Macro with Strobes pointing inwards

Hi, I recently came back from a trip to New Caledonia and was practicing some more macro photography with black backgrounds against open space while snorkelling around in about 2-3m of water.

I pointed my strobes (2 x Z-240's) inwards and they were basically just to the right and left of the port. While shooting I noticed the photo's were coming out quite cloudy ? I only had about 15mins in the water at this time so didn't try to move around the strobes too much, but I was under the impression that there is too much light in the front of the lens, hence the white cloudy type images. Should I be moving my strobes back more, perhaps mid way to the left and right of the port and casing ?

Here is an example pic

First were the strobes firing? It looks to me (difficult to know without details of exposure depth etc) that there was enough ambient light of poor quality with the aperture ISO shutter speed you were using to get more or less the right exposure without strobe light if you were on TTL flash then the strobes would barely flicker leaving your bluey diffuse ambientlight to do the job.

More detail please.

Tim Digger