auchmeddan

It’s been a weird few days.

Just last week I received an email from a friend, warning of “Brown Recluse Spiders” in Bermuda. The email recounted the tale of a man bitten by one of these spiders, and included photos. Within about 2 minutes I sent an email back telling my friend that it was OK, this was a hoax that had been circulating for the past couple of years (see Brown Recluse Link at Snopes.com for the photos) and explained the basics and gave him the link to Snopes.

Unfortunately, the local newspaper “The Royal Gazette” (The Royal Gazette online) also recieved the original email, took it at face value, and published a warning on the front page of Friday’s newspaper which included one of the photos from the hoax. The local TV channel ZBM also started reporting this, and my friend heard it. It turns out he knows the broadcaster (Bermuda is a small place after all) so he called him up to tell him it was a hoax, and forwarded on my email to him.

Sadly, I wasn’t watching the news on Friday night when they read out my email to my friend (with both names removed) debunking the story, and they provided the link to snopes! How funny is that!?

As of today it now appears that there was a man in Bermuda bitten by a spider at some point in the last few weeks, and when his wife went online to find out more information about his injury she found (and fell for) the hoax information and then panicked.

At this point, it seems there’s still no evidence of Brown Recluse Spiders in Bermuda.

I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for them…..along with Giant Squid!

We went Diving at a new dive site today - “Blue Hole”

This is basically a big, blue sand hole about 30-40ft deep, surrounded by Coral Reef. The most striking thing about it for me was how blue it was - it really changed the colour balance of the photos I took.

There was not a lot of interesting fish to see, and the visibility was getting messed up by the resort divers (not their fault - they’re new to diving) but there were thousands of tiny fry/bait fish that were in huge shoals. At one point we had to swim blindly through the shoal of fish, as they were so dense we couldn’t see past them. It was very cool when they parted like a theatre curtain though to reveal the cut in the reef behind them.

It was the 2nd time diving with Eric and Tina, who both had a better experience this week.

The photo highlights were Jules swimming in a swim-through and hovering in the water as the fish start to part as I approach.

I started this as I want to provide updates on the website for friends and family, but I can’t always be bothered creating a new HTML Pages under the updates link. I wanted to update the page because of a dive we did at the weekend, and this seemed an easier way to do it.

We’ll see how it goes.

I’ll back date the dive entry for May 21st.

We got out this weekend to do our first dive of the year in Bermuda….and it was bloody cold! I’m not sure I’m cut out for diving in 73 degree weather anymore.

The main reason Jules and myself went out was to be there when our friends did their first dives in Bermuda, and it was worth putting up with the cold to get pictures of Eric, Tina, and Tina’s brother diving. It was also really cool to see your friends conquer their fear and totally get off on their first dive…and kinda funny to see them kicking like hell and bumping into things! It doesn’t seem like all that long ago that Jules and myself were like that, but I guess 38 dives and two PADI courses makes quite a difference.

They all seemed to enjoy the dive so I hope they go back for more. I’d like to be there to get more photos.

The pic below is the 3 of them (Tina’s calmly kneeling at the back, while I’m trying to block of the guys escape - the instructors had gone to the surface to help someone who’d had a panic attack, and the guys seemed to take this abandonment as a signal to go off exploring!)