On my second day of working at East Coast Divers, my main job was helping get the shop ready for the big tax-free weekend sale that East Coast was running on Saturday and Sunday. Every year East Coast holds a big party with food and drinks, which help entice customers to buy the newest gear….
This week I got the chance to spend a couple days helping Sea Rovers President Nick Fazah out in his dive shop, East Coast Divers. East Coast is located in Brookline, MA and helps support much of the diving community coming out of the greater Boston area. My day was filled helping Nick out around…
Yesterday I got the chance to do some more underwater photography practice at Old Garden Beach in Rockport, MA. I brought my underwater camera with the macro lens on because the water quality in Massachusetts isn’t conducive to wide angles this time of year. We saw a lot of great macro subjects to practice on….
A few days ago I had the chance to Join Rick Simon once again on one of his commercial diving operations. He had been hired to help the United States Naval Research Lab with their operations (don’t worry this is all declassified information). The Navy is interested in being able to identify unexploded ordinances on…
Our final day in Catalina we did two more dives. For the first dive, I again focused on my wide angle photography, trying my best to capture the depth of the towering kelp forest. At the end of my dive, I also got the chance to play around with over-unders, using the big dome port…
My second day in Catalina was even more eventful than the first. We ended up doing 3 dives, with one of our main goals being to find the Giant Sea Bass that we knew were hanging around the area. Giant Sea Bass can grow to 500 pounds, and so provide a spectacular subject for wide…
While on a family trip to Catalina Island, I got the great chance to do some diving using the amazing gear I was gifted by the Sea Rovers Donors. Catalina Island is known for its spectacular kelp forests and rich marine life close to shore, so I was excited to take my first crack at…
Recently I had the great opportunity to go out with Joe and Lauren Romeiro for a second time. We headed out on their boat the Warfish with the goal of filming blue and mako sharks. This time we didn’t go so far, only a couple hours out to sea off the coast of Rhode Island….
A few days ago I had the great opportunity to go diving with Sea Rovers Ted Maney and Vin Malkoski. We headed out of the Cat Cove Marine Lab, with the goal of helping Ted with his benthic surveys at Halfway Rock. Halfway Rock is a small rocky outcropping a short boat trip out from…
Recently I had the amazing opportunity to join Joe and Lauren Romeiro on their boat the Warfish. They are both shark biologists and filmmakers, heavily involved in the filming and production of shark week in association with Discovery. We set out in the early morning from Rhode Island, travelling far out to sea in the…
For the last couple of days I had the great chance to collect quahogs with Vin Malkoski! Vin needed to collect 12 quahogs from 10 different locations around New Bedford Harbor in order to sample them for PCB contamination. While PCBs are no longer present in the water column, they can linger in sediments, so…
On Monday, Sea Rover Rick Simon took me out on his commercial diving boat Miss Wendy. Prior to this I had almost no knowledge of what commercial diving entailed so it was great to be exposed to this entirely different side of the diving world. While out on the boat, I helped on deck while…
On Sunday, Sea Rover Vin Malkoski took me down to Fort Wetherill State Park, RI to help me get acquainted with my great DUI drysuit. The water was a nippy 49 degrees so it was definitely needed. On our first dive we refreshed some basic skills made slightly harder with a drysuit such as taking…
Thursday was the first official day of my internship! I had the amazing opportunity to go out with Greg Skomal who heads the research team for the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy. We left early out of New Bedford and steamed all along the southern arm of the cape, eventually ending up on the eastern coast…
