Okay, the book has undergone some changes since my first concept. The publisher did an amazing job of laying the book out. The first change that was presented to me was the cover. Although the changes were minor, they looked great. So, here it is – you decide:

I love the way that they designed this. I like the inset photo of Gerry Niel of Mint Hill, North Carolina shooting a photograph on the shipwreck, Lana Carol – a scallop boat that sank in a Thanksgiving storm and the purple jellyfish on the spine.

Before I go further, I should explain that the book is going to be hard cover, 11” x 8 1/2”, with 166 pages and 235 color photographs. Schiffer Publishing has been a joy to work with. Everyone there has been incredible.

Some of you may have looked at my original design and a lot of you voted for the front cover. The main image used was chosen from your votes. I had pictured a North American lobster for the back cover but the Schiffer designers had another idea and I liked it better than mine. The lobster image is the last image on the inside of the book. The new back cover is:

The image of the lined anemones and blue mussels is pretty cool and it enhances the “Garden State” theme. Now, you can buy the book anywhere but if you want a signed copy, you will have to attend a book signing (none are planned yet but there will be) or purchase the book from my site when it is available. If you would like to be notified when the book is available, please fill out the contact info form below. This information will only be used to notify you of book availability and nothing else.

© 2012, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

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 left the inlet and decided to give a try for the Mohawk shipwreck. It is about a 7 1.2 mile run from Manasquan Inlet. She was a passenger liner that was sunk in a collision with the freighter Talisman in 1935. She doesn’t resemble a ship anymore. The Navy used over 8 tons of dynamite to demolish her. She was wire dragged to maintain a depth of 50’ over the wreck to keep her from being a hindrance to navigation.

When we arrived at the site, I was surprised to only find one fishing boat on the wreck. Lately, it has been tough finding a spot as the wreck fishermen are loving the action on the reefs and wrecks. The Mohawk is large so it is not difficult for two boats (or more) to be on the site at the same time. As I approached the wreck, I saw our friends, Paul and Ruth Hepler, who run the Venture III, a commercial SCUBA diving charter boat approaching.

In what is an unusual happening for me, I told my friends to drop the marker buoy and then a minute later, told them to drop the hook. We use a grapple type hook to hook into artificial reefs and shipwrecks. Ours is light weight and made of stainless steel. We have more than ten feet of chain at the anchor to help keep it on the bottom when we are dragging to hook in.

There was about 75 feet between our boat and the fishing boat. Paul brought the Venture III in right between us and dropped his hook. Paul uses a different approach. He drops a Danforth anchor in the sand and then drifts over the wreck and drops his wreck anchor straight down. One of his divers will go in and wrap the anchor line around a piece of wreckage to hold it in place. Paul’s divers have a shorter swim to reach the bottom than we do.

Beth was bringing her underwater camera for the first time today. She uses a point and shoot Nikon camera in an Ikelite housing. Her husband, Wes, bought her an Ikelite strobe for Christmas. Last year, she tried using the flash built into the camera but it did not give out enough light and part of the flash was cut off by the housing. The new flash uses a sensor to sense the light from the on-camera flash and then it fires the external flash. I am anxious to see her results.

And here is one of Beth’s photos from our dive. I think that it’s great.

I got my rig ready. Today, I used a Nikon D300 in a Subal housing with a Tokina 10-17mm fisheye zoom lens, a Zen 100mm (4”) port and twin Ikelite DS-125 strobes. One of the most difficult things with wide angle photography in New Jersey is lack of light at the bottom. Visibility or lack of it is also and issue that makes wide angle photography difficult.

Paul’s divers got into the water first and Beth and I headed for the bottom a few minutes later. The visibility in the first 40’ of water column was beautiful. I was hoping that I would see something to shoot in the water column but that was not to be. I kept going down. The first change that I noticed was the temperature. The surface temperature was around 68°. At the bottom it was a refreshing (????) 52°. Visibility on the bottom was around 15’. This was enough for me to try and work some magic.

First thing that I do on the bottom is turn on my strobes and camera, position the strobes where I feel that they belong and then take a meter reading of the available light. My secret to shooting wide angle photos in New Jersey is to try and match the output of my strobes to the available light. I let the light do most of the work and use the strobes to provide color to the photos. This is much easier with a digital camera than it was with film. When I shot film, I would pick a film speed (ISO) before the dive and I would be stuck with that speed. I could push it one or two speeds but with digital, I can decide on the bottom which ISO to use and I can even change that between shots.

I took a meter reading and decided on an ISO of 640. I used a lens opening of f11 and a shutter speed that ended up varying between 1/6th and 1/15th of a second. My strobes were on half power. I started off taking shots of some of the wreckage and was enjoying myself when I saw some movement out of the corner of my eye.

