Snorkeling for up to seven hours a day, guest Pam Osborn has chronicled hundreds of different fish and other creatures that live on a small Indonesian coral reef.
At first glance, the online book Wakatobi’s House Reef looks like an underwater photographer’s dream assignment. In fact, it was an epic labor of love. Putting it’s photos of about 400 tropical fish and invertebrate species into a book was an afterthought.
Pam and Wayne Osborn have been going to Wakatobi Dive Resort once or twice a year for 1more than a decade. On a typical day, Wayne has exercised his passion for underwater photography during 400-plus dives made from the resort’s dive boats. Pam sometimes accompanies him. But much more often, she has strolled to the beach and jetty with her mask, snorkel, and fins to enter the warm, clear waters of the House Reef – a kilometre-long strip of seagrass and coral that drops into deeper water some 70 meters from shore.
“I was able to spend 90 minutes with a rather severe-looking beaked sea snake, tracking it to the surface and following it down again.” ~ Pam Osborn
“On some of our first trips I’d say to my husband, ‘I found this, and I found that,’ and he wasn’t very interested,” Pam recalls. “He thought I needed a camera, so I got a waterproof Panasonic point-and-shoot. The trouble was, condensation from the warm water kept fogging the lens, and I’d have to stop swimming to shore every hour or so to recharge the battery.”
So, Pam graduated to a Canon 5DS R in a Nauticam underwater housing. She also swapped her underwater light for a more sophisticated Inon strobe and got a weight belt to make it easier to pursue her subjects for as long as one breath hold dive would allow. Being much less interested in wide-angle vistas than getting up close to creatures sometimes as small as a grain of rice, she has mainly used a 100mm macro lens and occasionally a 50mm macro.
As Pam has floated and flippered along behind the lens, time didn’t matter. She would spend up to four hours in a session and seven hours in a day on the reef, entranced by the richness and diversity of the sea life all around her. Pam estimates that she has spent more than 1,000 hours snorkeling alone on the House Reef with her camera.
“Sometimes I’m floating in water less than a couple of metres deep and sometimes I’ll dive down along the sea wall, where I can also see pelagic [ocean] fish.” ~ Pam Osborn
In addition to spending time in the shallows, Pam often ventures to outer slopes and walls, using her breath-hold abilities to capture subjects at greater depths. “I’ve swum since I was at school and did a bit of competitive swimming at that time,” she explains. How deep does she go? ‘I’ve never really taken any notice… maybe 13 or 14 meters,” she says.
Pam employs her swimming talents when seeking out and capturing a subject. “The currents can get quite strong at times,” she says, “but I don’t worry about that.” Pam says she drifts with the flow while seeking something of interest, then turns and swims into the current to hold a steady position while composing the shot. “I’m looking for things all the time and can get lost in what I’m doing,” she says.
“When I do see something I like, it can take a while to get it all lined up. Sometimes the fish don’t do what I want and I’m thinking, ‘Do you realize I need to go up for a breath of air?”’
Wakatobi Dive Resort is in the remote south-east of Indonesia’s Sulawesi, on the Banda Sea. Centered in a UNESCO designated national park, it’s devoted to marine conservation and showcases the famed marine biodiversity of the region. “The number of fish here is incredible,” Pam says. “Schools gather along the drop-off and there are lots of babies in the nursery along the reef. Lots of turtles too. I try to swim alongside them when they come up for air, and I must be careful because when I follow them down again, they can take me deeper than I think I might be.
There are also moray eels, snake eels, shrimps, flatworms, slugs, and many different shells with animals in them. “I know the reef very well, but every time we go back, there are new things to see,” she says. “It’s partly a seasonal thing. On one quite recent trip, it was a tiny algal octopus, and I was able to spend 90 minutes with a rather severe-looking beaked sea snake, tracking it to the surface and following it down again.”
Pam says she doesn’t normally bother the venomous sea snakes and they don’t bother her. “I’ve always been told they can’t bite you because they can’t open their mouths wide enough. Mind you, Wayne is renowned for his whale photography, and when we’ve been up in Exmouth Gulf [in Western Australia] doing that, we’ve seen sea snakes with fish in their mouths.”
The Osborns donate their whale photographs to whale researchers in Perth who use them to identify individual animals and track their movements. Wayne does the book compiling and has also produced the online book Reef Fishes from his diving at Wakatobi, in other parts of Indonesia and around Australia. It’s important to the Osborns that anyone can look at the books free of charge. They help people identify what they see when they’re doing their own diving and snorkeling, and they raise awareness of the need for marine conversation all over the world.
“Some of the statistics about our human impact on our seas are quite depressing,”’ says Pam in the preface to the photos in Wakatobi’s House Reef. “It’s been reported that 90 percent of the large fish are gone from our oceans, and 30 percent of the fish stocks that we humans consume have collapsed. One billion people rely on fish for their main animal protein source. They are mainly from third-world countries where alternative means of feeding families aren’t obvious or available. Whether such media reports are selectively sensationalized or not, there seems to be ample evidence that life for many species is not assured and there is a need for intervention.
“I am a believer in the simple principle the more you look, the more you see.” ~ Pam Osborn
“That’s one of the reasons I am a strong supporter of environmentally sustainable diving operators such as the Wakatobi Dive Resort. Prior to its establishment, the surrounding coral reefs bore a heavy level of artisanal fishing. The jobs and regional income from diving tourism have provided other options for the local communities and places a value on sustaining an ecosystem that will continue to attract divers. A small step forward perhaps among the many needed in a very long journey ahead.”
Summing up her endless fascination with the Wakatobi reef, Pam says ‘I am a believer in the simple principle the more you look, the more you see.’
More of Pam’s Wakatobi photos, and all of Pam and Wayne Osborn’s many travel and wildlife photo books, can be seen at https://www.wayneosborn.online/our-books.html
For booking information or questions, please contact us at office@wakatobi.com or complete a trip inquiry at wakatobi.com.
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This article was reprinted with permission from Photo Review Quarterly. It was first published in Photo Review Magazine. We would like to thank the publication and the author for doing such a nice profile on a Wakatobi regular who has returned more than a dozen times over the years.
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