Tuesday 21 June 2016

Islamorada & The Blazing Mako Fishing Tournament

Our team, braving the ridiculous heat.

Last weekend the Oceanic Ecology team headed south to Islamorada in the Florida Keys to represent the DEEPEND project at the Blazing Mako Fishing Tournament. We took along a bunch of cool activities for people to do (all made up by our intrepid MSc students), as well as a tons of postcards and stickers featuring some of Dante's deep-sea fish photographs and (of course!), the temporary tattoos I designed:

It totes glows in the dark!

When we weren't working on the stand, I had a bit of time off to take some photos. It was stupidly hot during the day, so we didn't exactly go very far! Luckily, we had plenty of iguanas-in-trees to keep me entertained (and slightly pooped on) during the middle of the day while we were hiding out in the shade!

An iguana in a tree.

The evenings were a lot more pleasant, and I headed back to the tournament after work to see them lighting the bonfire (the 'Blazing Mako' itself!)

The blazing mako!

It also gave me a chance to try out my new Manfrotto BeFree tripod. I've never really done much low-light photography and there's not a lot of need for a tripod when you're on a boat, so it was fun to have a play around with it on the beach. If I can catch one of the lightning storms off the coast this summer with it I'll be a happy photographer!


A hut on the pier 

A family fishing under the full moon

Oh - Islamorada also has a sweet diving museum if you're interested in that kind of thing. It's pretty small, but they've got some really cool stuff covering the full history of diving!

Some of the one-person diving suits and commercial diving helmets on display in the diving museum.

Saturday 4 June 2016

Deep-sea (temporary) tattoos

One of the things I love about my job is how varied it can be. We've got an outreach event coming up in the Florida Keys next weekend to promote the research we're doing in the Gulf of Mexico through the DEEPEND project. With most people in the office just back from a cruise, things were somewhat hectic, and I ended up spending an evening last week designing a couple of temporary tattoos for the event!

An anglerfish

And a little squid

What makes them extra cool is that because they're going to be used as part of a 'bioluminscence' theme, the white bits will glow in the dark!