It's on...Bermuda in the morning!

The last two weeks have seen my Bermuda trip on again, postponed, off again, on again.  Due to business commitments in Raleigh, the Waste Knot crew had to cancel their Bermuda plans.  During the Big Rock I met the owners of the Click Through, a 68' Wanchese.  Keith and Josie English seemed very keen to help try and tease up a blue for me in Bermuda between tournaments.  I'll be joining them, captain Matt Mauldwin, and mate Courtney Stanley for what I hope will be an epic 10 days!

That epic 10 days starts tomorrow morning with a 6:00 AM flight out of New Bern to Atlanta where I'll meet the crew and then on to Hamilton to meet the boat.  That means I need to be leaving the house tomorrow morning by 3:45 AM at the latest.  As usual, I will be blogging daily, adding new pix and generally providing a behind the scenes look at what goes into a shoot like this.

First and foremost there are never any guarantees with this sort of thing.  A shot of a blue marlin three feet from my lens in crystal clear "burple" water is my holy grail.  It's not a shot I can get by calling up my local PADI dive shop and booking myself onto the 8:00 AM two tank.  It's going to take trial and error with a great crew to tease a fish up and then keeping her lit and in prey response mode around the boat while I get as close as I can.  Teasing entails raising her first with hookless natural baits trolled behind the boat.  Once raised and feeding, the mates pull the teaser strips away from her, then feed her again, pull the bait away and feed, and so on, until she's trying to climb into the cockpit of the boat after the bait.  At some stage during all of this, the plan is for me to slip into the water and get between her and her food.  Sounds simple enough, right?

The reality of the situation is that this shot could take me 10 years to get.  This is the shot that keeps me awake at night and that I've played over and over again in my head.  Every shot I chase I try to visualize beforehand.  It's like a lighting bolt of déja vu if it happens, the instant the picture in my head and what's going on in the viewfinder collide.  For every fished raised there is probably only a 5% chance that that's going to be my fish--the one who will behave as predicted, point her bill right at me, come storming at the camera doing 20 kts and, hopefully, turn at the last 100th of a second, mouth open, eye in focus, and CLICK.

Starting tomorrow you will be able to track me in real time on my SPOT each day I'm in Bermuda.  Right now I'm trying to load 200 pounds of camera and dive gear into two 50 pounds bags and then I'm going to try to get some sleep before I have to get up at 3 o'clock tomorrow morning.