped up, he was shaking so badly that he had difficulty picking up his hood. A gust of wind blew him off balance as he convulsively pulled the hood over his head tearing it in half in the process.

   The rest of us wore dry suits. At two o’clock in the morning, the thought of exposing myself to that wind while putting on a damp wet suit would have made me suicidal. It was to be our fourth dive that night. Norbert had been first in the water and last out on all the dives. We all thought he was pretty tough, dumb but tough.

  The glow of movie lights began to dim as Bob descended. I waited a few moments longer and then pushed myself off the stern with the thirty pound tripod and immediately began falling toward the yellow glow. At seventy feet I plunged past him and a few moments later impacted on the sea floor at one hundred and ten feet. By the time Bob reached the bottom with the lights, I had pulled my fins off and hoisted the tripod over my shoulder and was walking up the slope through the squid eggs. There were squid everywhere, but I wanted to move into the shallowest water possible to extend our bottom time.

   I knelt down before a large egg cluster and waited as Bob mounted the movie lights on the camera Mark had brought down. Mark passed the camera to me and I took one last look at my dive computer before mounting the camera to the tripod. Then I looked through the lens and began following a female squid that was carrying an egg. This dive was devoted to one shot - a female anchoring her egg case in the sand. It was not an easy shot to get. With the zoom lens, if the squid moved toward the camera or away from it, I would quickly lose focus. The shot would only work if a squid entered the frame from the side, moved straight across and deposited the egg in the center of the frame.

©Howard Hall

   After a few unsuccessful shots, I decided to take the camera off the tripod and hold it by hand. I then tried following a squid as she moved to lay her egg. She swam slowly forward inspecting the fine sand at the base of a large egg cluster. I couldn't tell if she was still in sharp focus after the camera started to run, so I concentrated on keeping her the same size in the frame. Just as she began digging into the sand, a large bat ray blundered into the lights and knocked me off balance, kicking up a storm of silt. We picked up our gear and moved forward out of the cloud to try again.

   I settled down on the bottom and checked my computer. I had six minutes left. I knelt down, looked through the viewfinder and zoomed in on a squid with an egg case. After focusing, I zoomed back out to full-frame composition of the squid and dialed the aperture to f-8. Then careful to keep her the same size in the frame, I began following her and turned the camera on. It was almost too easy. She swam across the sand for ten seconds then began digging four inches into the sand. After setting the small anchor that would hold the egg case in place above the sand, she released it and swam away. Perfect. I shut the camera off, opened the aperture, refocused on another squid, and tried to repeat the shot. But the next female just continued to swim until I was convinced she would never lay the darn egg. So I shut the camera off. As if on cue, she began digging down to set her anchor. I screamed something appropriate through my regulator and began looking for another female carrying an egg.

   Mark tapped me on the shoulder and showed me my dive computer. Two minutes left. Without giving a signal, I pushed off the bottom and began ascending. Bob had already started up with the tripod. At forty feet, Mark and I slowed way down and checked our computers. Then we inched our way up to thirty feet and began looking for the glow of the boat lights. Pointing the movie lights straight down toward the bottom to minimize the glare, I could just make out a dull glow to the east. I took the movie lights off the camera and lowered them toward the bottom on the cable, then in near darkness, Mark and I began swimming toward the glow of the boat lights.

   As we swam, I reviewed the shots I had taken on the bottom. I was certain none had worked with the possible exception of one. Did I hold focus on that one? Was my exposure ok? If I had six or seven shots in the can that I felt good about, then I'd feel comfortable moving on to the next shot in the script. But the egg laying shot was crucial. I knew I needed to shoot more. But not tonight. No more bottom time. And I'd had enough. We'd get the egg laying shot tomorrow night, maybe on the first couple dives. Then I could begin working on the mating sequence.

   Swimming toward the dull glow of the boat light I continued to review the shots I had taken and the ones I needed. Then tried to calculate how many more nights we need spend filming squid before moving on to the next animal behavior sequence. Then I thought of all the other animals I planned to film that were in my film script. I was looking at years of work ahead. Years! And if everything worked out well, it would culminate in a one-hour film for television. It seemed ridiculous. One hour on the air and it would be over. But, of course, I knew that it was the diving and the exploration that mattered to me. The film was only a justification for doing it.

   After ten minutes of swimming, I noticed that the dull glow of the boat lights looked exactly the same. I began to get a bad feeling. I looked over to Mark and shook my head. Then I slowly surfaced. Yep, it's the moon. The glow we had been swimming toward was the moon. I looked over my shoulder and saw our boat lights glowing against the dark silhouette of Catalina Island. The night was crisp and cold and filled with stars. The boat was more than a quarter mile away.

   On the huge screen in Bristol England, the female squid laid her egg and backed out of the sand. Then she began to fade as the room lights came up with the rising applause and for the briefest moment I was not sure where I was. Michele leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. Then she poked me in the ribs and said, “Stand up!”

Postscript:
SEASONS OF THE SEA won the Golden Panda Award for best of show at the Wildscreen film festival in October, 1990. This is the most prestigious award in natural history filmmaking and this was the first time it had been won by an underwater film and an American filmmaker. It also won the Festival Choice Award at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival, September, 1991.