👻 Thanks again to all who participated in our Scuba Boo Scary Story Contest 2023! We asked for your best watery tales and you did not disappoint! 👻 These stories were full of eerie atmospheres, skin crawling encounters, and even skeletons!
For your spooky tricks and treats, all entries for Scuba Boo are below, and the winners were read aloud on a special Halloween episode of What We Sea.
Congratulations again to our winners, @hannah_underwater, @theshiplady, @underwaterpaparazzi, and @tygeronix
That’s right, we had a a tie for first place and 4 winners for our first year! Congrats again everyone and hope to sea you next year!
🎃Scuba Boo Winning Stories 2023🎃
First Place pt. 1: There She Bones! by @tygeronix
During an intentional buddy separation, because said buddy wanted to explore further at depth, I waited on a small boat wreck in an unfamiliar site with low visibility. I was at 14m/45feet, with 80bar/1160psi left. I waited and waited… The sea was green all around and the vis dropped. When my air dropped to 70 bar I decided to just find my own way back. After only perhaps 1 minute of swimming, I saw a shadow upright. It was a skeleton 😱 I did not get close enough to investigate because I didn’t want to know if it was real or fake. Basically I freaked out, and turned back to my original spot again. But my air was depleting, so I gathered all my courage to investigate this skeleton. Luckily my buddy found me as I made my way there. And it turned out to be a fake skeleton sitting on a toilet!
Brrmaid Note: There’s more. I was chatting with Tygeronix after Scuba Boo ended… and there are more scary details to add to the original story. Apparently a week prior to that dive, her friend told her that they found a human remains of a missing sailor in Langley while muck diving. She sent me an article from a local paper… they think its the body of a captain who went missing in 2013! According to the article, leg bones, a rib cage in a jacket, and a driver’s license. And right after hearing this, Tygeronix found this fake skeleton…
First Place pt. 1: I Seal You by @theshiplady
I was solo diving in Laguna Beach, California. My head was under a rock ledge since there were some huge lobsters that needed their photos taken. I randomly kicked something once even though there was nothing behind me. I kicked it again a few moments later. I went to look to see what it was when my fin was yanked and I was pulled out of the rock ledge. I turned around and screamed. That scared off the cute harbor seal that was toying with my pink fins 😂 Luckily we both got over our mutual scares and I took one of my favorite harbor seal pictures when it returned. 🦭
Second Place: The Great White Scare @underwaterpaparazzi
The year was 2019. We were blissfully diving as much as possible. This particular weekend we were diving the sites around Catalina island. My husband and friend hunting for yellowtail from the surface, while I went solo diving below with my camera. Dive site was Ship Rock. I was excited! Conditions can be volatile here and I’ve never had the opportunity to dive it till now. Visibility wasn’t great for Catalina standards but decent. Maybe a hazy blue/grey 25 ft with a lot of particulate in the water column. I dropped down the rocky pinnacle poking around in kelp fronds and crevices, looking for my next photograph to capture. Taking time to look up and around to evaluate my surroundings more than normal since I was diving solo. Around 70 ft, I felt the need to stop and turn around… as I turned, appearing through murky water was the unmistakable grin of a great white shark! She slowly was swimming towards me with an entourage of 5-6 yellowtail. The second she came into clear view, she turned and swam slowly off into the depths. My heart was racing and I was thrilled to have had such a rare encounter, but then remembered my husband. On the surface. Looking for yellowtail. I aborted the dive to let the hunters know there was a large shark in our dive area. They had already exited because something didn’t feel right. I, of course descended back down the pinnacle to see if I could catch another glimpse of her.
I never saw her again. A few weeks later, we found out we were expecting, which meant I was unknowingly pregnant during my great white shark encounter. Maybe she was curious by a weird small second heartbeat? Maybe it was congrats visit? Who knows?
Third Place: by Wiggle Worms @hannah_underwater
It’s the middle of the COVID pandemic and our wedding was originally planned for the weekend. It obviously got post poned in the back and forth of ‘do we allow group gatherings or not’. In lieu of getting married, we decided to go for a diving weekend. It’s been a weekend of diving, hiking, lots of eating and drinking while staying with our friend at his family cabin on Orcas Island. The pandemic and wedding planning are far away and all I care about are the nudis I can find and taking some deep underwater breaths (it’s been a stressful few months, yeah?).