My name is Russell Laman and I’m going to be this summer’s intern for the Boston Sea Rovers! My internship was supposed to take place last summer, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this amazing opportunity was deferred by a year making me the longest serving intern in Sea Rovers history!  So… let’s get…
I started my summer working for Rick Simon. The first day I was there Rick and his crew took me out to inspect morings at the Noank shipyard. I found it very exciting at the time since it was a door opening for new opportunities. My second day with Shoreline I helped pull props off…
The next few days I worked at Undersea divers in Danvers with Shaun McGuire. The shop that donated my equipment to me. I found it pretty fun to stamp prices on products, line them up along the walls and go through inventory. I even got to help customers try on boots, hoods, and gloves. It…
Back in New England I went diving with Sea Rover Andy Martinez, who literally wrote the book on marine life of the North Atlantic! Andy is a great photographer and a a diving legend in New England. We went to a familiar site: Folly Cove on Cape Ann. As we waded into the water at…
Soon enough the competition rolled around and I handed in my best photos from the week. Because of the rules of the competition I had to compete in the advanced category with professional photographers. I ended up winning an honorable mention in wide angle traditional for one of my metridium and sea nettle shots. It…
The last spot I did was the metridium fields. Metridiums are huge white anemones that look really ethereal and peaceful. To get to them I would follow an old pipe line that was linked to the canning factories that are now the Backscatter shop. Becca told me that the metridiums are a little hard to…
Another spot that I dove at was middle reef. I only did one dive at middle reef for a few reasons. I had trouble finding really good subjects I wanted to shoot and because I kept getting lost in the kelp. I would follow my compass then look up and realize I was needed to…
I started out by going along the wall looking at all the scarlet psoluses, bat stars, and anemones. The wall is pretty easy to navigate just, follow the rock sand line down and back. The kelp along the wall was really impressive. It reached the surface then spread out along it. I thought it would…
After staying in Newfound I flew directly to Monterey, California, for the Monterey Shootout hosted by Backscatter. This shoutout is very similar to the one in Roatan except it’s only 36 hours. I was greeted at the airport by Becca Boring who is the operations manager at Backscatter, and an amazing photographer. Becca brought me…
On my last day in Newfoundland we headed up to the interestingly named town of Dildo, to dive on whale skeletons. The skeletons are remnants of old whaling factories. It was the only shore dive that I did in Newfoundland and it is one of the most unique dives. We walked into the water over…
After we had dove all the wrecks a few times we did a few reef dives. Before jumping into the water Rick told me to keep my eyes out for the Mick Jagger fish, aka the ocean pout. It’s so named because of its massive lips that looks like it had a bad plastic surgery…
While in Newfoundland I also got a chance to go out and catch cod. Rick brought us out into the harbor we put lines down as humpback whales beached around us, and after a couple minutes we were pulling up cod. In total we got 14. Back at the dock Rick filleted them for us…
By far the most eerie and most beautiful of the wrecks was the Rose Castle. It lies at about 100 FSW and totally adorned by soft corals. Because the Rose Castle is so deep icebergs don’t hit it and it’s mostly intact. You can even look inside the control room and see an old marconi…
The next wreck we did was the Saganaga. The Saganaga is known for having lots of lumpfish. Most people either think the lumpfish is really ugly or really cute. Personally I believe it depends on the lumpfish. But hey that’s just me. I’ve always wanted to see a lumpfish, and on one dive I…
The second wreck we did was the Lord Strathcona. An equally impressive wreck to the PLM, also about 400 ft long. The Lord Strathcona is littered with frilled anemones that glisten in the blue waters. It seems as if each is open feeding, as opposed to the PLM where not nearly as many were opened….
