Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
pictures. Once again, even though the mantas swept by just above our heads,
it was too cloudy to see much cleaning activity.
Then, just as I had taken a picture of a manta that was swimming past
only three meters away, I was suddenly buf eted from behind by a series of
physical blows accompanied by loud hammering noises. The blows were so
powerful that I could feel them in my chest. They continued at full force for
what seemed like an endless time but was probably only about thirty sec-
onds. Then they gradually diminished. The manta that I had been photo-
graphing had, very sensibly, vanished.
In trying to describe the sensation afterwards, I could only compare it to
an intimate encounter with a pneumatic drill that I had experienced decades
earlier. While I was helping to demolish a building in order to pay my way
through college, I was given the massive air hammer by my boss. He told
me to tear up a concrete basement fl oor with it. The hammering I had just
experienced underwater was as loud and violent as my youthful
pas de deux
with that pneumatic drill.
Figure 36
Brilliantly colored mandarin fi sh,
Synchiropus splendidus
, mate on a reef near
Yap. The fi sh lurk in the corals and wait shyly until dusk to consummate their brief affairs.