It’s late one night and we are standing around our fire, talking and laughing about god knows what when we suddenly hear loud splashing in the water. We run to the top of the stairs down to the beach to see if we can figure out what is causing the splashing. We get to the bottom and shine our lights out to see hundreds of eyes looking back at us with fins and tails splashing around. HOLY CRAP it’s Dogfish!!! Hurry – get your gear on!! 😂 probably not a normal humans reaction if they saw splashing sharks in black water but you know what? It’s a PNW divers reaction. We throw our gear on, pack our cameras and head in the water. We are quickly surrounded by 30+ dogfish hunting sand lance. They are absolutely beautiful sharks. They are scared of my big camera lights so I turn them off or point them down to see the sharks come in a little closer. A few are curious enough to bump into my dome or nibble our fins while most stay just outside our perimeters of light.
Wait wait wait… this sounds like an awesome story, not a SPOOKY story! Well I forgot to tell you what was also in the water… GIANT WORMS 🫣🤢 slithering and sliding against our faces, getting caught on our gear and masks. Big, purple, centipede leg looking worms. I can still feel them gliding across my face while I was trying to catch a good Dogfish shot.
Was it worth it? Absolutely.
Are worms the scariest thing in the water and much more creepy than sharks? Most definitely. 🦈🪱
Ghost Blubbers by @masonphotos
My favorite boo story was I was shooting macro at the wharf in Monterey and found something super cool to shoot so I was very focused and was kneeling on my knees with my arms up shooting and felt, I thought, my buddy pulling on my flashlight to get my attention. I went to shooo her off and lifted my head to look down towards my right armpit and there was a big harbor seal face with its nose and face up in my armpit!!! It had curled up against me and was chewing on my flashlight lanyard. Having macro set up, it was impossible to get the chunk in the frame so I just booped the nose and played with the whiskers until it had had enough and swam away like the little ghost on ghostbusters 😂😂 def scared the bejesus outa me but still a pretty memorable boo!
The Man Faced Fish by @above_thermocline
Once upon a time, in a small town near Lantan Lake (蘭潭), a fisherman went fishing and caught a tilapia. Eager to enjoy the fresh catch, he cooked it on a BBQ, wrapping it in aluminum foil. As he just started savoring the delicacy, he was startled to see the fish’s head transform into an old lady’s head. The mysterious apparition giggled and asked him, “How does my flesh taste? (魚肉好吃嗎？speaking in traditional Taiwanese)”. Three days later, he committed suicide at the same spot where he caught the fish. The investigator found that there was an abandoned grave right at where the fisherman sat for fishing.
Lantan is located in Chia-yi county, Taiwan. Numerous spooky stories about the lake have circulated during my childhood, but the most famous one is probably the legend of “man-face fish”. Today, you might be able to find abandoned graves walking around the trail beside the lake. This is forbidden during the ghost year. In Chinese culture, July in lunar calendar is the month when the drowns came out to take other’s life in exchange for reincarnation. It’s recommended that people stay away from water during this month and not to go swim, snorkel, and maybe scuba diving.
Start and Fail and Flood @fursmanm
One of my first ever open water dives, we were down about 10m in the Atlantic in early March, it’s freezing and dark. I’m doing my skills a few minutes in when my buddy signals to me there’s a problem with his drysuit and he needs to go up immediately. I signal okay and we both press our inflator, but only he inflates. Within seconds he is lost in the murky water… I panic and keep pressing the inflator only to notice the hose is leaking and my BCD won’t inflate. I end up finning for the surface, and in my panic not even thinking to drop my weights, I had 10kg round my waist. I break the surface and GRAB my buddy and quickly tell him what’s happened. He says his drysuit isn’t fully closed and he’s taking in water so his BCD is now all that’s keeping us both up while the drysuit floods. We signal to the boatman there’s an emergency and hear the engine start…and fail. Start…and fail. He had no choice but to pull out the oar and slow ROW the rib over to us. 15 minutes. For 15 minutes we just about treaded water okay. The adrenaline when the boat arrived was enough for me to drag myself up into the boat without taking off any gear and just collapse panting once inside…
Happy Halloween and safe diving all!
