Hello everyone. In need of urgent help as I am in the middle of a dive trip, currently 1 week in Dauin then heading to Anilao for another week of diving/photographing. When I arrived in Dauin I noticed that my flash trigger was not consistently firing my strobes and even when it did it was out of sync with the camera. Ive had this problem prior due to old batteries in the flash trigger. I replaced the batteries and now when it fires it syncs with the camera. However, I noticed that when it doesn't fire my camera is not detecting the hot shoe. Ive cleaned the connections in the hot shoe and camera. Ive lighted the battery spring so that the batteries are tighter and still having the problem intermittently. It is strange that it works perfectly find on the surface on the camera table but as soon as it underwater problems begin. I little percussive maintenance, hitting the housing sometimes gets it to work which leads me to believe that is a poor contact somewhere. Any advice?

• Try swapping optical fiber cables around

• Clean the glass fiber ports inside and outside (mostly outside) including the strobe

• If your fiber is crimped or bent it might not transmit well

• Using a sharp box cutter blade, cut a few millimeters from the end of the fiber optic cables

….. burp the fibre optic connectors underwater to get any bubbles out.

If both of your strobes are impacted, it's less likely to be a problem with the optical path.

I've seen enough shooters on dive trips have problems with flash triggers that I started carrying a spare trigger and a USB soldering iron.

Actually, one situation was the hot shoe connecter to the flash trigger. We opened it up and the internal wires to the contacts had broken loose resulting in intermittent firing of the strobes. I was able to solder it back together to get it working.