Hundreds, maybe even thousands of starlings moving as one at dusk. Garretstown, Old Head of Kinsale.

It is unusual to have a ‘new’ shipwreck discovered in sport diving depths, especially in an area where there is plenty of good diving and lots of active divers. It is even more exciting when the location is in your ‘home patch’ -– in my case, waters that I have dived regularly for many years. Over these years, stories of undiscovered wrecks have come and gone – more among the deep, technical diving community than sport divers. The assumption has always been that these ‘shallower’ waters have been well explored and have no more surprises and any new wrecks will too deep for most divers.
Great credit is due to the team of five local divers who persisted in their search for this elusive World War I shipwreck, that of a mine-laying U-boat, UC-42, lost in 1917. See the news report here. Those of us who will get to explore this wonderful time capsule are grateful for the opportunity to visit the wreck and I am certain that any diver who does will accord it the respect those lost on it deserve.
My thanks to Graham and Ann Ferguson of Oceanaddicts. View a Gallery of images from an initial dive here.

Spring has brought some glorious equinoctial light, with Daylight Saving Time just coming in this weekend. I spent a wonderful weekend on the Sheeps Head peninsula in West Cork and the dawn and dusk light was just magical. This is Glanlough at Dusk, a tiny lake on the northern (Dunmanus Bay) side of the peninsula.

Leica M9, 28mm Elmarit lens, tripod.

Sometimes a unique moment just happens. On a shallow reef, at a dive site called Crystal Tiger, the late afternoon dive promised just as much shark activity as earlier in the day. With the change in tide, we had clear blue water and lots of Caribbean reef sharks, lemon sharks, and the occasional cautious approach from the king of the heap – the Tiger shark.

For this trip, I had mounted a small compact camera (in an underwater housing) on top of my main camera rig, with the view to taking some video clips–just for storytelling. By chance, I had started to record just a few moments before a large tiger shark showed up and was curious enough to come close. And close it came, as you will see from the video clip, and its curiosity reached the point where it wanted to have a feel of the lighting arms on my housing. The instant just before that moment gave me a beautiful composition of this magnificent creature, in the afternoon light, and it is an enduring moment which I treasure.

THAT_TigerShark_moment from John Collins on Vimeo.

Nikon D2Xs rig with Canon G12 on top
JC in action: Photo by Jim Abernethy

View more images of Sharks of the Bahama Banks here.