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 angle photography among the kelp forest. On all 3 dives we managed to find them and capture stunning images along the way.
Hello all! My name is Sofia Grabiel Butler, and I am incredibly excited and grateful to be the 2025 Boston Sea Rovers Intern! I’ll be posting on this blog to record my experiences and the people I meet this summer, but my hope is that it is also a window into what being the BSR Intern…
Fred Dion is one heck of an entrepreneur; he keeps a tight store, staffed by only a few people but certainly very successful. At his shop, Underwater Photo-Tech, not only did he explain to me how cameras and strobes work underwater and how they differ from land, he gave me invaluable pointers on how to…
My next location was Fairhaven Harbor; here I was on Eric and Lori Takakjian’s boat the Quest. The Quest was being used by the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries to support a Focus II tow vehicle for using multi-beam sonar. The two days were spent putting everything onto the boat and securing it to the…
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…
I went to visit Mike and Fred at Backscatter in New Hampshire. They showed me how to set up the camera systems used by the Sea Rovers Intern. There is a GoPro system and a still camera set up for me to use during my summer as the intern. Fred also showed me how to…
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…