Results tagged “scuba diving” from Intelligent Travel Blog

Friend of IT Tobias Nowlan sinks into the murky depths that surround Panama's Isla Coiba.

The sunlight is obscured as hundreds of smooth-tailed manta rays float overhead. The swarm twists as the plankton feeders flex their sides like wings, then cruise away into the blue.

I'm scuba diving in waters around Isla Coiba, off Panama's Pacific coast, where giants graze on plankton soup. The seas are so thick with the stuff that visibility is often reduced to just a few meters. As a result, pelagic beasts can appear in front of you as if from nowhere, and vanish just as quickly, leaving me constantly wondering what could suddenly emerge from the deep. Two weeks prior to my arrival these waters were host to the largest fish in the world: the whale shark. Now the leviathans have moved on, and other colossal planktivores are stealing the scene.

Coiba is renowned as one of the world's top sites for viewing marine monsters like these, and I see plenty of plankton-feeding action. Troops of mantas sail by every few minutes, and 30-meter-high columns of blackfin barracuda, their torpedo-shaped bodies as long as my arm, surround and engulf me.

With air running low I approach the surface. As I do so, clicking and whining sounds become louder. A black shape the size of a small car looms in front of me; I pause nervously. I break above the water and not five meters away three pilot whales surface with me, blowing out jets of water as they take in air. Like submarines surfacing in fast forward, they rise and descend again in seconds. I glimpse them again at the surface 100 meters away - they must be moving with incredible speed.

As the world's most widely published underwater photographer, Stephen Frink knows a thing or two about the ocean. For 30 years, he's traveled the world shooting everything from starfish to great white sharks for publications like Glamour, Time, Newsweek, and National Geographic, and he's even published a book, Wonders of the Reef. When he's not submerged in a remote tropical lagoon, Stephen serves as a columnist and photography director to Scuba Diving magazine. He lives in Key Largo with his family, where he was nice enough to take a break from running his gallery and photography school for a quick Q&A with Kristen Gunderson. Read on to find out his take on kids, tricky photography, shark fishing, and the plight of the world's oceans.

Tell me about your favorite photo.  What's the story behind it?

My favorite photo is one of my daughter Alexa swimming with a dolphin, which I took several years ago near Freeport, Grand Bahama. She was three years old at the time (she has her learner's permit now). For me, the photo shows a moment of incredible and touching interaction. It was also an inspiration that a kid that age would be open to jumping in with such a big "fish." We weren't sure how she would handle it, but she showed no fear. There was also a 13-year-old in the water, and at one point, he began to freak out. Alexa put her head in the water, resurfaced, and said matter-of-factly, "Daddy, it's just a nurse shark." I knew then we wouldn't have to worry about her.

See the photo, and the rest of the interview, after the jump.