In April of 2005, La Jolla’s scuba diving community would commence weeks of outrage over the actions of one of its own. Omid Ahdami was arrested after lifeguards discovered him and two other men pulling a dead giant black sea bass into a boat at La Jolla Cove’s San Diego-La Jolla Ecological Reserve; five months later, Ahdami would plead guilty to the illegal taking of a member of a protected species. He was ordered to pay a $1,100 fine and was sentenced to three years’ probation and 30 days’ community service.
Divers had come to name the fish Blackie, known for its gentle, curious nature and its 171-pound girth. Ironically, they note, Blackie was killed at a time when giant black sea bass sightings are on the increase.
Mary Lynn Price, who’s been diving since the mid-1990s, would like to think there’s at least a vague connection between the bigger numbers and events such as the one that’s sold out many times over the last several years. The eighth annual San Diego UnderSea Film Exhibition is set for Friday and Saturday, Oct. 12 and 13, at Qualcomm Hall’s big-screen auditorium, featuring 16 five-minute digital movies per evening on topics from sharks to shipwrecks. And for Price, the event speaks to the foundations from which environmental activism makes its mark.
“The more images we encounter in the underwater world, the more our perception of what’s out there, and who we are in relation to it, changes,” she said. “We wouldn’t have people caring about whale conservation or dolphins, the big animals that so many people fall for, if they didn’t have those images to perceive of animals underwater. That’s the impulse that starts all of this.
“You can’t help be struck by how fragile [the undersea world] is and how important it is to take care of it.”
Price’s entry is titled “Conrad Limbaugh & the Sharks of Clipperton Island,” a look at Limbaugh’s pioneering work in Scripps Institution of Oceanography research diving and underwater imaging in the 1950s. The former La Jollan had led research expeditions to Clipperton Island, a French atoll west of Acapulco “” and he found the sharks so numerous and aggressive that his first trip was cut short. Price, however, saw almost no sharks in the area during her visit last April. In their place, Price said, was a sea of commercial longline, replete with its thousands of baited hooks and used to catch sharks and swordfish. Clearly, the area had been overfished for decades.
“I was a little nervous that we might run into these huge numbers of sharks that historically had been documented from the ’50s,” Price said. “When we got down there, there were very few sharks. Most of them were very small, are very wary. The story presented itself to me blatantly, visually.”
Limbaugh died at 35 in 1960 in a French cave-diving mishap, which Price said resulted in “a huge tragedy for La Jolla, for Scripps and for the diving community. He was in his ascendancy, a pioneering young man in all these different fields, and he dies in a terrible, stupid accident.”
But Limbaugh’s death, she added, embodies the spirit of the festival. The filmmakers, she said, are getting better as storytellers and conveying those stories through their craft.
“As we’ve come to see, the short-form video is a genre in itself,” she said. “When the festival started, the technology [was such that] the films had to be in short form to go on the Internet.”
Digital technology and desktop editing have helped immensely, she said” but she’s quick to note that the local diving community has taken all due advantage as stewards of the public good.
Qualcomm Hall is located at 5775 Morehouse Drive in San Diego’s Sorrento Valley area.
Tickets are $15 per program and are available through various San Diego dive clubs. The programs begin at 7 p.m. More ticket and contact information is available at www.sdufex.com.