I have a lot of work ahead of me in the coming months. I have a preview of the book that you can see here. This is the way that I perceive the book but I am not sure that it will end up like this. Schiffer Publishing Ltd. editor’s will do the layout.

This book has been the culmination of forty years of scuba diving and photographing in the Atlantic waters off my home state of New Jersey. I have seen and photographed some amazing things. One of the areas that I love the most is the surface and mid-water. This is where I find my favorite subjects – jellyfish and plankton. I have spent entire dives hanging on the anchor line at fifteen or twenty feet and loving every second of it. When I was shooting film and using a Nikonos camera, it was easier to capture some of the really small things like the one-half-inch long naked sea butterfly since the Nikonos camera had macro capability with a wired framer. I just had to get the subject between the uprights of the framer and take the photo. Although this is much more difficult with a housed digital SLR, I am thoroughly enjoying the challenge.

The book is full of some of my crazy dive stories like when my wife, Veronica and I were snorkeling around the 2M buoy off Manasquan Inlet. We observed numerous fish and an ocean sunfish circling the buoy. Other boaters stopped to ask if we were in trouble. None had thought that the view below the surface was so wonderful. On another occasion, I was swimming over the deck of the USS Algol more than eighteen miles off shore. The deck was covered with baby scallops and I moved over them, many clasped their shells together and squirted up into the water column.

I have a great photograph of two baby Forbes’ sea stars in a mussel shell with two arms of a much larger Forbes’ sea star above them. I like to think that the large sea star is the mother telling it’s two babies that they can’t go out and play until they finish their meal and clean up the shell that they are in.

One of my favorite dives was on the two locomotives off Long Branch, New Jersey. On a few occasions during my diving career, I have been completed speechless when viewing something that takes my breath away. The locomotives did this for me. They sat upright on the bottom about fifteen feet apart and were covered with sea anemones. The sight was one of unbelievable beauty. Schools of black sea bass swam around and under the locomotives. I stood looking at them for nearly ten minutes before I started to photograph.

This is a one-of-a-kind book. Very few people have spent as much time as I have photographing the New Jersey marine community. You will see fish, invertebrates, mollusks, crustaceans, sharks, turtles, seahorses, artificial reefs and shipwrecks. I hope that many of you will enjoy having the book as I enjoyed creating it.

I am collecting names, email addresses and/or mailing addresses for anyone that might have an interest in purchasing the book. There is no obligation to buy. It is only to notify you when the book is available. The contact information will go no farther than from me to the publisher and will not be used for any other reason. You can sign up at the contact form here.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

Click on the link at the bottom of the page to go to a page that shows the book in a one or two page format. Before you click, look at the short explanation about the page controls.

If you hold your mouse over the control, a text box will describe the operation of the tool. There are only a few, so here they are:

Click on the left pointing arrow to go to the previous page

Click on the right facing arrow to go to the next page

Show thumbnails of the pages. Once available, click on any page to go there.

Show the book full screen, which is the best mode to see it.

Zoom in and out from double page mode to single page mode.

Go the first page (cover) of the book.

Go to the previous page.

Go to the next page.

Go to the last page (back cover).

I have not tried this book viewing program with more than a few people at a time. If you have problems with it, please let me know. Please be patient and let each page load. I would appreciate any feedback that you might have.  Enjoy! Click on the photo below to go to the book or click here.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

We departed Manasquan Inlet and I steered a course for the Sea Girt Artificial Reef off Sea Girt, New Jersey. I am on a summer long self-imposed assignment to shoot wide angle photos of artificial reef sites that I do not have in digital format. My two destinations today were the Spartan Tug and the Travis Tug. As usual, we were at the mercy of the people who were out before us. I had some contingency sites but these were two that I wanted to do.

There was a swell on the ocean but it wasn’t too uncomfortable. We had about a 3 1/2 mile trip to the Sea Girt Reef and our first stop, the Spartan. The Spartan is an 85’ long canal tugboat. It was sunk on Friday, January 31, 1986. It lies upright in 70’ of water. It was sponsored by the Spentonbush Red Star Company (Hess Oil). I originally dove the Spartan in the summer of 1986 and there was minimal growth on the tug. I dove it again a year later and it was overgrown with frilled anemones, tubularian hydroids, blue mussels and a cornucopia of marine invertebrates and fish. I really like the Spartan but I don’t get back to it very often. It isn’t a big site and experienced divers would probably lose interest in the dive after a trip around and through the tug. It is a great dive site for new divers because it looks like a ship and it is easy to navigate without getting lost.

