Lucia Griggi
UK

2nd Place - Merit of Excellence

"Underwater Surfer"

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and there certainly is a story behind this one. To get to this position I took a 40-minute boat ride from the main island of Nadi to an outer reef in the middle of nowhere. One thing I DON"T like doing is leaping from a perfectly safe boat to swim across a deep, black channel, to get to the reef. With every stroke, all I hear is the Theme From Jaws, which inspires images of tiger sharks swimming up at me at Mach One. But I made it from the imagined danger of the channel to the real danger of the reef - swimming under open ocean swells thundering on a shallow reef. Dangerous but beautiful, and I did a lot of swimming, and dodged a lot of bombs and took a lot of photos and used a great deal of card space to come up with this one image. The next day I was riding on the back of a Personal Watercraft taking photos, when the driver zoomed into the danger zone to rescue a surfer who had wiped out bad. We got caught up in the turmoil and I fell and drowned several thousand dollars worth of 21st Century digital photographic equipment. So, a lot of trouble and strife goes into taking photos like this, and I want to thank you for your appreciation and respect.