Marty’s photo of the day #4496: When Deb and I visited the island of Bonaire earlier this month, we enjoyed 26 hour-long snorkels. I fell in love with above-water wildlife photography many years ago, but all those snorkels made me passionate about underwater wildlife photography, too. It’s incredibly challenging, as underwater creatures never stop moving. Just when I’d have the perfect portrait, my subject could turn in an instant—ruining the shot.
Photography highlights for me were an octopus (which I only had an instant to photograph and pretty much fucked up), three species of eel, and, of course, sea turtles. At the end of our stay, Deb and I had seen seven green sea turtles and three critically endangered hawksbill sea turtles.
My wife and I both suspected some of the turtles were repeats—especially the hawksbill—and when we went through the photos together, we confirmed that all three of our hawksbill turtles had the same white blemish on the back of his/her shell, where it had had been slightly damaged many years ago. So now we can say that we saw only one hawksbill sea turtle—but that turtle felt secure enough to “hang with us” three times.