In April 2019 I joined a special six-day live-aboard expedition out of Port Lincoln, hosted by Andrew Fox. After a really enjoyable Australian Sea Lion dive at Hopkins Island we motored further south aboard Calypso to North Neptune Island.This was “Big Girl Season” and certainly some of the Great Whites I was to see were massive.
Both Surface and Bottom Cage diving were available. I did four Surface Cage dives on this trip, but the real shark action was to be seen in the Bottom Cage. As on my previous trip here, trevallies quickly formed “a curtain” around the shark cage obscuring Great White sightings. I got glimpses of Great Whites through “gaps in the curtain” but this was problematical photography. If I had set my strobes to TTL, the exposure would have automatically been governed by the trevallies which took up so much of the foreground, not the Great White somewhere behind. I felt my best hope of good shots lay in leaving my strobes on a pre-determined manual setting. The “gaps in the curtain” would be very brief so I did not think that I would have time to adjust the settings if I saw a Great White. I just needed to be lucky in guessing the appropriate setting. If I got it right, the pesky trevallies would be overexposed but the Great White would be correctly exposed.
As luck would have it, the trevallies parted on my second Bottom Cage dive at North Neptune and I was very pleased with the resulting shot of a Great White. Unfortunately, the weather turned nasty on the second day at North Neptune Island and no diving was possible. The next day we travelled to South Neptune Island but after a disappointing Bottom Cage dive, we headed back to North Neptune. There was time for one Bottom Cage dive and a Great White came close to the cage, but I wasn’t so lucky at second guessing the appropriate manual setting for my strobes, either under or over exposing the shark as “the curtain” momentarily parted. Maybe I should have shot TTL. The following day was our last at North Neptune with two more Bottom Cage dives, the first of which gave me a first! My first photo with two Great Whites in it.