BLUE PLANET II THE BOILING SEA
Roger Munns is a British, Emmy award-winning underwater cameraman, based in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo.
by Roger Munns
T
he stories that we filmed for Blue Planet II came about in many ways. Some were a result of painstaking research by marine biologists. Some were seen by chance by recreational divers. Others, like the boiling sea, were the stuff of myth and legend, born of tall tales by fisherman and other ocean-goers. It was so named as legend had it that on rarely witnessed occasions the surface of the Pacific ocean would come alive, a writhing, tumultuous mass of fish, so violent that from the surface, or the air, it would seem as if the sea was boiling.
Setting out to film this event was therefore risky, both in terms of personal safety and achieving our filming goals. Nonetheless in early 2015, after some promising sightings, a team set out to a point 100 miles offshore from Australia with that very aim. Using echo sounders to try and locate the massive shoals of lanternfish at depth (thought to be on the menu at this ferocious ocean buffet) the crew deployed Remote Operated Vehicles (ROV’s) with low-light cameras to try to identify the fish. To their dismay there was nothing there but a thick
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of plankton. After three weeks at sea the crew returned empty handed with not a second of footage to show for their efforts.
Fast forward 18 months and I was called into action for a second and different attempt at capturing this event on film. This time on the other side of the world. I set out into the Pacific from Costa Rica with the dive team on a small converted sports fishing boat which was to be our home for three weeks in the open ocean. A second team set out in tandem to search from the sky, in a more hi-tech research vessel, equipped with a helicopter rigged with a stabilised camera.
We were acting on reports from locals in Costa Rica who had told us of pods of dolphins driving lanternfish to the surface, pinning them there with no escape, while predators came at them from every angle.
After the previous failure we knew we were in for a tough time. Open ocean shoots are never easy. The blue sky and sea can seem never ending at times, like
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