Plan · Bucketlist Tours
What It Really Looks Like
Not the brochure. The water, filmed on real nights, with the settings locked.
Every photograph and every video you have seen of this is electric blue. All of mine are too.
That is not what your eyes are going to see, and I would rather tell you here than have you floating in the dark quietly disappointed.
1. What the camera sees and what you see
In near-total darkness your eyes stop using the cells that read colour and switch to the ones that only read light. So you see whitish sparkles. Maybe a pale green. Only at its peak does it pick up any hint of blue.
A camera sensor has no such limit. It reads the real wavelength, and the real wavelength is blue.
The camera says blue. Your eye says white. Both are telling the truth.
2. The first fifteen minutes
This is what the water looks like when you first get there. Almost nothing. They need movement to glow, and your eyes need fifteen minutes to adapt.
Do not judge anything in the first ten minutes.
3. An average night
The halo runs six to ten inches from the skin. Several hundred separate sparks, about a quarter of an inch apart.
This is what I call average. My guests call it astonishing. They are measuring against nothing they have ever seen.
4. A peak night
Close to twenty-four inches, at twice the density. It stops being points. It goes milky and continuous, like powder dissolved in the water.
These are the nights I live for.
5. The arm test
Lift your arm slowly. Some of them stay on your skin and keep blinking in the open air. Thirty or forty on an average night. Hundreds on a peak night.
Lift it fast and they run off before you can look.
6. Under the pontoon
Under the platform there is no moon.
7. After heavy rain
Four inches of rain in six hours, and the moon at ninety percent. Fresh water is lighter than salt water, so it sat on top like a lid. From the surface the bay looked dead.
Underneath, the light was all still there.
8. A guest's night
This is the footage you take home.
One question tells you what kind of night you are in. Can you see separate points of light, or has it gone milky?