-bottomless, ocean.Next to you is a length of slightly frayed rope, with a 5lb weight at the end of it. You're tethered to it, by an unconvincing clip at the end of a ~10ft lead. The frayed rope is (you trust) secured to the boat ~40ft above you.
The boat has a parachute (submerged) attached to provide speed control. The parachute is necessary this night given the strong currents that would drag us into the abyss.
The ocean turns out to be a primordial soup.
Welcome to the Blackwater Dive. The next hour is yours: you, with a lamp, five comrades in arms who are comparably restrained, and mind-bending array of entities that you will randomly encounter that have come up from thousands of metres to feed on smaller primordial life-forms equally as alien as themselves.
If you find the dark, inexplicable parts of these videos hard to wrap your head around, have some sympathy for those who experienced it in the flesh/water/dark. The water may look unclear but in reality every small particle is another organism, mostly the unexplainable and almost all translucent - micro shrimp, jelly fish, tiny things with glow in the dark innards sometimes with an amazing internal fluorescent light show. Admittedly, it is sometimes difficult to pay attention to those tiny creatures in right in front of your eyes when out of nowhere larger, bizarre alien-like lifeforms appear out of nowhere to feed on those small unsuspecting creatures.
Vids courtesy of the GoPro we found when doing practice hikes in Canberra.
Click below for some pix - they should display here, but learning technology is not a holiday activity :/ Weird thing Small weird thing Particularly weird thing "Rainbow mustache" (non-scientific name) - qv video  |
| Photos courtesy Ryan, our dive's Accomplished Photographer |
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