Hi folks,

just returned from a trip to Crystal River, FL (the week after Alex' group left). Weather conditions were good for manatee encounters - i.e. cold!!! weather, so that the manatees gathered in Three Sisters Springs. But not so good for the manatees themselves: Diana from Birds Underwater told me that this season almost 100 manatees already died due to the cold winter, the coldest one in Florida for 30 or so years.

We had rented a house at a canal leading to the spring, so I did not use Birds Underwater except for a trip to Rainbow River and for a boat tour with my wife and friends, who all had a serious cold and could not get into the water. Anyway, it was good exercise to swim to the manatees once or twice a day, 500 yards per way.

The manatees in the spring area: Sometimes there were so many that photo conditions were a pest - the manatees stirred up the silt from the ground when they came up for breathing. A couple of hours later conditions could be perfect, when - during the day - many manatees had left the spring. And also the number of snorkellers was less from noon on.

Which brings me to a point that really pissed me off: There are rules for manatee encounters. You have to watch a video if you go with a tour operator, and there are large boards at the spring area. These rules state that you are not allowed to approach, follow or harass a manatee, and you are not allowed to free-dive down to them. What I observed on every single snorkel trip annoyed me: There were -inexperenced- snorkellers who sometimes kicked a manatee accidentally when swimming around, but, much worse, our dear fellow u/w photogs and -videogs:

There was always at least one guy in the spring area who was carrying a big, big camera with two big, big strobes who simply seemed to assume that the regulations were for everybody else except him. Many of them wore weightbelts (which, by the way, pushed their legs down and let them stir up much!!! more silt than the manatees) and dived down/submerged to the manatees only to approach them "secretly" under water, and then fired at the poor beasts until they were nerved and swam away. Most highly rated subjects were mothers with calves, and to add an extra excitement, a model who was fondling the manatee.

Boy, I now can understand why some dive operators hate us! I never saw so many rude photographers and videographers before (one guy even pushed me aside for a video while I was waiting at the surface for a sleeping manatee to come up for breathing, pushed his camera into the manatees face so that it woke up and swam away). Unbelievable.

For me, I usually hung around at the surface near a manatee and waited patiently for a good photo opportunity. I used my goold old RS with a fisheye lens, a Nik V with 15mm lens - films are in the lab for development - or a small digicam (Olympus SP350 with wide angle converter), which I mostly took for shooting short video clips.

If you are interested, here is a video I just uploaded to Youtube - as you can clearly see, diving with manatees can be very dangerous!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzGSAs3dcTI

Regards,
Jock

Jock

Where in Germany are you from? My wife is from Darmstadt, she's been here for 15 years now.

It sounds like we were there at the same time and ran into some of the same photographers/videographers. We (My wife, my 2 daughters and myself) went out with Birds Underwater last Monday (Presidents Day) and there was so many Manatees and people in 3 Sisters that water conditions were terrible. I remember seeing a couple separate video crews. One was on tripod on the bottom, another was in a bright yellow dry suite that actually looked like it had ears on the top of his head, my 11 year old said he looked like a Pokemon and it was kind of true. I did not get any good photos that day, which was a bummer since it was my first time up there since I was a kid.

This past Sunday my 11 year old daughter and I drove up for the 6:15am boat with Birds and once we got in the water we made a bee line for the back of the springs and we were able to photograph Manatee's by ourselves for about an hour, then her camera battery died and she was getting cold. We started out of 3 sisters and passed 2 other large tour groups and in the amount of time it took for me to take my daughter to the boat and swim back to the deepest part of 3 sister those other groups had silted up the whole area. I was done, there was no way to shoot in that mess. Luckily I had gotten some good shots earlier, but I hoping to get a few more as the sun made it's way thru the trees to create shafts of light. I guess if I want to do that I'll have to go up there on a weekday.

I'll post some in the gallery section later tonight.

Mark

Tough to read that. I dove with the Manatees several times back in the early 80's. We would rent a canoe and paddle to some of the small springs away from the main one. We always had several manatees to dive with and no one else was ever around.

One good thing about that cold weather is that it has supposed to have killed almost all the large Burmese and african rock pythons that have infested the Everglades. Tough to hear about the manatees suffering as well. The difference though of course is they evolved to survive these occasional cold spells.

@ Mark:

I live near Cologne, some 130 miles north of Darmstadt.

Yes, we definitively saw the same people (the tripod-guy and the pokemon lady) - so we must have been swimming together! The "Lady in Yellow" and her husband have been there all week long, I saw them every day. They were Asian; I tried to talk to them, but their English was not so good. They both were, from my observations, very careful with the manatees and did not go after them.

@ Dave:

You are right, they evolved to survive the occasional cold spells - but for sure not to survive the collisions with boats! Many manatees had large and deep scars on their back and/or big cuts in their tail - and these were the ones that survived...

Regards,
Jock

They are very beautiful creatures. Thanks for your report and video.