I was going to do something like edit the underwater video in a logical order, even if it was starting from the end and working back, but I received a demand for whale sharks ASAP, so here's the video from day three of my trip.

In late summer and autumn, whale sharks come to the soupy, plankton-filled shallow waters of Bahia de los Angeles. The bay is stunning, ringed by beautiful desert mountains; the water is warm, and snorkelling with the whale sharks is wonderful! They emerge from the gloom, grey and white spotted giants carrying a collection of remoras. There are huge shoals of herring out there too, attracting sea birds.

There's a theory that we're supposed to stay at least six feet away from the whale sharks, and avoid touching them. It's a great theory, but nobody explained it to the whale sharks, who are very big, and can swim a lot faster then I can. If they're heading right for you, there's really no getting out of the way (and I wouldn't want to kick one in the face with my fins trying). I did get gently brushed on the arm by the tip of a tail on one occasion...

We took a late afternoon dive at Punta Don Juan afterwards, which was a lovely site with more stingrays than I saw anywhere else on the trip. I had a technical issue with my camera, though, so I didn't get much footage from that dive.



Enjoy the whale sharks! I certainly did :-)

I finally got to go diving! The weather and the tides agreed to coincide with my schedule last week, and I went to visit the fish for the first time since January.

It was a very fishy dive - in the deeper water, it seemed like there was a buffalo sculpin lying on every rock, and the shallows were full of little saddleback gunnels. The water here may be murky and green and cold, but you can't say it isn't colourful down there!

It’s somewhere between snowing and hailing outside, and the cold opossum is very grateful for the fact that birds are messy eaters and scatter seed everywhere.

We dove the San Juan Islands on Sept 9th with Bandido Charters, at Bell Island and then Broken Point at Shaw Island. Unfortunately we'd had a weekend of thunderstorms and heavy downpours and the visibility was the worst I've ever had it in the San Juans. On the upside, the last time I dived Bell it was covered in nudibranchs, and that was true again for this dive. So that's mostly what's in this video. I saw 13 different species that day.

For our first day of diving in Little Cayman, the winds and the surface chop kept us on the protected south side of the island. This meant a day of diving lovely, fishy shallow reefs and a wreck called the Soto Trader. The Soto Trader is a true wreck, a 120 foot freighter who sank in 1975 following a fire involving the alcohol it was transporting.



The second day of diving Little Cayman, the winds changed and we got to north to where the famous walls are. They really are stunning walls, dropping away into perfectly visible depths, and covered in life. Lots of tiger groupers being cleaned down there! Plenty to see in the shallower parts too for safety stops and follow up dives - watch out for the scorpionfish at 1.50.



The third day of diving in Little Cayman was just stunning. We did three dives at sites on the Bloody Bay wall and the amazing, fishy reefs above them. I liked the coral formation that looks almost human thirty seconds in :-) The guides told us the pillar coral at Coconut Walk was the largest in the Cayman Islands and that seemed quite likely!



I'm getting there, just one or two more edits to go :-)

Another completely different kind of wreck, this time the Oro Verde, once the 171-foot long USS Palm Beach that went into private hands after she was decommisioned as a spy vessel. She ended her life as a banana transport ship with a side in marijuana smuggling, and she grounded on a Grand Cayman reef in 1976.

Four years later, she was towed off the reef and sunk in a sandy area. Since 1980, various hurricanes moved her back towards the reef and bashed her to pieces on it. She's now a scattered debris field alongside a beautiful section of reef, and a really nice, varied dive. Oh, and someone put some bicycles down there too, because it seemed like a good idea at the time?

The USS Kittiwake is a 251 foot long submarine rescue ship that launched in 1945. She was cleaned up and deliberately sunk as a dive site off Grand Cayman in 2011. Originally she sat upright on the bottom, but a storm tipped her onto her side in 2017.

As a relatively recent sinking, she hasn't accumulated a lot of coral and sponge growth yet, but they're starting. She was also the only site in the Caymans where I saw midnight parrotfish. (I recommend watching in 1080 for fewer pixel artefacts!)

Molokini crater is a semi-circular wall off Makena in Maui. Inside the crater is a shallow reef - the back wall is a long drop exposed to the Pacific where more pelagic species are found.

We did two dives off the back wall with Maui Dreams Dive Company. We'd previously had two fabulous diving days with them, but unfortunately our guides on this day weren't very good. The boat was split fairly evenly between newer air divers and more experienced divers on Nitrox, but instead of putting the advanced divers together, they split us up. This meant those of us diving Nitrox were forced to dive an air profile to stay with the group, and we didn't get to spend much time at depth with the pelagics which are the whole point of diving the wall. What we saw was pretty, but not what I had hoped for when I booked the dives. After the amazing experience I had diving the walls at Lehua off Kaua'i two years ago, this was a bit disappointing.



And with that, Maui's all done! I feel like I've accomplished something :-) I can clear up some HD space on my computer. Now I have to go back to the dauntingly insane number of gigabytes from Cuba...

The 98 foot steel Carthaginian II was built in 1920 and converted into a replica of a whaling ship for the whaling museum in Lahaina. When the boat rusted to the point of being unseaworthy, it was cleaned up and sunk as an artificial reef in 2005.

The dive charters will time dropping you on the wreck to coincide with the visits by the electric Atlantis submarines, which operate out of Lahaina and allow non-divers to visit the reefs. Down on the sandy bottom below the wreck, white-tipped reef sharks spend the day sleeping.

Yes, someone did put a Sponge Bob toy on the side of the wreck...

Yes, I still have a ton of video I haven't edited from the diving trip to Cuba last year. I've been busy! But I'm making a start again...



The Caribbean reef sharks at the Gardens of the Queen in Cuba weren't shy. Often they were curious creatures who meandered by for a closer look. There were plenty of them around too - by the third day of diving, I'd stopped filming every shark I saw. Unheard of!

The inhabitants of the Gardens of the Queen are entirely protected, with the exception of invasive species, like the lionfish. So our guides did a spot of lionfish spearfishing, and the aroma of fish blood completely changed the behaviour of the sharks - suddenly they were faster, searching sharks.

Lionfish have no natural predators in the Caribbean, but a program in the Cayman Islands has successfully been training groupers to eat them. So we fed lionfish to anything that looked interested - the yellowtail snappers were happy to munch on lionfish innards, and so were the sharks...

The divers had our own lionfish dinner back on the boat too, although we had ours cooked first. As usual, watch in HD, although even then some of the youtube encoding is making me cry. Apparently the seagrass is far too much for it to cope with....