With my dry suit in hand I traveled up to Newfoundland, where I met up with Sea Rover Rick Stanley, who runs Ocean Quest Adventures. As soon as I arrived Rick made me feel right at home. The next morning we headed out on the dive boat to the Bell Island shipwrecks: Â The PLM-27, Saganaga,…
My next stop was with NOAA and Sea Rover Mark Dixon. We went out collecting oyster cages for a study looking at the impact of oyster beds on fish life. The fish are monitored through GoPros attached around the cages. When the cages were pulled up I was able to see some of the fish…
My next training was at East Coast Divers with Sea Rovers Nick Fazah, Kim Malkoski, and Zach Wahlen, doing my perfect buoyancy class. I learned about changes in buoyancy and how to control it through an entire dive. I had a blast practicing in the pool with free divers and other divers crowding the pool…
I spent the next few days with Vin Malkoski working on my dry suit training. I donned my DUI drysuit donated by Faith Ortins, and jumped into the green waters of the New Bedford test pool with Vin. Once we nailed down my weight system, we practiced buoyancy control and flipping around if I ever…
My last day the the New England Aquarium was spent working with the rescued sea turtles at the rehab center in Quincy. A discrete industrial building, that looks nothing like it would house animals, is filled with quarantined animals, the sharks and rays that had been removed days before and the rescued turtles. When I…
I spent my next day working with the team from marine mammals, who care for and train the harbor seals and fur seals. I first worked in the kitchen divvying up fish for each of the fur seals. Then the team and I headed over to the harbor seals to do training with them and…
I spent my next day working with Charlie Innis the director of animal health for the entire aquarium. Right when I arrived at the aquarium I headed up to the top of the Giant Ocean Tank (GOT) where a team of divers were removing the bonnet heads sharks to be sent to the rehab center…
The next department I worked in was the cold water marine department, which houses marine life from Eastport ME, the West Coast, and of course the octopuses. My morning started by helping clean sand for tanks for incoming fish and invertebrates from a recent collecting trip to Eastport. When I wasn’t washing sand I would…
The next day at the aquarium I worked with the penguins. The New England Aquarium has three species; african, rockhopper and little blue. Each is very different and has distinct personalities. I worked first with the little blues, the smallest species of penguin. They were molting their feathers so I cleaned up the feathers…
I arrived at the New England Aquarium bright and early to meet Dan Dolan, friend of the Sea Rovers and long time aquarium volunteer and diver in the GOT (Giant Ocean Tank). Once I met Dan he brought me up to the dive locker and kitchen where I dropped off my stuff and got to…
My last day at the National Aquarium was spent looking around at the exhibits that I didn’t get to see the rest of the week. I couldn’t dive because I was flying home later that afternoon. I looked around at the Rainforest and Australian galleries and their complex tanks. The diversity of life at the…
On my fourth day at the Aquarium we went to the Animal Care and Rescue Center (ACRC). There Holly and her team did training in one of the pools with divers figuring out best methods to save an unconscious diver and help if need be. Holly’s team of Josh, Jackie and Taylor Grace all helped…
This morning Simon the stingray was overdue for a spine clipping. In the morning I worked with Katie, Emily, Jennie Janson, the assistant curator of Blue Wonders and a diver, and Josh Foronda one of Holly’s dive team. Katie and Jennie went down to catch Simon while Josh tended the divers (made sure nothing happened…
My morning started by getting food ready for the aquarium’s many animals. I cut up a crab, and stuffed squid and bait fish with vitamin pills for the sharks and rays in Black Tip Reef. I worked with Emily Anderson and Katie Diciccio, divers and aquarists who help run the Atlantic Coral Reef and Black…
After my short flight to Baltimore I met Holly Bourbon. Holly is the DSO (dive safety officer) of the National Aquarium, and an associate Sea Rover. Holly runs the entire dive program at the National Aquarium, not an easy job managing people who are diving with sometimes potentially dangerous animals, in precarious places, and you…
I spent the day with Vin Malkoski working with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries. Our goal was to find a spot that would be a good site for an artificial reef. An artificial reef is a bunch of large concrete that is molded into certain shapes that marine life can grow on, live in…
Finally the week ended and we got to the competition, the part everyone was waiting for. There are lots of prizes for a multitude of categories including wide angle and macro, both traditional and unrestricted (without and with editing), a fluorescent category, and sharks category, and of course video. I only entered the wide angle…
My last dive in Roatan was with Cristian Dimitrius, a filmmaker for National Geographic and BBC who filmed Wild Brazil, he has presented at the Sea Rovers clinic in the past. He came part way through the week from shooting on assignment. I went to his classroom presentation about visual storytelling where he showed us…
Towards the end of the week I decided to try out a Pegasus Thruster, a small scooter that attaches to the back of the tank and you control with the push of button. I was a little anxious to try it out because it was hard to control at first and I would end up…
After getting sick so much on the boat dives I decided to do shore diving through the rest of the week. The shore diving was just as amazing as the reefs we went to on the boat, and I had more time to spend with the marine life without worrying about getting back to the…
To complete my deep dive training I was helped by the dive shop instructor at Coco View. One morning we went out on a shore dive snorkeled out past the Prince Albert and dropped down to 70 fsw, swam along Newman’s wall down to the the edge of the wall which was exactly 103 fsw….