- Day 4 -

   No one made it up for the early morning dive today, and seven of the ten guests are currently up here on the top deck reading or napping. I figured out yesterday that if I come up here to work, it makes it seem like I'm out enjoying the fresh air instead of doing photo and web work all day. This morning, a school of playful spotted dophins escorted us part of the way from Maruka Bay to Paradise Pinnacle. I stood next to Jim on the boat photographing them, and I could almost feel intuition and experience radiating out from him as he was shooting (even though it wasn't anything really tangible). When he sees something that warrants a photo, his body sort of... snaps, and his focus shifts immediately to the subject at hand. I've seen it twice in the water so far, and it's been very inspiring each time.

   I forgot to mention that we had another "phrase of the day" uttered at breakfast yesterday. Bill was talking about Nanette's finning speed in the water, and Merlin used "red shift" to describe how her speed should be measured. Traveling with engineers is fun. :)

   We dove 3 Room Cave this afternoon. The crew had rigged up glowsticks on a string with spare air at the end of it so we could explore the darkness more safely. Jim took me through a narrow opening into a tunnel that led to an alternate exit, and we photographed slipper lobsters and other little critters inside. The group saw four or five octopi here, and it looks like it's going to be an excellent location for a night dive. The digital folk aren't getting many good photos today, for some reason (Jim claims that it's because he didn't have enough coffee this morning). We've finally gotten some slides together for the slideshow tonight, so it should be full of great photos!

   My Ikelite Substrobe 200 decided to stop working during the dusk dive today. This is very bad, because... well, I love the strobe, and I also use it as a dive light during night dives. :( [UPDATE - Strobe has been repaired by Ikelite, and is as good as new again. :)]
- Eric Cheng, 5:57pm, November 7th, 2001

   The slideshow tonight included 58 scanned slides and 29 digital images. Unfortunately, no one had enough time to properly correct the slides for digital projection (there are only two or three of us on the boat who know how to do that, and none of us had the time), so the "contest" ended up having an unintentional digital bias to it. Like every day before, Jim picked three of them for uploading, and added an honorable mention because Merlin managed to capture one of the longfin jacks that were hanging out under our boat a couple of days ago.

   A few more things:

1) We're going to skip tomorrow's slide show and web update and do day 5's upload on Friday instead.

2) We didn't go out into the blue today, and probably never will.

3) Jim has been advocating TTB - "Through-the-Back (Brain) Metering. Look at the back of the camera and adjust accordingly!" Almost everybody has switched to shooting with cameras and strobes on manual mode. Automatic underwater photography just doesn't work yet.

4) Bacchus wore a hood with two glowstick antennae/horns during the night dive. It was awesome. :)

   Did I mention that all of us love UK Germany's Canon D30 housing? :)
- Eric Cheng, 10:20pm, November 7th, 2001

      >> continue on to day 5