Feature Story Picturing Under the Sea Jeff is a local underwater photographer and cinematographer whose work has taken him on underwater adventures beneath the sea throughout Monterey Bay and to dive sites around the world.

by Jeff Wildermuth

The luxury ocean liner SS Andrea Doria has been sitting in its undersea graveyard for 51 years as the centerpiece of a fascinating and nightmarish environment. Entangled by piles of twisted metal, festoons of netting that the ship has snagged over the years from passing fishing trawlers, and other hazards, the 700-foot vessel lies below the reach of even the faintest rays of sunshine.

Last year I was part of a team that dove to the Andrea Doria in order to film it for a PBS special. Our assignment was to focus on the area of the impact where another ocean liner, the Stockholm, had rammed into its side sending it to the bottom, together with the 46 passengers who were lost in the accident.

The Andrea Doria continues to claim victims. Our lead researcher died on that dive. He was a consummate professional, who had more than 120 dives on the site, but in this business doing all you can do is sometimes not enough when something goes wrong.

The ship lies more than 250 feet beneath the surface. All of us who work under these kinds of conditions realize that death is always lurking by our elbows, waiting for an equipment malfunction, an unseen trap, or a moment of carelessness to pounce and claim another victim.

We accept the danger as an inescapable part of the job, or else we would quit and do something else.

Quitting my diving activities is not an option for me. I belong beneath the sea. Underwater imaging is my job; this life is my passion, as well as my profession.

Lured into the Depths

I grew up in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina and the sounds of the restless Atlantic Ocean form part of my earliest memories. The sea called to me and I began free diving and snorkeling when I was 13. I usually dove beside the jetties that protected the beaches near my home. The sandy bottom held little attraction for sea life or for me, but those jetties provided toeholds for simple environments of flora and fauna, especially many species of rockfish.

The colorful sponges raised within me the longing to descend deeper and remain longer. Within a year, I began SCUBA diving with borrowed equipment and little training. To find real marine life we had to motor 14 miles offshore and dive into the comparatively warm Gulf Stream. The most abundant areas of sea life grew upon and around wrecks of ships that lay on the sea-bottom a mere 40 to 130 feet down.

Following high school graduation, in order to convert hobby into career, I enlisted in the Navy, where I was able to pursue my diving.

After my discharge, I headed home and went to work with the Ripley’s Aquarium in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, very near to where I had been raised.

Ripley’s Aquarium had three immense tanks filled with up to 750,000 gallons of water that showcased sharks, rays, brilliantly colored Pacific fish, octopi, and other underwater life. My job, diving into these tanks to care for the marine life and conducting educational classes and tours, intensified my passion to work underwater.

I began to develop an understanding of marine ecosystems and animal behavior. I also scheduled staff hours, plus maintained and repaired equipment.

The best parts of the job were the activities that kept me in the water because I enjoyed working with the marine life. The experience of being with them in tanks, however, eventually wore on me. The underwater denizens were treated well, but seeing them in that place was not the same as diving into their natural habitat and viewing them from the vantage point of their own environment.

I had to figure out what my next step would be. I wanted to do something I enjoyed and was good at. I’ve always had an artistic inclination that I believe came from my maternal grandmother, who was an artist working in oils. She gave me lessons in oil painting and the elements of composition and style that developed my eye for art.

Diving into My Career

I decided to meld my love for the sea, my underwater skills, and my artistic bent by pursuing a career in underwater imaging. I had bought a camera for myself while in high school and had always played with photography. Most importantly, my Navy experience had included working with cameras.

I moved to Monterey, where I got a position with Backscatter U/W Video & Photo, at which I’m now the sales manager, and continue to dive two or three times a week. We teach principles of underwater photography and sell equipment to both novices and professionals.

Point Lobos State Reserve is one of my favorite local dive sites because it is a protected, no-take zone, where fishing or spear fishing is prohibited. As a result, you can find larger specimens of rockfish, as well as species of marine life that aren’t seen in other places.

When diving in other areas in the world we often use the services of an amazing operation, called the Nautilus Explorer, which is a 115-foot motor yacht designed to carry a 30-foot aluminum skiff on the back deck that can then be used to take us to almost any area of interest.

We charter the boat and use it as a base from which to conduct underwater seminars and workshops for as many as 20 clients at a time. The boat is harbored in Vancouver, Canada. We often dive in the Nautilus’s home waters up the Inside Passage as far as Juneau, Alaska.

The highly nutrient waters of the area produce versions of some of the same species of fish we find here in Monterey Bay, but up to twice as large — and found in ecosystems that are almost completely unaffected by man.

Sometimes sea life in the area has had so little contact with human beings that they haven’t learned fear.

On one of our recent Alaskan dives we encountered a group of Stellar sea lions that behaved in an aggressive fashion. Seven of them were always swarming around us in the water. They were as interested in learning about us as we were in learning about them, and lacking hands and fingers, would conduct their research by such activities as clamping their mouths around our arms, legs, and even heads.

The sea lions didn’t intend any harm, but even the female Stellar sea lions are larger than a sumo wrestler and one of the males can weigh over 2,000 pounds. Try to imagine having a friendly gorilla or Brahma bull checking to see what you have in your pockets and you can get some kind of an idea of what the experience was like.

