auchmeddan

The day started well with “Snow Cake” - a very well-acted character study starring Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver and Carrie-Ann Moss. It was a moving and humourous movie which Jules and myself both enjoyed a lot. The Director’s Q&A at the end was also very entertaining.

The evening movie was “Destricted” - 5 short movies about sex and pornography. There were 2 good episodes - a short 2 minute montage and Larry Clark’s entry around “gonzo” pornography. The rest of the running time was just a sausagefest. From the opening 5 minute (? - it felt like eternity) shot of a flaccid penis becoming hard I knew some of this movie was going to be awful. I had no idea though that most of the running time was going to be film of guys jerking off! They should have just called the movie “cock, cock, and more cock!”. I think the entire audience was bored into a coma as I didn’t hear a single positive comment as people exited (with the exception of praise for Larry Clark).

We saw the World Premiere of “Holly” last night and the movie was so good that it’s the first time I’ve ever bothered to go vote for a film at the Internet movie database.

Although “Holly” is sombre in tone it is very well done and the central performances are excellent (especially Thuy Nguyen as Holly). I hope this raises awareness for the K-11 Project and they can somehow make some changes to the child-sex industries in Cambodia and Vietnam.

I’m not sure that any other movie we see at the film festival will be able to top this.

We saw the international premiere of the movie “Apart from That” last night at the Edinburgh Film Festival. Apart from about 4 minutes the movie was an exercise in tedium that robbed us of almost two hours of our lives. The directors were coming in at the end of the movie for a Q&A session but I couldn’t wait to leave the cinema. I usually love hearing a director talk about filming but this was such a dull, poorly shot movie that I had no interest at all. The very forced use of “artistic” camera techniques such as out of focus, long shots of characters in conversation, and too close close-ups made it look like a student film and worked together to cause eye-strain and headaches.

I wish we’d just stayed in the bar. I hope the movie we’re seeing tonight “Holly” is better. At least it appears like it will have a story and purpose.

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.

Morag arranged an afternoon out to Vogrie with the kids, my mum and her mum. In the morning I thought it was going to be rained off but the nearer we got to Vogrie the brighter the sun got.

Mum had to meet dad to drop off some tools so she met us later along with Morag’s mum. When we got there Kimberly, Rachel and Joshua all set off running for the park, Morag and I not quite as enthusiastic about the whole thing just walked. Once there the first thing I spotted was the swings, felt like a kid all over again and practically bolted to them. Kimberly, Rachel and I all got on and started swinging for all we were worth. The swings are all set in a circle so when you swing forward all your feet end up together in the middle. Of course this means that we were all trying to kick one another.

Next up was the trampolines where Morag and I tried our best to knock the kids off. It’s set up as lots of little trampolines strung together with rope, pretty cool. While down there my mum and Auntie Doreen (doesn’t seem right to call Morag’s mum just Doreen) showed up with Murphy (my Mum’s Border Collie).

We headed back to the main park where we spun and flung the kids all over the place. Both the mums sat at the side chatting away and probably laughing at Morag and I running around like idiots. Kimberly challenged Morag and I to leap frog the pillars in the park. Kimberly although much smaller than us had no problems leaping over all 6 of them. Rachel gave it her best shot and did them all by jumping, sitting then sliding off. Morag almost head butted the next pillar in the line so stopped at just one. I decided to go for it and to my surprise I managed them fine. Think my mum was just as surprised as I was that I didn’t trip and end up flat on my back. Much fun was had by all.

While having our mid afternoon refreshments I remembered I had the camera on me and got it out to get a few photos of the kids, the best two are below. It was a great afternoon out and I look forward to our day out to North Berwick next week.

Edinburgh appears to be in the grip of a real summer at the moment, with the temperature hovering around 80 degrees. It’s been great to have the heat without the humidity we got used to over the last few years!

Jules and myself celebrated our 9th Wedding Anniversary last week with a late lunch and (more than) a few drinks in the city centre, and we ended up out with friends on my birthday. It’s been a nice relaxed trip home so far as the huge amount of time we have means we don’t feel the need to rush to do anything. It’s given me a lot of time to read and relax, although I am looking forward to going to see the Hibs this weekend.

Things will get a bit more hectic for us in the last 2 weeks in August when the Edinburgh Film Festival runs as I’ve booked us tickets for 12 movies, but I’m really looking forward to that as it’ll be the first time I’ve made it to the Film Festival in seven years. Until then, I’ll be happy if we keep going at the same slow pace.

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.

This was our last day at Tiger Beach, and we managed to get 4 dives in totalling around 5 hours of underwater time.

For me one of the highlights was watching the small Tigers sniffing around in the sand for dead fish, and then working some scraps through their jaws. We also saw a large Tiger flex it’s jaw outwards out of it’s mouth, and got a good idea of what the bite radius of one of these sharks would be. It was a pretty fearsome sight and a good reminder just how dangerous the Tiger Sharks are, just in case anyone had gotten too complacent around them. Jim Abernethy’s words of warning from early in the trip came back to me.. “If a Lemon bites you I can take care of that. If a Tiger bites you you’ll die out here”.

By the end of our 4th dive all of our group were tired and agreed we were finished, and as we rinsed off our gear I said a silent, sad goodbye to the Sharks of Tiger Beach. The week was an incredible experience that we’d repeat again in a heartbeat if we can ever afford to fly back from New Zealand.

The crew of the “Shear Water” were great and maybe someday we’ll get to see Ed, Lew, Wade and Jim again. I hope so.

This turned out to be a much easier day. After a morning dive at Tiger Beach we moved to a beautiful reef at around 60ft and did a couple of dives here with some Caribbean Reef Sharks. These guys were so small (5ft or so) that they were cute.

The reef itself was beautiful and was home to more fish than you could count. We saw everything from friendly Grouper to Rock Beauties, with highlights including a large Green Moray Eel, a Nassau Grouper that followed me around like a little dog, and a small school of Tuna.

It was nice to have a couple of dives where we could just relax and enjoy the scenery.

I didn’t change my camera batteries before the first dive, and as a result I ran out of camera power after 2 minutes. As it happened, that turned out to be a good thing as we ended up with 3 large Tigers on this dive and 2 of them circled each of us in turn. The worst part was when 2 Tigers swam towards me then split to both sides and circled me in different directions, making it impossible to keep my stick between both of them or watch them both. It was a very hectic dive and would have been even harder with a camera.

The 2nd Dive was a lot calmer and gave me time to shoot some video and stills. The 3rd Dive was the highlight of the day, as a 16ft Great Hammerhead came in for a look at us. Unfortunately, he didn’t get close enough to me for a decent photo but it was incredible just being in the water with this large prehistoric-looking fish.

We did a night dive this day, and as 8 of us nervously prepared to get into the water with the sharks Wade (The Chef) had the funny idea to play Jaws on the video player inside the cabin and blast the music outside. In a strange way, the humour of it calmed me a little and made my step into the water easier. He might have been nice enough to spare us the opening shark attack though, as I could have done without donning my gear to the sound of a woman’s death screams!