Archive for the ‘Diving’ Category

Well my ear is well and truly buggered, but I will be buggered if I am going to pass on a dive with a dolphin. So I brave the stinging salt water that runs into my throat while I pass the 10 meter mark. The dive is not much deeper and a perforation of the eardrum does not actually suffer from the dive, because there is no imbalance of the pressure. Anyway I am sure it is not recommended, but so far… 10 days later when I write this I have no earpain.

The instructions from Gearge the Dolphin trainer of the Dolphin Academy are clear: let her Annie, the dolphin come to you, and don’t start reaching out right away. If you stick to that, she will hang around.

And hanging around she did. For a full 30 minutes she races over the reef like a dog of his leash, to come back to us and play for a while. Soon Annie becomes cuddely with most of the divers, interacting with most of us.

I can immagine how much swimming with a dolphin must mean for autistic children, because by the time I surface I almost feel sane again .  Although Anne Marie of Habitat seems to think I should go for 2 more sessions , to even come close to sanity.

Even though Annie was captured in the wild in Central America, she was trained in a record 6 weeks and goes out to open sea regularly, without wanting to disappear. Dolphins are very intelligent underwater mammals, so I guess if she wanted to get away, she would have done it a long time ago. In the meantime she has convinced me that she is having a good time playing around with landbased mammals of a dive. After diving with an Elephant this is the next best thing I have experiences and I am glad that I decided to withstand the ear trauma.

Annie comes to Jillian for a cuddle

Another year, another dive destination. Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles, where 70% of the tourists come to dive…. must be something good then. It has been a while since we were last underwater with a breathing apparatus. I still have fond memories of diving with Rajan, the swimming elephant of Havelock Island in the Indian Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, last year.

This time we are in the Caribbean Sea, and the water is getting to a nice 27 degrees Celcius. From the Habitat Curacao Resort we start with a boat dive on Mushroom Forest.  A beautiful dive site full of mushroom shaped coral formations.

This is the maiden voyage of my new 8″ dome port for my Nikon D200 Ikelite Housing. With the Sigma full feame 12-24 mm mounted, the postbody was not wide enough, so I had my friend Nico Bodewes, widen the port with two mm to accomodate the lens and was able to customize a zoom ring that fit the narrow space.

The Dive is going well, and my ears… always the weak link, seem to adjust well to the local pressure. After a good 40 minutes we surface with many good shots for the story.

The second dive was a bit more eventful than I planned for. Halfway through the dive, a loud zipping noise splits my right ear and the world starts spinning for a while. I signal to the divemaster that I need to go up…. Jillian, my buddy has a new camera, and 2 buddying photographers with tunnelvission, we now find out, does not work as we have temporarily lost contact. Salt water is eating away at my inner Ear and I know I am buggered with a perforated eardrum for the rest of the trip… and months to come. @#$@$#@$

Life goes on and I will have to concentrate more on the landbased photography.