2023 May
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This was a fantastic Big Fish Expeditions trip with hundreds of banded houndsharks and red stingrays, and lots of other species including Japanese horn sharks but ‘two firsts’ for me were my trip highlights, Japanese Angelsharks and Cormorants. 

I have wasted a lot of time looking for Angelsharks. In March 2017 I dedicated an entire Gran Canaria trip to getting shots of them and the results were poor. Closer to home I’ve frequently looked for them on the south side of Looking Glass Island, part of the Broughton Island Group in NSW, but always without success. But now in Chiba, southeast of Tokyo, I was in luck. There were plenty of Japanese Angelsharks to be found there with Kan Shiota, owner of BOMMIE Dive Centre, always happy to point them out to our BFE group. 

Cormorants are known for their underwater hunting abilities. They are skilled divers and swimmers, primarily hunting underwater for fish, as they use their webbed feet to propel themselves through the water to depths as deep as 45 metres. Their long, flexible necks allow them to reach and catch fish, and their hooked bills are well-suited for grasping slippery prey. However, I always failed to see them in time to get a decent shot, or I had the wrong lens. There was only one exception though, I did manage to get a decent shot of one in Simons Town harbour in South Africa in June 2015. But that was it. Until Chiba 2023. Kan Shiota was conducting a shark feed and a cormorant saw this as an opportunity to grab Ken’s bait, Chicken Grunt. However, the Cormorant had a rival, a Takifugu Pufferfish which seized a Chicken Grunt. Soon the Cormorant was circling the Pufferfish trying to grab the Chicken Grunt while I happily snapped away.