John Collins has photographed many weird and wonderful underwater creatures - and lived to tell the tale, writes Lorna Siggins, Marine Correspondent
Does a recent spake of attacks on stingrays Down Under indicate that wildlife film-maker Steve Irwin's fatal experience with one has given the marine environment a bad name? Or has it always been thus? Is it only islanders who have that innate fear of the horizon beyond shore? "To many, the idea of rolling over the side of a boat to swim to the seabed is quite unfathomable," says Cork-based underwater photographer John Collins.
"To breathe, we need cumbersome equipment, and the senses that guide us in our air world are next to useless here. It seems that in the millennia since we have evolved from the sea, we have completely lost the ability to venture underwater."
As Collins notes in a new book, it is just more than six decades since Émile Gagnan and Jacques Cousteau perfected the aqualung - allowing millions of us to return to our original environment, albeit briefly, sometimes badly and often at significant personal risk. Writing in The Silent World, published in 1953, the late French marine adventurer described how he went to a railway station at Bandol on the French Riviera to collect a wooden case which had been sent, "express", from Paris.
'IN IT WAS a new and promising device, the result of years of struggle and dreams: an automatic compressed-air diving lung conceived by Émile Gagnan and myself. I rushed it to Villa Barry, where my diving comrades, Philippe Tailliez and Frédéric Dumas, were waiting," Cousteau recalled. "No children ever opened a Christmas present with more excitement than we did when we unpacked the first 'aqualung'. If it worked, diving would be revolutionised." Collins quotes Cousteau, and his colleague Capt Tailliez, among a number of writers and photographers sharing a similar passion. Cousteau "stood upside down, on one finger and burst out laughing" when he first found himself "delivered from gravity and buoyancy" and flying "around in space". Philippe Diolé, a contemporary of Cousteau, found that the "underwater baptism" provided him with "keys to unlock certain parts of myself".
"For the first time, skin divers, who up to that time had to come up to the surface for lack of breath, experienced in a three-dimensional space the free intoxication of diving without a cable," Capt Tailliez noted. "Back on the shore, we danced for joy. We were already certain that this was really the discovery which, a few years later, was to inaugurate, in France and the world over, the age of undersea exploration." The French captain may have been a mite optimistic.
More than half a decade later, more resources have been put into exploration of space than into greater knowledge of and protection of some 70 per cent of the world's surface. For all that, the sub-sea environment has always been a source of fascination to those not deterred by its uncertain, unrelenting and uncontrollable nature.
Collins is one of those water babies. In Cool Waters, Emerald Seas, he remembers the first time he opened his eyes underwater. "The blurred scene of a gravel river-bed gripped me; dappled light flickering across the plants and stones. A freshwater eel made a sudden dart from behind a rock, sending me bolting to the surface, gasping for breath." The noise of a summer's day returned, chaotic with children playing in the shallows. The dreamlike silence and mirage of that few seconds underwater was to begin a lifelong undersea journey."
That journey began when he took up photography while growing up in Limerick. A few years later, the young student at Trinity College, Dublin, joined Dublin University Sub-Aqua Club. The two pursuits were a perfect match. He became a diving instructor in 1991, and he has studied at the New York Institute of Photography. His work has won awards and has appeared in specialist publications, such as Dive International and SubSea. The "day job" supporting all this has been a pharmacy in Kinsale, Co Cork, which he and his wife Caoilfhionn run, while the couple have two daughters, Aislinn and Eadaoin. More than 140 images, which Collins has selected for his book, extend from Vancouver island in the north-west Pacific to South Africa and Tasmania in the Southern Ocean.
HE HAS LOOKED predators in the eye - and teeth, as one of his stunning images of great white sharks off Dyer island, South Africa, confirms. For this, he had to climb into a cage suspended from the mother craft, while two onion bags filled with offal from a local fish factory were strung over the side. "Once you are in the water, there is only one rule," his skipper told him. "No part of you can be outside the cage at any time. You cannot see a shark from underneath."
COLLINS HAS CAPTURED images of moray eels off the Canary Islands, wolf eels off Vancouver, spectacular Southern Jewel anemones off Port Arthur, Tasmania, giant kelp in Tasmania's Fortescue Bay. Yet his representations of life in our own coastal waters are among the most memorable - be they the flukes of a humpback whale off west Cork, the startled eyes of young whiting swimming close to a compass jellyfish in St Finian's Bay, Co Kerry, or the comical contrast between our "over" and "under" worlds at the Pollack Holes, Kilkee, Co Clare.
Shipwrecks are an integral part of his collection, be they rusting and relentlessly visible, as in the Ranga off Slea Head, Co Kerry, or partly absorbed into the underwater landscape, as sections of the Kowloon Bridge hull off the Stags Rocks, Co Cork, have already been. Among these images are bullets, scattered on the seabed, which were destined for leaders of the 1916 Rising.
The German naval crew carrying the munitions on the steamer, Aud, were arrested by a British warship. Rather than let the cargo fall into enemy hands, the captain gave orders to scuttle the vessel, and it still lies in some 36 metres of water just outside Cork Harbourmouth.
Collins may have had a few frights during his time, but reveals little of this. His sense of adventure intact, he maintains a passionate belief in protection of the fragile environment. His photographic record is accompanied by an illuminating text, for which he offers an unnecessary apology. "The experience of swimming freely underwater is an intensely personal one," he writes.
Sights and feelings cannot be "adequately described in land-world terms". Perhaps, as he says, this is because it is so "outside our everyday lives that we simply have not yet developed a suitable vocabulary".
Cool Waters, Emerald Seas: Diving in Temperate Waters by John Colins is published by Cork University Press at €29.95
On the edge: by the shores of our own lovely sea
John Collins's salted back garden is the magnificent south-west Irish coastline, which has inspired many writers, photographers and scientists, some of whom would trace their interest back to "rummaging in rockpools" as youngsters.
Audrey Murphy was one of those, growing up on Sherkin Island, off Baltimore, Co Cork, where her father Matt founded his own marine research station.
Murphy and his pioneering team are responsible for many publications, including one of the best pocket-book guides to this 2,700-mile coastline - A Beginner's Guide to Ireland's Seashore (1999).
Now the research station has produced a new DVD, On the Water's Edge, presented by Murphy, which endeavours to give a snapshot of life "on water's edge", teeming as it is with shellfish, fish, plants, animals and bird-life.
The short documentary comes with interactive materials which can be used on a computer or DVD player, including nature quizzes, printable colouring sheets and a slideshow of over 40 animals and plants.
On the Water's Edge is available from Sherkin Island Marine Station, Sherkin Island, Co Cork, e-mail: sherkinmarine. eircom.net. Price €16.95.