Note: I wrote this story just after we finished filming our Sea of Cortez film, Shadows in a Desert Sea. Reading this story as I wrote it more than ten years ago well illustrates the phenomenon called Shifting Baselines Syndrome. If you are unfamiliar with the phenomenon of shifting baselines, I suggest you check out shiftingbaselines.org. Shadows won many major natural history film awards including best cinematography at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival in 1993.

Shadows in a Desert Sea
Howard Hall

Manta 1HD©Howard Hall

At the end of a long dive one September morning in 1981, I paused at the summit of the Marisula Seamount to see if the tube blenny was home. Checking on the tube blenny was routine. Physiology always forced me to the surface well before I was ready to go. But I often stopped briefly at the mountain summit to see the blenny, and to let myself imagine what wonders he must see from his tiny home in an abandoned barnacle perched at the top of an undersea mountain. What marvels would one witness during a lifetime of observation from a home with such a view?

The tube blenny was a tiny fish less than three inches long. But what he lacked in size, he more than made up in animation. He breathed so rapidly, opening and closing his tiny mouth as he pumped water through his gills that he seemed to be delivering a lively soliloquy. His eyes moved independently allowing him to watch for danger in two directions at once. These tiny orbs darted about so rapidly it almost made me dizzy to watch. What a great character for a wildlife film, I thought. And what a great place to make an undersea wildlife film.

I looked up to see the Mexican motor vessel, CCMar hanging heavily in the sky above. The vessel was a dilapidated cement tub that we had chartered three weeks earlier for making a Wild Kingdom film about hammerhead sharks. I had no great desire to return there. The round concrete hull pitched and rolled unmercifully in the mildest wind chop. Her decks offered no protection from the summer sun. There was no refrigeration for maintaining fresh foods. The toilet offered no privacy. The superstructure had caught fire the night before causing considerable damage. This damage caused little concern since the value of the vessel could not be decreased further by anything short of sinking. And whether sinking could depreciate this wreck’s value or not was argumentative. And a few weeks later when the pathetic vessel sank in La Paz harbor (just five days after our film crew disembarked) no one cared to argue the matter.

The CCMar was no luxury live-aboard, but I didn't care. It was only a place to sleep and replenish my energies for making another wonder-filled dive. In those days the waters surrounding the Marisula Seamount were filled with fish. Giant pacific mantas soared the rising currents upwelling over the escarpment. Whale sharks lumbered along close to the seamount walls. And legions of hammerhead sharks regularly rose from the depths to cast their shadows across the rugged summit.

The shadow of a manta ray passed over me and I looked up to watch the familiar beast fly off across the seamount. Suddenly, I was surprised to see another diver rise over the escarpment on the opposite side of the mountain. By his equipment and the large red camera housing he was pushing, I realized he was not a member of our small group. But as he swam across the seamount with exceptionally powerful yet graceful strides, moving easily, yet nearly twice as rapidly as an average diver, I realized I knew him. I hadn't known that Jack McKenney was working in the Sea of Cortez, but there was no mistaking him even from eighty feet away. I leapt off the reef and started swimming in his direction. He too was surprised and puzzled at first (we both thought we had the Marisula Seamount to ourselves that morning), but as the distance closed he stuck out his hand to greet me. What a small and wonderful world, I thought.

That evening the setting sun splashed vermilion light against the high clouds as I ravenously consumed a modest dinner of chicken soup and tortillas. One of the launches from the Baja Explorador, which was home to Jack’s film crew, started up and headed in my direction. A minute later, Jack and a few friends climbed aboard the CCMar for a visit. We talked about hammerheads by the glow of a gas lantern as the vermilion sky was replaced by pitch and stars. As I finished my meal, I noticed a strange expression on Jack's face.

"What is it?” I asked breaking the flow of conversation.

"It's got feathers on it for Christ's sake!" he said pointing to the chicken leg I was gnawing on. I pulled the scrawny leg from my mouth and realized that, indeed, it had the foot, nails, and feathers still attached. Having spent three weeks on that wretched vessel without a bath, without a shave, with little more than chicken foot soup to look forward to, I realized I had, indeed, lost some degree of civilization. Recalling the scene, I always wished I'd come up with something clever to say at that moment, but Jack started laughing and the chance was lost. We all laughed so hard we nearly fell overboard.