I haven’t been on the Spartan in at least ten years or more and I was wondering how it had changed. The tug has been on the bottom for twenty-three years. It took us two tries to hook in and Beth and I started getting ready to go in. The ocean was pretty flat except for the swells. I was in the cabin putting my camera together when Veronica yelled “Ocean Sunfish”. When we originally purchased our current boat, a 33’ Wellcraft Sportbridge, I chose it because of its flybridge. I wanted to be able to find ocean sunfish and turtles when we were traveling to and from dive sites. We have had the boat for about six years and I have yet to see an ocean sunfish while on the boat. I have seen a few turtles but ocean sunfish, Mola mola, have eluded me. I have been in the water a few times with them and have photos on film but nothing on digital. When I got into the cockpit, Veronica yelled that the ocean sunfish had just breeched about twenty feet from the boat. I got there in time to see a big disturbed area of water when the breech took place. We were all in the cockpit now looking for the ocean sunfish and we saw a fin swimming away from the boat. It is easy to mistake an ocean sunfish dorsal fin for one belonging to a shark and I have jumped into the water thinking that I was going to photograph an ocean sunfish only to be surprised that it was a shark. Fortunately, the shark wants less to do with me than I do with it and I haven’t gotten close enough to a shark on the surface to get a photo. I for one was ecstatic that Veronica got to see the sunfish breech. She can’t dive anymore because she has multiple sclerosis. She only gets to see the underwater world through my photographs. She deserved that wonderful experience. I asked Veronica what the breech looked like and how far out of the water did the sunfish jump. She says it reminded her of when I told her about a baby humpback whale that I had seen breech. They kind of try to get out of the water but they only end up getting out of the water a little bit and then flopping on their side. She said the sunfish got its whole body about a foot out of the water but the diving judges would not have scored it well. What a way to start the day!

Beth and I started down the anchor line and I wasn’t sure what to expect. With the ocean swells, the bottom usually gets stirred up and visibility isn’t very good. When we reached the deck of the tug, the visibility was about fifteen feet. I thought that I could work with that and went ahead and set up my camera and twin Ikelite DS-125 strobes. I started taking photos of the bow and moved my way back to the pilot house. I was reading on Rich Galiano’s web site www.njscuba.net that the pilot house on the Spartan could be raised and lowered so that the tug could get under low bridges. It was in its lowered position when it was sent to the bottom. Beth had her underwater camera and was taking photos on the top of the deck house and I moved towards the stern of the Spartan. I noticed that there was deterioration to the metal walls on the deck house. It is understandable after all this time underwater. As I headed across the top of the deck house towards the stern, I found the weight for our marker buoy near the rear end of the deck house. I guess that we were right on with the buoy. I moved the weight off the tug into the sand so that it wouldn’t get in the way when we were retrieving our anchor.

I swam around the stern and took some photos of it before moving forward and photographing the deck house. I love to look through doorways on the deck house and see the green water in another doorway or porthole opening on the opposite side of the ship. When I capture it correctly, it is a favorite shot of Veronica’s.

I went around the tug three times and took nearly 300 images. That still boggles my mind. That’s a little more than eight rolls of film taken on a single dive. How great is that! Before I knew it it was time to head to the surface. I looked at my dive computer and noted a bottom temperature of 57° F. A little chilly but not so bad in my DUI drysuit. Beth and I moved our wreck anchor so that it would come out easily and made our way up the anchor line to the surface. It was an enjoyable dive and another addition to my wide angle summer. It was now about 2:30 pm and I hoped to add the Travis Tug to my wide angle collection.

The trip to the Travis Tug was great. The first thing that we had to do was find Veronica’s boat shoes that had fallen off the foredeck when a huge boat wake caused them to slide overboard. They are orange in color and float. I thought our chances of finding them were less than zero. Wes thought that he had a good handle on the direction that they floated in and we started our search. Wasn’t I surprised when Wes yelled, “there they are” and sure enough, the two boat shoes were floating about ten feet apart. Wonder of wonders! To add to our good fortune, the flat sea allowed us to see schools of moss bunker on the surface being herded around by bluefish  (we think). The surface water boiled as the moss bunkers where herded together and the larger fish raced through the school scooping up dinner.  We even saw seagulls diving into the school grabbing a meal. What a sight!

We arrived at the Travis Tug and there was a boat anchored near but not right on it. We tried to hook in three times and each time, the hook would grab and then pop loose. Finally on the fourth try we were in. Beth and I got suited up and headed for the bottom. When we arrived, we saw that we were not hooked into the tug but into some debris that may belong to the horseshoe wreck reef site that is nearby. The wreckage that we were on was really small and the visibility was not very good. We ended up making a short dive and calling it a day. The Travis Tug will have to wait until another day.

The trip back to the dock was beautiful. Being at sea, we had cool weather with low humidity. We knew that at home it wasn’t like that. We arrived at the dock at around 6:00 pm, unloaded and washed down our trusty boat and headed for home. It was the end of another great day on the ocean. When Veronica and I woke up on Sunday , we found overcast skies and a descent wind blowing. We looked at each other and smiled, knowing that we had made the right choice as to our dive day.

To see more photos from the Spartan, visit my Photo Gallery or click here.

© 2009, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.