DIVE-IN:                       
The CoastX Blog

Every time I dive or run my ROVs from local New England shores, passers-by seem to ask one question without fail: “What do you see under there?” Or, more specifically here in Southern Maine, “So, whut d’ya see undah theyah?” Watching a lone diver trudge down the beach, the human imagination naturally races to fill in a picture of what might lurk in the dark depths beyond the shimmering waves. Are there sharks? Treasure? Why would anyone go plunging into our freezing-cold, often murky harbors to take pictures? Their looks are especially concerned in the winter, or at night, or when I’m hiding from the summer sun under a sheet, squinting into a control box with a long cable leading into the sea. This blog series of mini photoessays will share some of the things that I have witnessed “undah theyah.” Hopefully, these vignettes of ocean exploration will provide a glimpse into the CoastX experience.

My primary goal as a cofounder of CoastX is to introduce students to the amazing places that I visit underwater—to connect them with the incredible, hidden, and all-too-often inaccessible aquatic ecosystems here in their own backyards. These places are vitally important and critically threatened. As such, we cannot allow them to fall out of sight and out of mind. Oceanographer Jacques Cousteau put it best: “People protect what they love.” To play, to learn, to explore, and to make a living on the sea is to become a steward of it. My passion for the ocean (and ultimately my career as an oceanographic engineer) began when I was a child, and it is my goal to foster this love of the sea in all CoastX students through real hands-on projects, exploration, and adventure. Enough about the philosophy of it, though. This series is about sharing what I see when I plunge my face or homemade electronics into 40-degree salt water, and what you might see on the ROV screen from a CoastX boat.

As the ache of shouldering heavy gear gives way to buoyant weightlessness, and the clamping pain of cold water rushing into my hood fades to a dull, ignorable numbness, I am surrounded by striking, unearthly colors. The intense emerald green gradients of our nutrient-rich water, teeming with phytoplankton, glow in brilliant complementary contrast to the vibrant magentas of encrusting coralline algae on the granite. Pictured below, a local rock reef teems with life. Curious cunner fish circle like helicopters over a bustling city. Northern sea stars stretch their arms across the rocks in search of mollusks to consume. Tubularian hydroids bloom like swaying undersea flowers. Green urchins graze, blue mussels open up to filter feed, and barnacles rake the water to catch copepods with their fan-like legs. Sponges and bryozoans engage in a slow-motion microscopic battle over territory. And I hover there with my camera, trying not to miss a thing.