lemon

Hi Steve, thanks for the excellent report. i really enjoyed reading it. i was also just recently in cocos (early july with the underseahunter group). generally, i would agree that this was an off year. in fact, the last two seasons have been down years. while i share your concerns regarding longlining and agree that illegal fishing is likely seriously hurting the park i think another factor is the unusually warm waters the past two years. there has generally been less cleaning action and i believe the hammerheads have been staying deeper. the last two seasons the thermoclines have generally been deeper than usual due to the la nina. fortunately the nina just ended this summer (according to noaa) so things will hopefully improve in the next seasons. for sure though longlining is a huge problem. while silverado used to provide regular silvertip sightings it seems that the silvertips are all but gone from cocos now. the silkies have definitely taken a big hit from the fisherman as well and according to the DMs you don't really see them that much anymore. these species likely get hit extra hard as they spend a lot of their lives outside of the marine park in the open seas. talking to some of the park rangers it seems that the same fishing ships are repeat offenders and generally whenever they are caught pretty much get off with only a minor slap on the wrists. i imagine they are well protected politically. its a real shame and it makes one fear for cocos future. i was talking to one of my dive buddies who is also a frequent cocos visitor and he was speculating that the recent decrease in white tips and marble rays may be in part related to the recent increase in tiger sharks hanging out around manuelita. they have to be eating something! this was my first season diving cocos on my rebreather and i have to say that the difference was awesome. no more "blue diver technique" aka breath-holding to get the hammers to come closer. can't wait to go back as i totally agree with you that out of the many places that i've dived, cocos is hands down my favorite. i just wish underseahunter was still running their combined malpelo-cocos trips. i did that one three seasons ago but unfortunately we didnt see the famous silkies at malpelo. apologies for the longwinded rambling, just my .02 worth! best, alex

excellent pics and report! i really enjoyed them. on the topic of cocos here are two incredible videos shot by one of the DMs on the underseahunter: The Best of Cocos Island 2005-2008 http://vimeo.com/27478869 Baitball - A killers day http://vimeo.com/13086726 enjoy!

great pics! look forward to seeing more. is that school of jacks taken off of dirty rock? looks like the vis improved a bit over the last few weeks. I was in cocos early july and we had some poor vis and unseasonably warm waters. still a great trip but definitely an off year for us. also, i've never seen so many octopus at cocos. they were everywhere!

yeah, we really scored weather-wise. couldnt have asked for better conditions. and those sharks just stayed all-day every-day. amazing creatures.

glad you enjoyed it. all credit for images and video goes to jim abernethy who shot and edited this as our trip video. jim runs a great trip and we were lucky to have calm glassy conditions with up to 14+ oceanics at a time. beautiful sharks that will hang out all day. great to see a couple of pregnant females too. cheers, lemon

video overview of the diving. produced and shot by jim abernethy. we had great diving on the trip having up to 14+ oceanics at a time in the water. great times! http://vimeo.com/24688044

lovely shots! looks like the color is off a bit though. i was in cocos over the summer and had a front seat view of a whale shark hovering in a cleaning station in a 45 degree vertical position getting cleaned. of course i didn't have my video camera with me at the time!! it was such an amazing sight....until one of the still photogs decided to charge right up to her and scare it off...arrggggg!

For some reason it seems like tiger sharks have become a regular occurrence at manuelita this year with multiple sitings on most of the trips this year so far. Will be heading back to cocos in 3 weeks for my second trip and really looking forward to it.

Gorgeous work. Would love to do this trip some day. HH's expertise with the camera really shows. A lot could have gone wrong with these shots in terms of exposure, etc. Thanks for posting. I really, really enjoyed this.

Kind of sad to part with the trust old gates. That baby has seen some great dives. It looks to have found a great new home though. Definitely strongly recommend Gates products to anyone looking for a housing. I never had any leaks or floods with that housing. When I buy my next housing, Gates will be my first choice!

Thanks everyone for the interest. The housing and Unit sold on ebay. Shipping costs were an estimate as I made the mistake of underestimating the cost in the past. For this sale, shipping was actually a bit higher than estimated as it was an international sale. Cheers!

BUMP - Final day on EBAY!

