Friends Found - Sharks of Tiger Beach Bahamas

Check this out! Beautiful film of amazing animals: [youtube]MRe6gG47710[/youtube]

Trout feeding at Capernwray

While diving today with Ian Smith, Anthony Gattrell and Alf Yates, Guido was stood throwing some bread into the water. The trout are so hungry at present that a feeding frenzy rapidly ensued. It may not be a Sardine baitball on the Wild coast or chumming for Tiger sharks(!) but the action was pretty fast and furious!  

BBC's Natures Great Events-Sardine Run

The episode of the excellent BBC Natures Great Events series covering the Sardine Run off South Africa's East coast goes to air in the UK on Wednesday night (4th March). If the trailer (and the preceeding episodes) is anything to go by, we are in for some fantastic footage. I am planning a trip to SA in 2010 to dive the Sardine Run-so this is a great program to get your enthusiasm going!

Pictures from out on the Mussel beds

We get big flocks of Oyster catchers, Curlews, Gulls and Dunlin at this time of year. Whilst investigating the mussel beds (see previous post) I took some pictures!

The demise of Morecambe Bay's mussel beds

I spent some time walking out on the mussel beds around my house in Heysham, and was shocked to see how denuded they are. For the past two summers, there has been mussel gathering on an industrial/commercial scale. Large gangs of labourers, accompanied by dozens of quad bikes with trailers have quite literally stripped the mussel beds. I walked out on the beds early last year, and was encouraged by the amount of re-growth that had occurred since the harvesting of the previous year, but the mussels were very small. I assumed that the size would render the beds uneconomic for the 2008 season. However the gangs were back in force-apparently, they were taking these tiny mussel as "seed". They were stripped out of the beds, and taken elsewhere (to Ireland I believe) to be grown on to a commercial size.  This illustrates the ammount of profit that is to be made-and equally that the profits didn't return into the local economy. This strikes me as a ludicrous system, and one that the sea fisheries protection should prevent. The wholesale destruction of any marine species in an area is not acceptable. There was no attempt to do so in either an way that is sustainable or that would encourage re-growth. In farming this would be called slash and burn-and yet it is going on adjacent to a mid sized town in one the most highly developed nations in the world!  I will be watching this year!

Forgotten Pictures

Sometimes you need to browse your picture library! I was doing so today and came across this image from the Red Sea last November   I really like it-and I hope you do too!

Earth-touch.com

Another amazing source for wildlife/nature video is earth touch http://www.earth-touch.com/ Also primarly South African based-enter Sardine Run into their search engine!

More Sardine Run footage

More amazing footage of the Sardine Run off South Africa's east coast. [youtube]ulzv7tG8-PQ[/youtube] Shot by Stuart Ireland This won the award for short video at the Antibes film festival in 2006. By all accounts, the run in 2008 was even more spectacular!

Diving Yesterday

I was diving yesterday, completeing two PADI adventure dives with a student. I've spent a while either out of the water, or not being able to carry a camera on a  specific dive, so it was great to be able to take few pictures! It is hard to juggle the responsibility of a student with the needs of photography! Many thanks to Dave(s) Morgan and Elliot and Antony Gattrell for backing me up!