Anthology comes from Greek words meaning "to gather flowers." In this collection of underwater stories, we have harvested from among those who explore the depths of the ocean realm, choosing extraordinarily well crafted professional sequences and placing them alongside more roughly made footage by dedicated amateurs. Our goal has been to assemble an anthology that shows the splendid diversity of life and behavior hidden beneath the waves, but also to create a dive album that showcases the extended family of scuba divers that has grown up since the invention of the aqualung six decades ago.

We hope that Sensational Seas will evoke the thrills of diving − those priceless moments when you want to yell WOW into your regulator and you seem to have merged with the sea. John Steinbeck, in his book The Sea of Cortez, provides to my mind all the rationale we need for taking time out from our demanding routines to explore this new world: "...we simply liked it. We liked it very much.... the gardens of the sea, and the beer and the work, they were all one thing and we were that one thing too."

In some of the most fascinating footage in Sensational Seas, the ocean opens up and speaks and acts with its own multitude of voices and dramas: we hear the songs of humpback whales, feel the fear prey does for predator, see through the eyes of a bird as it hunts beneath the waves. Such sensational achievements in video are rare and worth celebrating, perhaps ultimately because they transform our earth-anchored state of mind, remove us from daily cares, and make us affirm that we like diving, we like it very much.

~ William Warmus