It was some of the divers from the Venture III. I later found out that they were from Lakeland Divers in East Hanover, New Jersey. I spent a few minutes taking photos of the divers as they swam by. When I am diving in New Jersey, I don’t often get a chance to shoot divers other than my buddy, Beth. Don’t get me wrong, she makes a great model (even though she doesn’t always realize that she’s doing it).

After the divers headed up their anchor line, I swam around a little and I found a plaque. I had seen this plaque before and I was amazed that I was at the same spot again. The Mohawk is pretty large and yet here I was. The plaque is a dedication to Thomas A. Butler, Sr. who died on October 6, 1992. The saying on the plaque read, “Here stays a man who loved the sea.” What a great tribute to someone who loved the sea. My wife, Veronica, has a tugboat on the Axel Carlson dedicated to her – the Veronica M. It is where we both plan to spend our eternity.

I also found a few abandoned commercial lobster traps. I am sure that they were not abandoned. They were lost somehow. A lobster fisherman would never abandon his gear. They do become traps for fish and lobster on the bottom. When divers find these derelict traps, most check to see if fish or lobster can get trapped in them and if they can, the divers will usually open them up to keep this from happening. Before long, these traps become havens for marine life.

Beth and I finished our first dive and headed for the surface for our 1-1/2 hour surface interval. It is a standard practice on our boat. We talked during the surface interval. I remembered seeing a lobster near our marker buoy on the first dive and since neither Beth nor I had a bag to put the lobster into, I didn’t try and catch it. I thought that I should try on the second dive. I was telling that to Veronica, Wes and Beth and Veronica started to laugh. I asked what was funny and she said, “did you forget that you just swam over by Paul’s boat and pulled up our marker buoy to keep it from getting stuck in his ladder?” Well, we all had a good laugh on Herb about that one.

Again, Paul’s divers were in the water before we were. When Beth and I reached the bottom, they were just about done with their dives and I didn’t see any of them on my dive. The visibility had probably dropped in half from the first dive. Lower visibility makes wide angle photography that much harder. I tried to work as close as I could to my subjects and hope for the best. Another thing that I rely heavily on when taking pictures is the histogram on my camera. It tells me if I am getting a correct exposure or if I am under or over exposing. If you want to learn more about histograms, you can get info in my digital photography section of my web site here.

The second dive was over before we knew it and Beth and I moved our wreck anchor to a spot where it would come out easily. We got back on board, removed all our gear, recorder our logs, put cameras away and pulled our anchor. We relaxed and were soon zipping across the Atlantic waters back to our dock. It was a great day out on the ocean and we are hoping that Monday will bring more of the same.

If you would like to see more of my Mohawk photos, click here or visit my Photo Gallery, click on Shipwrecks – New Jersey and click on the Mohawk link.

© 2010, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

For non-divers, a normal New Jersey dive means grappling or tying into a dive site and following the anchor line to the bottom and returning the same way. It is not possible to do this at this site because in 2004, the locomotives were “arrested”. In early September 2004, a federal judge ordered that the locomotives were to be protected. This was to follow with a federal marshal making a dive on the site and placing a laminated notice on one of the locomotives stating that tampering with or poaching is illegal. The reason behind this was to keep SCUBA divers from stripping any artifacts off the locomotives before they could be raised and restored. Two groups of amateur historical and diving enthusiast groups obtained the order and they are hoping to raise and restore the locomotives. Personally, I don’t think that this is ever going to happen but I am not against their obtaining the protection from the federal court. I think that it will be too costly to undertake such a raising and restoration. On the other hand, I did hear today that there might be something in the works to raise the locomotives. I wish them luck but I would personally like to see them stay where they are. It is believed that these locomotives were built in the 1850’s. There isn’t much data about locomotives from that era so they are an interesting historical find. The locomotives have a 2-2-2 (oOo little wheel-big wheel-little wheel) wheel layout which was rare in the United States. It was a more common layout in Europe. You can read more about the locomotives as well as see information about a Discovery Channel show at Rich Galiano’s njscuba.net web site. The page for the locomotives can be found here.

Having the locomotives protected does not prohibit SCUBA divers from diving the site. What it does prohibit is grappling into the site (a typical method for New Jersey wreck diving), damaging the locomotives or removing anything from the site. I don’t believe that this is well known amongst SCUBA divers but it is the law. I am glad that I knew this before going.

Now onto the dive. Making a buoy dive is easiest when the seas are calm. Here’s how it works. We find the site using the boat’s GPS. Once over the top of it, we throw in a weighted line that has a buoy that floats on the surface. Some buoys are very simple with 90’-100’ of line tied to the weight and a plastic jug attached to the other end. The weight needs to be enough to keep the plastic jug from pulling the weight along the bottom. The downside to this type of buoy is that you need separate buoys for different depths as the amount of line is premeasured.

