Category Archives: encounters

Underneath The Red Tide in South Florida

On Sept 19, 2018 TISIRI's Joe Kistel had the opportunity to video document seafloor conditions offshore southwest Florida. The region has been plagued with an ongoing "Harmful Algae Bloom" crisis. The brief video below provides a visual summary of what was observed underwater at regions 20...
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Invasive Lionfish Populations Increasing?

ABC/NBC news story depicting the high numbers of invasive Lionfish TISIRI Divers encountered. Check out the full news story at the news website here.
9-9-16 Invasive Lionfish have been found offshore the coast of northeast Florida for some time now in substantial populations. However more...
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Lionfish Found in Cold Up-Welling Waters

Yesterday we embarked on a trip to deep waters off the coast of Jacksonville Florida to see if we would find Lionfish in the recent up-welling cold seafloor water temps. We traveled nearly 45 miles east of the coast and visited live bottom and artificial reef...
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Near Death Shark Found with Bullet Wound

12-12-15Today we made a very disturbing encounter at an artificial reef site known as the Casablanca. As shark was found very near death with what appeared to be a head wound caused by a bullet. Below is a brief video clip showing how the shark was...
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Small Lionfish Struggle In Wave Current

On our last few observational and scouting dives we encountered Lionfish. Of course this is nothing new (at least since the invasion began) but our findings were intriguing. We found that every Lionfish we encountered was very small, around two to three inches in length. We...
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Entangled Loggerhead Sea Turtle

8-28-15This past Sunday TISIRI's Larry Davis encountered a dead loggerhead turtle during a recreational dive off the coast of Jacksonville. Based on Larry's observations we decided to send a team back out to relocate the turtle, confirm the death was due to entanglement, and remove any entanglement...
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A glimpse of the most infested Lionfish regions

Notable Lionfish hunters claim the northern Gulf of Mexico contains the highest congregations of invasive Lionfish that they have encountered in all of their Lionfish hunting excursions. This past Sunday a small team investigated a specific region presumed to hold high populations. The team included TISIRI's Joe Kistel (cameraman), FWC's Alex Fogg (Lionfish harvester), and Captain Grayson Shepard (trip host, consultant, and harvester). The team visited two underwater structure sites in the northern Gulf and were astonished with what they encountered. Words can fully describe the experience but the brief video clip below paints a pretty vivid picture.
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Spadefish "Tornado" News Media Story

While filming the sunken vessel below there came a moment when all of the sudden everything became dark. When the divers looked up they found a massive school of Atlantic spadefish blocking the available sunlight. Cameraman Kistel tried to capture some of the encounter and the massive "tornado" shape the school of spadefish created.
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Mischeivous Octopus Dismantles Underwater Camera Housing

Earlier today TISIRI underwater cameraman Joe Kistel stumbled across the same Octopus encountered last week (when it took a great interest in diver Kim Fair). Kistel hoped to make amends with the octopus from last weeks encounter and allowed it to investigate the camera housing. Everything...
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