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S
ome images take on a life of their own.
That’s my thought each time I see a
Facebook post by Capt. Spencer Slate,
because his profile picture is a shot I
took of him decades ago. Back in those
days he did a “Creature Feature” each
week in which he introduced divers to the critters and
fed ballyhoo to the resident marine life on Key Largo’s
City of Washington
shipwreck — usually with the bait
clenched between his teeth. This was an odd thing
to do, even given the tenor of the times in the dive
industry, but fish feeding at this particular site was the
continuation of a long tradition begun by Steve Klem,
celebrated as the “Pied Piper of Pennekamp Park” in a
long-ago
Skin Diver
magazine feature.
I took that photo when I was shooting for
Skin Diver
,
and it was one of those crappy days when the wind had
been blowing for a week and the visibility was less than
30 feet. The only way I could get the shot was by using
an extreme wide-angle lens and getting so close to the
action that there was only a foot of that turbid water
between us. Slate and I were so close together that
there was only a very narrow channel for the barracuda
to race through to get the bait. It took a dozen
attempts, but I finally nailed the shot: a frozen moment
in which the barracuda’s mouth was wide open just
nanoseconds from consuming the ballyhoo and made
all the more impressive with close-focus perspective
distortion. The shot made the cover of
Skin Diver
,
and then it went beyond. I’ve seen it as a postcard for
diving the Red Sea and the Turks and Caicos and on
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
as well as in other, mostly
unauthorized, uses.
Carlos Jaile related via Facebook a similar experience he
witnessed while diving the
City of Washington
some years
after the photo was published. “I remember this picture
well.… I also remember back in the mid-1980s seeing a
photographer and a diver trying to do something similar,
feeding this barracuda or another damn big one and the
guy losing two fingers in the process.”
I can see how that could happen. Given this image’s
wide distribution, it’s not surprising that other
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SPRING 2016
FROM THE SAFETY STOP
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME
By Stephen Frink
Capt. Spencer Slate feeds a barracuda with a
ballyhoo clenched in his teeth (photographed in
the early 1990s). Emulating this behavior has
sent several divers to the emergency room over
the years. Just because you see it in a photograph
doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to try it.
STEPHEN FRINK