In British Columbia in 2006, diving with Howard Hall, one of the world’s best underwater cinematographers, we documented marine life in high definition video. It was a great experience to work with him; I learned a lot about cameras and lighting. He was able to talk me through shots we were taking at 80 feet, because our rebreathers were fitted with wireless underwater communication devices.

In November 2002, we spent seven days on a Great White Shark filming expedition in Mexico in the waters around Guadalupe Island, a 22-hour boat ride from San Diego.

We filmed from three different cages and used chum to lure in the sharks. The females of this species are larger than the males, and we saw individuals that were as long as 18-feet. Great whites are effective killing machines; I once watched as one of these monsters bit a five-foot blue shark completely in half and then ravenously devoured both halves. They are called “apex predators” because they have no natural enemies, though occasionally a killer whale will make a meal out of one of them.

Last March we spent three weeks taking pictures around the Galapagos Islands that were made famous by Charles Darwin and his observations as scientist with the HMS Beagle.

The diversity of marine life is amazing! There were four of us diving with a crew of seven. We dove for five hours a day and came back with some magnificent shots of sea life ranging from huge hammerhead sharks, to giant schools of black-striped Salema.

One of the greatest expeditions I went on recently was to Truk (Chuuk) Lagoon in the South Pacific, not far from Australia. Truk is every diver’s magic place because the floor of the lagoon is strewn with the wreckage of more than 60 ships and 275 aircraft, all of them sent to the bottom in a single day of warfare, February 17, 1944.

Following the battle the tons of wreckage became home to a great variety of undersea life and now, six decades later, the wrecks have become great undersea islands swarming with living things of all descriptions.

We had a great time in Truk! Because of my Naval background I am particularly able to find my way around the inside of a ship, giving me an advantage when penetrating sunken vessels.

Into the Belly of a Beast

Undersea exploration is always changing because of progress in the technology. We’re currently using fully closed rebreather systems, called The Evolution, which allow us to go deeper and stay longer than was possible with an older generation of SCUBA equipment.

Besides the added functionality, rebreather systems produce no bubbles. The resulting silence provides an advantage when filming marine life. An additional payoff comes from the fact that the rebreather helps ones body’s internal core remain warm in cold environments since we are not always breathing fresh cold compressed air.

In spite of all the advantages, the emerging technology can add to the diver’s stress levels.

Besides the enormous increase in the cost of equipment and maintenance requirements, the elaborate technology requires significantly more training and monitoring than in the old days, when all you needed to do was make sure your tanks were full and your breathing apparatus was functioning.

Do not think that the new technology results in safer dives. It doesn’t. We can now dive deeper and remain longer, while holding the threat to our lives at a constant level. During deep descents, divers are entering an environment with multiple hazards. When you dive to 250 or 300 feet, pressures on your body become enormous.

The water is dark so you have to manage a lighting system, locate your subjects, take your pictures, and painstakingly go through decompression procedures — while always maintaining sufficient vigilance to prevent any equipment malfunction or other emergency from escalating into catastrophe.

The Andrea Doria was one of the most challenging dives I’ve conducted. The ship is sitting in sand 240 feet below sea level. However, in some of the interior sections of the ship we reached as deep as 260 feet.

Even with the most modern equipment a diver doesn’t have a lot of time on the bottom at that depth. The descent takes about five minutes, but the ascent takes more than an hour because of the vital decompression measures required. In other words, a two-hour dive might allow only 15-20 minutes on the bottom.

One way for human beings to survive at that depth is by using “tri-mix,” which combines helium, nitrogen, and oxygen.

Such underwater endeavors require divers to walk a thin line because at depths below 200 feet nitrogen becomes narcotic and oxygen becomes toxic. Too much oxygen causes a reaction leading to convulsions during which you spit out your mouthpiece and drown.

Nitrogen Narcosis is a terrible condition resulting in the diver’s loss of control of the thinking processes, so helium is added to the mixture to offset the effects of the nitrogen. Even when all three gases are properly managed, the diver still faces decompression obligations on the way back to the surface.

Increasing oxygen during the ascent can reduce time for decompression, thus decreasing the danger of bends, but crawling back up to the surface is still a time-consuming process.

From This Point

Besides my work at Backscatter, I freelance in the commercial and advertising fields, and am a regular contributor to SCUBA Diving Magazine. I’m also using my knowledge and experience to assist other cinematographers.

Someday I would like to open a gallery, creating a collaboration of work with various artists.

My life up to this point has been a grand adventure, in which I have been extraordinarily fortunate to have seen the things I’ve seen, and to have done the things I’ve done! Most importantly, I have been surrounded and supported by a dive community that has developed into a family of its own.

Freelance work is very competitive. The industry is growing. The technology is always advancing. Digital cameras are becoming more advanced by the day. Film is about to vanish. There’s going to be a changing of the guard eventually; I’m preparing myself to move into the upper echelon as part of the next generation of top professionals.

Diving is still wonderful! The sea continues to lure me with the siren song of its beauty. The experience of being in a weight-free environment, and sharing space with citizens of the deep is in fact another world.

At those times I’m way out of my element and yet, in a curious way, the experience is deeply peaceful. The frantic world with its clamor and demands seems far away. For more information contact Jeff at jeff@jeffwildermuth.com, or go to www.jeffwildermuth.com.