Description
LOCATION: My former home of the Turks & Caicos Islands
STORY: Unbeknownst to me, a regular dive on a sunny day off beautiful West Caicos Island was about to turn into the most expensive dive of my career! I’m just casually swimming along, looking for my friendly 3′ Nassau grouper who lived nearby, when I felt my camera almost get knocked out of my hands. I’m scanning the water for where what was going on, and I turn to look at this Queen Triggerfish (Balistes vetula) heading right towards my nose at mach 3, and luckily, I was able to deflect it with my 40’lb camera before it bit my nose off! At first, I was on the defensive – he kept coming at me, striking over and over with the ferocity (and size) of a rabid chihuahua. The logical instinct would be to swim away, but this might just be the photographic opportunity of a lifetime! Keeping my delicious-looking sausage fingers safely behind my camera housing, I held still, and let him hammer away at my lens’s 9.5″ dome port. Over the next 30 minutes, he’s circle away 3-4′, and then repeatedly slam straight into the port over and over again! Over the next few minutes, I learned his patterns, and was able to predict the exact moment of lightning-fast impact. As I was starting to run low on air, I said goodbye to the most overly aggressive fish I’d ever met, and while heading up towards the surface, I noticed about 20 massive scratches & gouges in my port from his teeth. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he also bit clean through one of my electronic sync cords (which goes between the camera and the flashes), and we all know what happens when salt water hits an electrical wire…. Yep, the most expensive day of my career, but totally worth it!!!
PRINTING AS FINE ART: Queen Triggerfish Attack! is available to purchase in standard sizes here online, or feel free to reach out to one of our awesome interior design staff to discuss custom sizing. It works best in its native 3:2 vertical aspect ratio. Sure, it works great alone, but consider pairing it with some of the in-your-face art from the Fish Faces Collection such as Dentistry or Cowfish Kiss.