The housing flood: Every underwater photographer’s personal Pearl Harbor. Unexpected, and catastrophic! There is nothing worse than having a camera in a housing full of seawater. You won’t get to take pictures, and you will have to fork over lots of $ again, or live underwater-camera-less in the future. The latter is of course not an alternative at all!
But just as the US Navy in WWII regrouped and fought its way all across the immense Pacific ocean, we as underwater photographers can learn from a flood how to avoid future ones. What can we do to avoid floods?
My friend Jerry, who once manned a nuclear submarine in the aforementioned US Navy, taught me the term “submarine tight”. It’s the opposite of “finger tight”. As a biology student, I was taught to tighten the screws of scientific equipment juuuust so that I could loosen them with two fingers again. Don’t use too much force, I was told! That’s not what you are supposed to do when assembling submarines or camera housings, though. “We broke some wrenches making screws submarine tight” in Jerry’s words. Stuff which keeps sea water out needs to be screwed together tiiight! All screws which keep your housing together need to be submarine tight.
Another good tips to avoid a flood: Assemble your housing with enough time ahead of your dive. If you are not in a rush, you won’t be sloppy on the assembly. The night before the dive is usually a good time. Assemble before “Beer O’Clock”, too!
Also: Test dunk your housing, once it’s all assembled. Put it in a full dunk tank, and don’t walk away! Instead, look for bubbles. There will be a few bubbles, initially, from air trapped in the spaces on the sides of buttons, or in the fabric of the lanyard you might have attached to the housing. But there should be no, no, no! Bubbles coming from the seams where you close the housing or attach the lens ports.
Some of the leak alarm systems which camera manufacturers sell are also quite useful. There are basically vacuum-sensor systems, which detect if air gets into your housing, while still on land. If that’s the case, you have a leak which will let in water when underwater. Typically a light will change color, and you know that you need to redo the housing assembly. The other type of alarm system is a humidity sensor, which goes off when its contacts sense water inside the housing. These will only alert you to a problem when its almost too late – in the water. Hopefully this happens on the surface or during the first few meters on your way down.
These alarm systems are sometimes available as part of your housing system (like in my Hugyfot housing) or they can be installed separately, on the strobe cable connector ports, for instance. I’ve had rather poor experiences with them. The humidity sensor in my Hugyfot housing for my 5DII once had a false alarm, causing me to go on an unpleasant surface swim back to the entry site, with the camera held up high in the air (so that no more water would come in through the “leak”). The warning systems also broke down after a few months, due to corrosion in air. The manual indeed says to only open the housing in air conditioned rooms, but that’s not always practical. I am not using any such warning systems right now, instead I am extra careful during the assembly and the test dunk.
Happy diving & hope to see you underwater! To no floods (at least none soon). If it happens anyway, it’s Neptune’s way of saying you should get a camera upgrade.
