Tunnel of Darkness

January 12th, 2009 @ 02:46pm

A lot of people probably don't know that I love horror movies. My entire life I've loved scary movies and being scared because of them. I don't want to see funny movies, girlie movies, dramas...none of that. Give me a really good Scary movie!
That being said, a lot of people see what it is that I do and think that I'm crazy and that they would be too scared to confront some of the world’s top predators. Well, let me just say that I've studied these animals my entire life. A lot of what I do is very calculated and has only been possible from studying the predators in their natural environments. I've been influenced by a lot of people and a lot of friends in some of the stuff that I've done, but overall it comes with a lot of hard work and a lot of hours logged. That being said, some times things can appear eerily like a horror movie.

For instance

About a month ago I went diving in an area where I like to go hand fishing. Typically, I go there with a friend of mine, Cameraman Jose Fernandez, (JAFPhotography.com) since he captures incredible stuff with his cameras.
So we're doing our thing, hand fishing, when we come up on an alligator. A big alligator.
When the alligator sees us it takes off into a tunnel that it had. Now, if you've seen any of my recent DVD's, you know that I've gone into gator tunnels before.
But this one was different. There was only enough room at the top of the tunnel to get a little bit of air in the snorkel. If I filled the snorkel with water, I would be hard pressed to get any air. Even if you turned upside down there wasn't much air to get. And on top of being hard to breath, the tunnel was dark....PITCH DARK. You couldn't see two inches in front of your face. Jose and I had to go next to each other moving about a foot at a time. The only light we had was from the camera flash. So he would snap a photo into the blackness, giving us a flash of light, and we would move a few feet and wait for the flash to charge again. Foot by foot we crept into this cave...into total darkness. And the cave seemed to go on forever. Talk about remembering EVERY horror movie I've ever seen. It felt like the movie Alien when the guy was crawling through those dark tunnels looking into the blackness for the monster. That's about as close to that scene as a person can get in real life.
Eventually we decided to get out of there. If we killed the battery on the flash we would be WAY in a tunnel with no light and no way out...at least no way out that we would be able to see.
So we retreated without seeing this behemoth alligator.
Next time we went out, about a week later, we took flashlights...with lots of batteries. We found the Alligator WAY WAY back in the tunnel. Aside from finding the alligator, we saw that the ground was covered with about 50 million walking catfish. Overall, it was a cool cool tunnel, but not the kind of thing that was easy to swallow with all of the horror movies that I'd grown to love replaying in my mind.
It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.