Okay, that’s enough: no more Dennis the Dugong after this post (at least for now). The Portugese underwater filmer Joel Machado, who can be seen at work this photo, just sent me a link to his video of our little quest to find Dennis.
Abu Dabab – “the dining room” from Joel Machado on Vimeo.
You can see me swim by a few times and trying to get aquinted with a Remorra… at 04:21 I’m actually taking this picture (watch the flash). But have a look at the video because it’s simply beautiful!
Knowing there is something to fotograph but not being able to find it sort of frustrating, especially when underwater and being limited by an annoying but finite thing as an air supply.
Try imagining an area as large as a couple of football fields of underwater seagrass and an underwater visibility of about 20 meters and you’ll understand it’s not easy to find a specific living animal, even it has the size of about two humans.
The “thing” I am talking about is “Dennis”, the famous seacow (or Dugong, it’s one of the three members of the Manatee family) of the Abu Dabbab bay near Port Ghalib in the Marsa Alam region of Egypt.
Seeing these pictures you’ve probably guessed we found it but it took us two full-hour dives to actually spot it. Sure, we did come across plenty of huge and approacheable Turtles and a couple of large Stingrays but imagine being a the last stage of your dive (it’s that limited air supply) and spotting an enormous dustcloud underwater, the number one Dugong signature… but no Dennis to match it.
Turned out it was right above us and while we were getting highly frustrated not seeing it, he was just getting a breath of fresh air. Our paths finally crossed when we decided to go up and finish the dive while he was going down to continue vacuuming the seafloor.
We squeezed a few last minutes at our ample air supply… enjoy the shots!
Images taken with a Canon Eos 20D, 15mm f2.8 fisheye and an UK-Germany housing.
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