Ten years passed. Now a decade later I was again anchored over the Marisula Seamount. As I sat on the ample bow of the Ambar III sipping a cold drink as the sun set once again over the Baja Peninsula, I found myself thinking of adventures past, opportunities seized and lost, and friends departed to explore deeper waters. A lot changes in ten years. The Sea of Cortez remains one of the most wonderful undersea wilderness environments on Earth. But much has changed here as well.

"You still want to make this dive?" Mark Conlin asked as he stepped out of the wheelhouse and onto the bow.

"Helluva current", I said standing up to look over the rail.

"Yeah!" Mark said hoping I had reconsidered making a night dive to film Tubastrea corals feeding in the current at night.

"Corals should be out in force. I guess we should give it a try".

"Ok, I'll put the zoom on the camera and put up a fresh magazine," Mark said then walked away shaking his head.

The current was strong but the idea was to film Tubastrea corals feeding in current. You simply need current to do that.

Bob Cranston came up on the bow a minute later carrying the cable-supplied movie lights. "Still wanna make a night dive, huh?" he said. He must have been talking to Mark. Bob was always up for another dive no matter what. However, sometimes you had to wake him up after falling asleep in his dessert plate. Bob can sleep anywhere, anytime of the day. Producers sleep only when the day is over and then only if they're achieving their goals. Bob and I had spent most of the day filming hammerheads with mixed gas rebreathers. We were both a little drawn out, but I felt we had one more dive in us. An all out effort makes it easier for a film producer to get a good night's sleep.

"What do you think, Bob? Too much current?" I asked knowing he would discourage only the most impossible dive.

"No", he said. "Should be all right", he replied as he tightened the lamp heads on their ball joint arms.

Hammerheads 1H ©Howard Hall

There was still a red glow on the horizon as Bob, Mark and I stepped off the stern of the Ambar. Current was too strong to swim to the anchor line. So my wife, Michele, played out the cable lights from the surface as we plunged straight down through the current until we reached ninety feet and the calm water on the lee side of the seamount. We worked our way up the seamount wall and over a ledge at the summit. Here we were able to brace ourselves against the current as we inched along looking for patches of coral. Water visibility was poor, but that didn't matter much since all I had in mind were close-ups. Now and then I would pause and take a shot of the brilliant yellow polyps extended by the corals to catch the plankton and detritus hurtling by.

It didn't take long to get the shots I needed and that was well since our bottom time was very limited. The tricky part was going to be getting back to the boat with all that gear at the end of the dive. We had a plan for that. Since Bob and I had spent a lot of time underwater that day, Bob would leave early and scout ahead to find the anchor line where we would make a safety stop (precautionary elective decompression). He would then signal the position of the anchor line with his dive light. Mark would take the cable lights and be on his own to make his way to the anchor line. I would stay put with the camera and tripod until I got Bob's signal so as to not risk missing the anchor line after using up all my bottom time.

After Mark left, I leaned back against the ledge, turned on a small flashlight and waited for Bob's signal. I ran the beam of my light across the rocky ledge and marveled again at the myriad tiny creatures that lived there. This was to be our last night dive in the Sea of Cortez. Tomorrow would be our last day. During the last two years, we had regularly dived from the decks of the Ambar III as we constructed a one hour wildlife film about the marine life of the Sea of Cortez that we would call SHADOWS IN A DESERT SEA. We had exposed nearly forty hours of film during that time and made hundreds of dives.

As we made the film, our science consultant Alex Kerstitch, guided us through the food web of the Sea of Cortez revealing to us and our cameras the secret lives of dozens of unusual animals and the overwhelming forces that now threaten them. Alex had been diving the Sea of Cortez ten years before I made my first dive there. The stories he told of vast shoals of tuna, hammerhead shark fins on the surface as far as you could see, schools of manta rays and other wonders often seemed like tales of fiction. But then I thought back to my first years diving these waters, back in the CCMar days.