For sale: Gates HC9 Housing with Manual White balance control. Very good condition, never flooded. Approximately 1 year old. Housing is equipped with the incredible Fathom SWP25a port that allows for FULL zoom through and macro shooting. Pelican Case included. To buy new you would pay over $4500 plus tax. Will sell for $2000 + shipping costs. EBAY LINK alex.lemon(AT)gmail(DOT)com

I hear ya. I'm not sure you'd get such a noise free low-light with the canon h.264 though, do you? Believe me, i'm a huge canon fan. I own the 7d and am waiting on the next gen full-frame from canon - 5dmk3? I'm really excited about the possibilities of the fixed 2/3" Scarlet for underwater work though. I believe the reset time on the m-x sensor is like 5microsec and is about equaling film in terms of eliminating rolling shutter. then there's the 120 fps w/ 150fps burst rate. AF, etc. not using h.264, no line skipping, etc. and lets not forget the noise improvements from downsampling footage from 3k to 1080p. etc, etc. (realizing this is all a beaten horse, but i'm still very excited!) I love the VDSLRs as well, i guess i'm still a huge red fan though. of course considering that i've only ever shot underwater with a sony hc9, i think you can see how any of these cameras seem like quantum leaps up technology and performance wise!

But have you seen the sample footage of the new M-X sensor at 2000 ISO as shot by David Fincher with Leonardo Dicaprio that is here: http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=39998 The noise levels are sick! And you can't really call this vaporware as it is going out as a sensor upgrade to existing R1s quite soon. This is from the same sensor that will be in the Scarlet. I think this certainly blows away my 7D. I guess I'm still one of their zombie followers!

check out South Park's recent spoof, "Whale Whores".

Nice work. I liked the interactions between the shark. I'm also beginning to think that Shredder is on his/her way to becoming the second most photographed shark in the wild behind Emma (of tiger beach fame)! Great video!

Yeah that's about all I get out of my HC9 in a gates with the best optics available (SWP25).

Ahah! apologies, I believe you guys are right. I have never been able to get my HC9 in a gates to white-balace at depth and I have the SWP25 port. Would love it if I could though! Not to hijack the thread, but as an aside... My current white balance slate is an amphibico one like this one, it is a slightly tinted white color and it will never WB below 20-30 feet. Maybe slightly deeper with the red filter on. I wonder what gives. I doubt it's the slate coloring...but who knows? I always assumed it was the camera itself.

If i'm reading correctly, I think he said it also failed to manually WB in the Gates housing.

I think that you are just bumping up against the technical limitations of the camera that you are using. I dive and shoot with an HC9 and have never been able to reliably white balance (i don't use lights) below about 30 feet. I think that it needs a certain amount of ambient light to achieve a white balance. It's a problem. Personally, I hate color correction filters and am loathe to use those. I'm already shooting at the very limits of the cameras capabilities in terms of low-light, adding a filter is just like putting on sunglasses in the dark. I find it adds a lot of noise to the image by cutting further into the ambient light that hits the sensor. And it still doesn't look very natural. I find the filters make things overly red. Another option is to white balance shallow and take that to depth, but I find that doesn't work very well. After shooting with my HC9 for quite a while now, i've essentially made a large compromise. I don't use a filter and I don't white balance. Sure, it often looks overly cold, but at least there is less noise and it doesn't look overly warm with purple water and pink corals. I then try to fix it up as best as I can in post. you can see my videos here if curious: http://www.vimeo.com/5240335

yeah, pretty sloppily handled. getting everyone excited for a big announcement and then punting scarlet to next month probably wasn't the best way to do it. also one wonders why they're not posting more images and video from the camera they're getting ready to launch, epic-x? i mean pictures of the redmote circuit boards are kind of interesting but where's the video samples and the still samples? also, i'm nit-picking but...looking at their PDF style announcement (that they initially left one of the scarlet models off of) it just looks hasty and sloppy. considering the announcement was announced weeks in advance you'd think they might put a bit more effort into it. hopefully, they're just heavily focused on camera development and this fell through the cracks. hopefully, next month will go smoother. we'll see!

the anouncement for scarlet is....*drum roll*...the announcement will be Nov 30! lol... boy that sucked. i still want my scarlet though.

wow, very cool. I was starting to feel claustrophobic watching that! how many times did you get stung?? i hope this is not a preview of what our oceans will look like in 50 years if we continue wiping out all of our apex predators. http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0615-hance_jellyfish.html

i'm definitely interested. if a fixed model comes out around the previously announced $3750 price point it could be awesome for underwater use. the ability to shoot 120 fps, shoot in RAW, the reported 12.5 stops of dynamic range in the mysterium-x sensor, etc. it all sounds awesome to me! i'm not looking for any kind of "work ticket" or anything like that. i'm always on the lookout for a great camera though!