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Expedition Drenched
02 July 2022
We put on our SCUBA gear, attached ourselves to ropes, and let the Sylfia drag us through 9,000ft deep open ocean water in the middle of the night. And we’d do it again! Expedition Drenched goes open ocean blackwater diving!
We’ve been on the Sylfia and the open water for almost two weeks now, slowly making our way from mainland Australia to Lord Howe Island. The voyage so far has been fairly problem-free and the new crew is adapting well to a life at sea.
Night diving is something that the Expedition Drenched crew does pretty often. We love being underwater after dark to witness how the ocean changes when the sun goes away. This is when most of the creatures in the ocean start to move around looking for food.
As we sail towards our next stop on our way to Lord Howe Island, we thought we’d take advantage of the extremely deep water we were in and do a blackwater dive. We won’t lie – we were all a bit nervous before the dive. Who wouldn’t be nervous to be underwater in the pitch-black attached to a boat that’s drifting and pulling you through the current? But those nerves disappeared soon after we jumped into the soup of creatures that the Diel Vertical Migration delivered right to us.
When people think of large animal migrations, they usually think of geese flying south for the winter or wildebeests travelling over the Serengeti because we can easily see these migrations. But actually, the largest migration in the world happens twice a day in the deep oceans.
The term ‘diel vertical migration’ is easy to understand if you break down its parts. Diel means that it happens every day. Vertical refers to the direction of movement. And migration highlights the mass movement of animals. The average creature migrates 1,000m towards the surface when the sun goes down, then migrates 1,000m back to the depths at the end of the night. That’s a huge distance to travel since most creatures are quite small. It would be the equivalent of you having to run 10km to go get your dinner and then having to run 10km back home to go to bed.
The Diel Vertical Migration is such a large event that it causes turbulence in the ocean water. Migrating jellyfish can move water upwards through the water column and this movement carries nutrients across water boundaries to new places.
The daily migrations of marine creatures were first noticed by French naturalist Georges Cuvier in the early 1880s. While the exact reason for such a large movement of animals is still unclear, the best explanation to date is that they swim toward surface waters to feed at night while conditions will keep them hidden from predators. Some creatures may migrate to take advantage of the reduced exposure to ultraviolet radiation, while others use the nighttime currents to move to areas with more food.
The Diel Vertical Migration also plays a significant role in the carbon cycle. The creatures that feed at the surface during the night return to the depths for the daylight hours and they take their waste with them. This accelerates the rate at which carbon is transported to the sea floor and sequestered. With climate change still worsening, the conditions in the ocean are constantly changing. If conditions get too bad and the daily migration of these animals is disrupted, there could be huge implications for the environment.
Blackwater diving is exactly what it sounds like – diving in black water. It’s essentially a really special night dive. This type of diving is still relatively unknown to a lot of the SCUBA diving community but it is gaining popularity quite quickly. And for good reason, too. It’s an awesome experience.
There are three different types of blackwater dives: bonfire, near a reef, and open ocean (or off-shore). Each of these dives focuses on diving in dark water and experiencing the marine creatures that emerge at night, but each is unique and requires different things from a diver.
A bonfire dive is the easiest blackwater dive so it makes a good starting point to ease into this (sometimes scary) type of diving. It’s usually done in shallow water (10-18 meters) in an area with no current. Lights are placed on the ocean bottom pointing upwards (almost looking like a group of bonfires) and they attract all sorts of nocturnal animals.
A near reef blackwater dive is the most challenging type of blackwater dive, even though the name makes it sound pretty chill. These dives usually take place along a reef or wall where there is open ocean immediately adjacent. Lights that mimic moonlight are placed around 10-15 meters down in the water column and they attract life from the neighbouring reef or wall and the depths. A decent amount of diving experience is helpful to undertake this dive since the lack of visual references in the water often presents divers with buoyancy issues.
The last type of blackwater diving sounds terrifying but is going to give you the best experience – open ocean blackwater diving. To do this dive correctly, you should be in the open ocean over thousands of feet of water and in a slight current. Since those conditions could mean drifting away in open water at night, open ocean blackwater diving has to be a bit different. Each diver is connected to a drop line that is also connected to the boat. They can ascend and descend along the rope but as the boat is pulled through the current, the divers will be pulled along with it.
This is the type of dive that we’ve just done. For many of the crew, it was their first blackwater dive of any kind so nerves were a bit high, but so were the excitement levels. Plus, it was a perfect chance to take full advantage of the Sylfia’s brand new in-hull Lumitec Marine Lights. As we were on deck gearing up and going through our blackwater dive briefing, our awesome Lumitec lights were attracting all sorts of bizarre and other-worldly creatures up from the deep.
It’s hard to describe this dive to people who weren’t there. How can you properly describe seeing the most beautiful rainbows of colour in the pitch-dark night? The ocean creatures that drifted past our faces in the dark waters of the Pacific Ocean at 2:30 am absolutely blew our minds.
We saw an incredible variety of bioluminescent creatures that emit their own light, like Comb jellyfish. These jellies have genes that produce photoproteins, a combination of two chemicals involved in light production. When calcium is added to the molecule, light is born. Comb jellies also produce rainbow effects when the comb-like plates on their bodies break up due to water turbulence and diffract the surrounding light.
Really and truly, the only way to understand what we saw on this amazing open ocean blackwater dive is to check out the Expedition Drenched Season 3 Episode 4 video that’s live on our YouTube channel now. Make sure you check it out and throw us a like and subscribe. Also, drop a comment and let us know about the cool stuff you’ve seen on a blackwater dive!
Our next stop is Elizabeth Reef, roughly 175km north of Lord Howe Island. Elizabeth Reef and neighbouring Middleton Reef form the Lord Howe Rise, an underwater plateau. They’re both also part of a regulated marine park so it should be a stunning location for some seriously wicked dives.
One of the most exciting things about Elizabeth Reef is the high recorded number of Galapagos sharks. These sharks are only found around Lord Howe Island and Lord Howe Rise so they were already one of the draws of our expedition to the area. But the high number of Galapagos sharks at Elizabeth Reef may suggest that the reef acts as a nursery and that is a very exciting prospect for the shark-loving Sylfia crew.
Stay tuned to our YouTube channel and come explore this idyllic coral reef with us!
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