In 1981 mantas were common on the Marisula Seamount. You could almost always see three or four mantas on a dive. In the summer, whale sharks were regularly found there. And it was quite easy to free dive into schools of hundreds of hammerheads.

During 1991 and 1992, the two years we spent making SHADOWS, we never saw a single manta or whale shark in the Sea of Cortez. To capture images of these animals we were forced south to the open Pacific. The hammerheads were still found at the Seamount, but not in the number I remembered from a decade earlier (Note: today hammerhead schools are no longer seen on the Seamount). Bob and I were forced to dive deep and long to find schools like the ones Alex talked about swarming on the surface twenty years ago.

But Mark Conlin had never dived the Sea of Cortez before 1990. To him, this was a wonderland filled with schools of hammerheads, marlin, and sailfish. I wondered what younger colleagues diving with him in the year 2000 will think of his stories of a decade past? Ten years seems to be a good period for measuring change in an undersea wilderness. It doesn't matter when you make your first dive in an area, ten years later the site will almost always seem "dived out". You enter a wilderness environment on a time-line that represents diversity and abundance as a declining curve. Whether you make your first dive in 1945 or 1992, you enter the curve high and leave it low. (Note: today this phenomenon is called Shifting Baseline Syndrome. You can learn more about Shifting Baselines at shiftingbaselines.org).

It's easy to blame divers for wrecking a popular dive site. Divers inadvertently abuse the reef with their fins and abuse marine life by pursuing, touching, even riding wild animals. Dive masters are quick to discourage these abuses today because these are things they can do something about. But they often helplessly ignore the rusting hulks of fishing boats lurking on the horizon. Make no mistake, for every manta touched by a sport diver in the Sea of Cortez and elsewhere, thousands die in gill nets. For every hammerhead disturbed by a photographer, thousands die on long lines. And, especially in the Sea of Cortez, for every fragile coral polyp damaged by the fin of a diver, a hundred square miles of sea floor are ripped up and desolated by shrimp trawls. During the making of our film we had many opportunities to wait below commercial fishing boats as they cast their incidental kill back into the sea. I watched as thousands of ominous shadows spiraled down, threatening no one but the sea itself.

I looked at my decompression meter and saw that I had five minutes left. I was going to have to move soon. Where was Bob's signal?

Bob had left me and began swimming forward of the light shining down from the Ambar. But he missed the anchor line. The current was impossible to swim against and he was swept down stream. Realizing his mistake, he began a harrowing dash across current to intercept the dive ladder knowing that if he missed it he was gone, adrift in a current in the open ocean at night. Bob made it to the stern, climbed up the ladder and yelled for another tank. He leaned over the rail and touched the movie light cable and, feeling it taut as a guitar string, pointed down stream to a glow 250 feet astern and said to Michele, "Somebody better go and get Mark. He's going to get lonely out there". Throwing a fresh tank on over his head, he trudged up along the deck, with his fins still on, and climbed up on the bow. Then he turned his light on and dived off. Michele thought he had lost his mind.

I had just begun contemplating an attempt to navigate back to the anchor line myself and all the bulky camera gear when I saw Bob's light flashing. "What the hell took him so long?" I wondered. Dragging the heavy camera and tripod, I worked my way across the seamount toward Bob's light and the anchor line for decompression. When I joined him he shrugged as if to say, "Sorry". And judging from the look in his eye, I anticipated a few good laughs over a cold Corona or two when we got back on board.

Later that evening, as we planned our last day of diving in the Sea of Cortez, I realized suddenly just how much I was going to miss the Ambar and our dives in this wonderful sea. I looked up stream and watched as galaxies of bioluminescent plankton rushed by. It had taken nearly two years to make a wildlife film about the marine life of the Sea of Cortez, and now with the filming finally over, it's like saying goodbye to an old friend you never expect to see again.

Note: Our film about the marine life of the Sea of Cortez, "Shadows in a Desert Sea", aired on NATURE in October 1992.