Archive for July, 2008
Kleinbaai Great White diving
Monday, July 21st, 2008
Faint of heart avert your eyes.
Oh, what wouldn’t I do for the sake of journalism and first hand story-telling. An interview with Kim, the Shark Lady, led to yet another freezing dip on the itinerary. A rough ride from Kleinbaai brought us into the stormy open sea next to a small island with a fur seal colony. Crammed into a steel cage like sardines in a can, we submerged four at a time to see great white sharks.
To my surprise, I wasn’t scared when the first shark showed up. There was no “TA-NA-NA-NA, TA-NA-NA-NA” playing in my head, nor was there a seemingly deadly dorsal fin breaking the calm of the water. It just appeared out of the blue. The people watching safely from the boat saw it coming and yelled to those in the cage. Curious, one by one the sharks came and circled around. I caught myself thinking that though I preferred watching animals without bars in the way, I’d rather be the one in a cage – watching the sharks, instead of them being the ones confined. In the meantime, the sharks kept coming. Some paraded their magnificence for a few minutes and swam away, others chose to try and see what the cage tastes like. The snorkel in my mouth made it hard to smile, but I had to at the thought of cartoon images of great whites. The sharks can’t help their toothy grin, curved down and making them look evil. I had a chance to see and even feel a bit of this smile, as close as one can without getting seriously hurt, when one four meter-long inquisitive male stuck its nose through the rails. The power of the impact made clear that if these grinning giants had any interest in taking a bite for real, no cage would stop them. In fact, even easier for them would be to simply jump out of the water, as we’ve seen them do countless times, land inside the boat, and have Russian salad for dinner.
On the way back food was the last thing on my mind. Everybody, including the crew, was hurling into a little bucket passed around in circles. Still, totally worth it.
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Adult Whale Watching
Sunday, July 20th, 2008
You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals
So let’’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel…
Using my camera more like a machine gun I only caught the words “..seven liters of sperm..” as Shurik and Vova held on to me, helping me not fall overboard and destroy expensive equipment.
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Fernkloof Nature Reserve
Friday, July 18th, 2008
Some Proteas are pink
Lobelias can be blue
Africa is awesome
You must visit too!
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Zooquery
Friday, July 18th, 2008
Do turtles shed scales from their shell, or was this flake left behind after an encounter with a predator? I don’t have the right answer…
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A Little Bird Once Told Me Its Name
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
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| Mousebird | Bulbul |
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I’m in Africa!
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
Flat-top mountains, red with rocky mohawks. Hills with boulder rims just below round bold tops that remind me of catholic monks’ heads. Blond grass on burnt-sienna fields rich with iron. Brilliant blue skies with pinches of stark-white clouds. I am in Africa.
red hartebeest
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Never, children, ever, go walkabout Africa
Monday, July 14th, 2008
The first one to discourage me from going to Africa was Korney Chukovsky. His quirky Soviet whimsy warned little children, by way of a nursery rhyme, about its mean sharks, gorillas, and crocs whose main objective was to beat and bite them. Only Barmaley, a fat, bloodthirsty bandit was worse, and he too was roaming the treacherous continent, ready to catch, fry, and eat any stray toddlers.
Fear is a simple and efficient weapon in any discipliner’s arsenal. My mother, for one, still tries to utilize it now (though, she mostly manages to scare herself), about twenty years after Chukovsky has given up. Yet, as history tends to prove, powerful weapons tend to backfire. In my case, fear mutated into curiosity, and curiosity, in its turn, gave birth to giddy excitement. Slivers of fear remain now only in a form of little lightning bolts that fire up in my brain, like warning signals, every time I venture too far into the lion’s den. The only trouble, fear is a hungry beast, and it feeds on the unknown. Every newscast, every film portraying Africa (Lord of War, Blood Diamonds, and even the good old Gods Must Be Crazy) fires in my brain in a blinding lightning storm. And I’m a kid again, afraid of Barmaley, only now he is poor and angry with his government, his children are bloated with starvation, and his wife has AIDS. An M16 is in his desperate heartless rebel hands, and he will not hesitate to shoot me in the head for my water bottle.
For lack of real information, with only ugly stereotypes to illustrate what I should expect from Africa, I will be stepping onto the Dark Continent hoping its dangers are only all too hyped by mass media just like the piranha of South America. And if life has it, and there will stand a Barmaley in my path, I’ll take a page out of Chukovsky and have a friendly crocodile incarcerate him in its stomach until he is fully rehabilitated and wishes nothing more than to visit Saint Petersburg.
(left to right) Library, Rout for the next four month, our new lens, and our mascot – Che
Drugs
Tags: pretrip
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Diving Quebec (Canada Roadtrip)
Thursday, July 10th, 2008
Wetsuit diving in Quebec, at ten degrees Celsius (51 Fahrenheit) is literally painful, especially if you take the time to stop and take a picture. One immersion was more then enough for all three of us to fully appreciate the large population of red-gilled nudibranchs, and the size of the local lobsters, under Ile Bonaventure. When we came back to Perce and stepped onto the dock in our 7mm wetsuits, now half undone, a concerned crowd of tourists boarding a whalewatching boat watched us carefully as we unloaded gear. I felt like an extraterrestrial who’d just landed. Thawing under the dive shop’s hot shower was my highlight of the day.
I have almost given up on cold water diving. The only thing that could change my mind was a Greenland shark. Sylvain Sirois was the first one to discover these sharks in Baie-Comeau just five years ago, so, naturally, he was the guy to dive with. Sylvain wears his heart on his sleeve. Discovery Channel interviews have not gone to his head and when he recalled his very first one for us, it was with a lot of shy sarcasm: “I waz zitting der like a little boy zaying: ‘un den I zaw a really really big fizh.’” Skeptical to the probability of actually seeing the rare deep-water shark, especially in a shallow Canadian bay, I was pleasantly surprised when Sylvain delivered and on the first fifteen minutes of the dive we encountered a fourteen feet-long, greenish with dark gray spots, female, that let us trail her for a few minutes. The visibility was horrendous, and I barely have a shot of a fin, but the sight and feel were almost indescribably incredible, though I did try to recapture it that same day for a History Channel’s Monster Quest interview.
The excitement from seeing a huge shark would have probably been enough to forget about the cold, but it also helped that this time we were diving in a dry-suit, which was an experience on its own. Putting it on is, in a way, what getting born must feel like. ( PUSH! HARDER! I can see the head… )
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Canada Roadtrip (Quebec)
Friday, July 4th, 2008
Now Quebec is a welcome breath of fresh ocean air, spectacular views, and the biggest gannet colony in the world. We are here just in time for our fourth wedding anniversary.
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For Entomology Lovers
Friday, July 4th, 2008
Eristalis larvae
( More )
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