auchmeddan

I had some footage from our Reef Dive in the middle of our Shark Trip, and have put together a short clip of some of the highlights. It made sense to leave this out of the original video, but I wanted to put it up so friends back in Bermuda can see the difference between what they are used to and what they can see if they head to the Bahamas. If you can take your eyes off the reef sharks you’ll see there are a lot of fish out there.

I shot some video with my underwater camera while we were on the trip and have compiled a short video. The video gives a better impression of how busy Tiger Beach is in a way still photos can’t capture.

The video is around 18MB and runs for 2:30 mins. More photos will be added to the Bahamas Photo Gallery when I get onto a high speed line here.

We had a full briefing from Jim while at dock in the Bahamas, then headed out in 6-9ft seas to make our way to Tiger Beach.

While a lot calmer at Tiger Beach, the weather was too rough to dive as the water was a little bumpy and the vis wasn’t that great. The crew still managed to entertain us all though by chumming the water for a while until Lemon Sharks started to show up. When they did, Jim got down on the back step as the crew slapped fish on the water in front of his Camera and attempted to wrangle the sharks onto the swim platform. They did pretty well, and everyone got their first good look at some of the Lemon Sharks and a very brave little Reef Shark that came in for some of the bait.

Jim liked the little Reefie’s spirit so much he asked Ed to let the Reefie take a bit of the fish. It was quite Joyous to see it grab a piece and race off.

The Video below is some Shark Wrangling from Day 2 (much calmer weather) and ends with the little Reefie from Day 1.

Did some pretty good diving this morning, the highlight being our safety stop hanging out with two Remoras. I hadn’t really noticed them gunning for us so when they abruptly arrived right at my face I nearly had a heart attack. I didn’t know what they were but they were about 2 feet long and looked kinda shark like. Wasn’t too sure about them to start with and when one of them swam right up my body then to my face I actually made a little whimpering noise. I saw Dave laugh at me then give me the “OK” sign, so I figured they couldn’t be that bad if he was laughing.

Our safety stop was long over but as they were still hanging around we stayed down for 10 mins or so. One of them tried to attach itself to Dave’s arm while he was filming. Was so cool having them playing with us and coming in so close. What a great morning diving on Jim Abernethy’s day trip boat, the 6 day shark trip on “Shear Water” should be awesome.

We did our last dive at Southwest Breaker yesterday, but it ended on a high thanks to Ondrej telling us about “Charlie”.

Charlie is a Yellow-tailed DamselFish that lives in a spent Artillery shell that the Americans used to fire at Southwest Breaker for target practice. I won’t get into how I feel about the Yanks using a millions of years old formation for target practice…

Anyway, Charlie is a very aggressive (I can attest that he bites) and very houseproud little fish. If you put a small stone on top of his home and make him aware of it, he throws it away into the reef.

The video below shows Jules playing with him on what was her 200th Dive in Bermuda. Thank you Ondrej for drawing us a map so we could find him.

During our week off together we took a dry day and went to Somerset Bridge to feed the fish. While we were there I got some film of a Scrawled CowFish that lives there. The video is below. I removed the sound as the noise of the traffic crossing the bridge was a bit distracting.

We went down to Somerset Bridge today to feed the fish some crackers and tape some video. After we ran out of crackers we stopped on the bridge to watch a Scrawled CowFish that was feeding on a dead fish. While I was staring at that little guy, Jules spotted a Porcupine Fish in the shallows and I grabbed the camera back out the bag.

There is a little bit of video of this cute little guy below.

The file is around 8MB, so if you’re on a slow link hit the pause button until the video finishes loading.

I finally got around to doing something with our Bungy footage from our New Zealand Vacation in February 2005. The largest one is the Nevis Highwire Bungy - a 134M jump from a cablecar.

The file is around 16MB, so if you are on a slow connection I’d recommend hitting play, then pause the file until the bar builds up along the bottom. When it nears the end, press play.

Posting a little Music Video I made around our skydive and bungy jumps in Las Vegas. The Video is around 14MB, so it will take forever on dial-up but will be fine on DSL and up.