GIANT SQUIDS AND SEA LILLIES

AT 800 FEET

In the summer of 1992, my 13 year old son Patrick and I visited Grand Cayman on a one week dive trip. He was growing up into quite a young man while I was and still am a child. In addition to the fun of Stringray City, we went on the dive of a lifetime. We took an 800 foot dive in a three man research sub. We had a choice of either going on a deep wreck or down the wall. Patrick had just read Beast and was excited about the chance to see a giant squid. I wanted to see Sea Lillies. Sea Lillies are related to starfish. Until recently they were considered extinct. Then they were found in the deep sea and now in the shallows in the Pacific. These creatures has fascinated me since taking invertebrate paleontology and finding them as fossils in the window sill in my college dorm. The header picture is a fossil sea lilly.

The sub was a big yellow pill shaped vessel with a clear dome on the front for the observers and a small conning tower for the pilot.

Captain Nemo greets us at the sub. The captain who drives the sub will look out the small windows in the upper section while we look out the big front dome..	Permission to come aboard granted, Patrick crawls down in the sub entry. Because of my well nourished frame, they had to remove a number of ballast weights to make the sub have the proper trim.
We were actually going to do it. We were heading down to 800 feet in a sub. After about 400 feet there was little light and we watched in the dark as we fell through the water through a snowstorm of white debris. Then the lights went on and there was our first view of a deep water creature.	Here we see a sea pen, a slow growing creature of the depths. We twitched every time the sub groaned as the hull adjusted to the depth. Patrick had his eyes glued looking for Giant Squid.
And there it was, my first of many sea lillies. These creatures have been around for hundreds of million years. It is amazing to see a "living fossil". Patrick was still looking for that squid.	Strange creature after creature came into view. No squids yet, but I was not sure I wanted to see one. I too had read Beast.
A pair of sea lillies stand in the current with their nets out to capture their prey.	Little shapes of fragile coral that grows at almost an inch in a hundred years.
Two more sea lillies but no giant squid. All too soon our trip was coming to an end.	We surface through the sponge zone.
Ain't technology wonderful. For the techno buffs. I did not take a regular camera down with us. All of	these pictures are frame grabs from the video I took of the sub trip. They started out as 8mm video tape from my Sony Handycam, were ported to Super VHS editing VCR for the master tape, the master tape was played to a Panasonic DVD writer and written to a video DVD, the DVD was played and output of the DVD was fed to a Snappy frame grabber on the the parallel port of my laptop, the output of the snappy was a 640 x 480 JPG, that was lightened up and reduced in size in Paint Shop Pro. It is a wonder that you can recognize anything.The whole process took 10 years...off and on.
More sponges but no squids.	Since it is so dark without the lights, why the colors?
As we near the surface, Patrick looks up into the sea. We had made an once in a lifetime dive into the deep and the past. You know, I really didn't want to meet a giant squid because I had also read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Breaking surface at the end of the hour dive.	Ok not a giant squid but I did kinda promise a squid.
Captain Nemo opens the hatch. It seemed like a short hour, but our legs were cramped and we were ready to get out. Would we go again...You bet.	< We leave Captain Nemo and the little sub as we head to shore in the zodiac. It is good to have our legs out straight again. Life is good, especially when you can share high (or deep) adventures with your loved ones.