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September 6, 2018

An Underwater View

BY: Aimi Hamberg

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Today, we got to be out and film with the drop-video camera for several hours, since we now have two boats in addition to our floating home and office. The drop-video camera is an inventory tool that is widely used in both Sweden and Finland for marine inventories in the Baltic Sea. It allows you to efficiently cover a large area, although you usually cannot determine all the species you see on the video. It does however give you an idea of the type of substrate and vegetation and conditions that prevail at each filmed point.

As the name suggests, it is a video camera that you drop, or rather, descend from the boat to film underwater. Usually the camera is kept around half a meter to a meter from the seafloor and an area of approximately 5 m square is filmed. There is a monitor that shows you in real-time what you are filming, but you have no way of controlling the movements of the camera, so the weather must be good enough to film, (i.e. the waves are not too big, and you need a calm and good boat driver). This especially holds true in the Quark area that is famous for its countless isles and islets and there are rocks everywhere, even in places you’d never suspect. We filmed between 0,4-20 meters and saw a wide array of different bottom substrates and vegetation, even some fish and benthic animals got caught on film.

On good days, as was today, filming with the drop-video camera is the most relaxing thing in the world, the sun was shining, and every film gave us more information about the precious underwater world of the Quark.