We use one that has a line reel attached to the surface float and a weight attached to the end of the line. When the weight hits the bottom, the reel is stopped and held in place by a cog. The reel has a few hundred feet of line on it and can be used on any of the depths that we dive from our boat. After the buoy is in place, the divers suit up and the boat is brought near the buoy. The divers enter the water and follow the buoy line to the bottom. They return following the buoy line to the surface. The boat waits nearby to pick us up after the dive.

With everything in place, my dive buddy, Beth Dalzell of Brick, New Jersey and I headed to the bottom. My wife, Veronica, and Beth’s husband, Wes, stayed on the boat waiting to pick us up. We had to additional guests today, Beth and Wes’s niece and nephew, Victoria and Brian Bartlet.

They turned out to be great deckhands.

The surface water was murky and kind of a yellowish color. Since this area is not known for great visibility, I was nervous that we had traveled all this way and would end up with no visibility. As we got closer to the bottom, the water got clearer but darker. At the bottom, visibility was about 10’-15’ and the water temperature was 57° F. My first impression upon seeing the first locomotive was “Wow”. It was really an impressive sight! It may not seem that way to everyone but my dive buddy wholeheartedly agreed with me. I couldn’t wait to get my camera and strobes adjusted and start shooting.

The locomotives were covered with life. There were frilled anemones, lined anemones and blue mussels. There was a great number of black sea bass swimming around both locomotives. I remember coming around the front of the one on the left side and seeing a school of forty or fifty black sea bass swim under the locomotive. The wooden engineer’s cabin, the cow catcher and the smoke stack are not there but there is no doubt what these are locomotives when you look at them. I understand after reading about the site on NJScuba.net that there isn’t much left on the locomotives to take as artifacts. We were here to record the locomotives underwater and didn’t look that close.

I started at the front of the left hand engine and worked my way along the side photographing the drive wheel, the drive wheel linkage and the steam cylinder and finally made my way to the rear of the engine where I photographed the rear of the boiler and the wheel assembly that once held the coal hopper. I moved forward and took some photos of the front of the locomotive so that more of it could be seen in one photo. From the front, you can see the front wheel suspension beneath the boiler.

While I was taking photos, Beth was just looking around. She found the locomotives to be really impressive. She was also impressed with the number of fish that we saw and also with the amount of growth.

Let’s remember that I am looking at the locomotives from an underwater photographer’s prospective. I don’t get many chances to dive on a site like this so I was very excited. For the normal diver, this is probably not a very interesting dive. After the initial impression of awe recedes, the next thought is going to be “what am I going to do for the rest of my dive?”. That wasn’t a problem with me. I shot nearly 200 photos during my dive and I was a happy person. By the way, I never did see the laminated plaque that should have been brought down to warn divers from taking things that they shouldn’t.

I would like to give credit to the people who found these locomotives. They are Paul & Ruth Hepler. Paul is the Captain of the Venture III out of Belmar, New Jersey. You can find out more information about Paul and the Venture III here. Paul and Ruth are two of the best people that you could ever meet. We have been friends since my son, Tom, was really small. We used to dive from Paul’s boat and we brought Tom whenever we could. I had the chance to talk to Capt. Bob Nash about the locomotives. He said that he was with Paul and Ruth when they made their first dive here. It was a real exciting find for them.

Time goes by fast on the bottom when you are having fun and I was. Before I knew it, it was time to make our way up the buoy line and back to our boat, Snapshot. Veronica, Wes, Victoria and Brian were waiting and it is always good to be back aboard safely. The wind had picked up a little from the south and we decided to stop at the Pinta, a freighter that lies in 80’+ of water about three miles from the locomotives.

I usually like diving the Pinta but today the visibility was pretty bad. It was only about ten feet and the Pinta is so big that it is easy to get lost on it. I didn’t bring a dive reel so I stayed close to the anchor line. I shot some photos despite the visibility.

Soon it was time to leave and the wind was now blowing pretty good out of the south. It was going to be a wet ride home. I am not going to write a separate blog about the Pinta dive as there isn’t much to say. Beth and I talked on the way back and we both agreed that despite the majesty of seeing the locomotives, it is not a site that we will be back to very soon. There are still so many things that I want to shoot in my summer of wide angle and I am glad that the locomotives are now crossed off my list. To see more photos of the locomotives, please visit my Photo Gallery and look under Shipwrecks – New Jersey or go directly to the locomotives by clicking here. You can see photos from the Pinta here.

© 2009 – 2010, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.