Basking in Sharks

It's not often that you get to realise a dream. After years of wanting, several false starts, cancelled trips and no shows, we've got our act together and with the help of a great contact who put us in touch with dedicated captain, wildlife guardian and seaman James Fairbairn, we've finally found basking sharks. Five days of searching the scottish islands were always going to be a long shot, but it's hard to sum up the dedication and resolve of James who has literally bent over backwards to help us on our task. Nerves were frayed on monday when we arrived at the location on a dull and misty, typically scottish day. Not good weather for plankton who prefer, like people I guess, to stay away from all that and sink down to the depths where it's half a degree warmer. The sharks followed the plankton on their never ending quest for food, and we were left sat peering into a never ending greyness, wiping drips of scotch mist from our noses, with only a gannet, a puffin and several jellyfish to keep us entertained.

Tuesday was even more frustrating when on arrival at the site on a windless calm sea, and glorious baking sunshine, we were greeted with not the slightest sign of fin or tail. We wracked our brains for an idea as to why the sharks had not shown. Perfect text book Basking Shark conditions, in the place recommended as being the most likely place for the sharks to show. Nothing. Nada. We couldn't work out why, except for the idea that maybe a seawitch had cursed us all at birth and we were destined never to set eyes on a basking shark. However, later in the day, we rounded a point and there they were, first one, then a pair, then gradually through the afternoon serveral rose from the depths to see us acheive our goal.

Giant mouths under those big round noses and coal black eyes, nothing can prepare you for the gentleness and apprent vulnerabilty of these giants. One always has a preconception of how a shark will behave when you come across it, and it's easy to look at those cavernous mouths and think that a shark might swallow you whole. There's plenty of room between those rakers. But when they approach you, they are very aware that you are there, sometimes gently veering to avoid us, sometimes closing down that gape and opening it again once passed. Despite the sheer size of them, they give off an air of distinct vulnerabilty and shyness.

Of all our group on board, the one to breath the heaviest sigh of relief was Nuno Sa, Wildlife Wonders of Europe photographer on his mission to cover Scotland's Basking Sharks. He certainly has a knack of being in the right plankton stream, in front of the right shark at the right time.

We all have some material to take home with us, but so far we are still looking for the shot to beat all other shots. Two more days to go and with the weather with us we have a good chance of cracking it. I will post an update at the weekend.

To arms once again...

...or at least concentrate on sitting writing a blog for once...My good friends at The Shark Group have developed another petition, to further enhance their campaign to get discovery channel to give sharks a more balanced news worthiness and a better place in the public eye.

It is not new thinking that sharks are being edged towards extinction through finning, as much as they suffer at the hands of those doing the finning, fishing and general killing, they also suffer at the hands of the nonchalant. For evil to prevail and all that....

As any businessman will tell you, PR is king. If one does not have the face that wins a thousand hearts, one will not prosper. Sharks have always suffered a bit of a PR problem; as one person commented once on one of my photos...hmmph..sharks should learn to smile more. He's dead right of course, yet as janet Street Porter knows, it's very difficult to be known for your smile when you have too many teeth jammed in your mouth.

Discovery Channel on the other hand, should know better. Wikipedia, the online infnopedia (the no-info cyclopedia), states that discovery channel "provides documentary programming focused primarily on popular science, technology and history". But then Oscar Wilde, the man with a quote for all occasions, once said that "everything popular is wrong". Addendum: Discovery Channel = Wrong science, wrong history, and wrong technology. Well done Oscar, I couldn't have put it better myself.

The sad truth is that discovery channel has, as with much of modern culture, dumbed down, if it could ever really be said that it ever dumbed up in the first place. That is all very well, if the only victims of empty headed tv gazing are the people doing the watching. There's nothing wrong with watching a bit of car crash tv, a tiring day passes all the more painlessly if we can watch someone walk into our homes via the plasma screen, and show us that things aren't so bad after all, because they've got it a whole lot worse....cue oprah, jeremy, so on and so on...
But there comes a point where the producers, commissioning editors and so on, should realise that there is an effect on society of this uber-pap way beyond that of their precious ratings.

Sharks are in deep trouble. Discovery Channel must wake up to that fact. They must answer our call for more balanced programming, and drop the incessant shark "killing machine" persona present in virtually all of shark week's listings.

Please sign the petition and pass it on to everyone you know.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Boycott-Shark-Week

End of the Line

As World Oceans Day approaches (June 8th, only 16 days away), it is really so important to remember exactly why we are concerned about the all enveloping entity that we love: The Ocean. It is still currently seen as stylish to be really into eating seafood, and it is precisely that which makes us prone to damaging the world's oceans. I'm not going to try to sum it up any more than that, as the trailer for this film does that as much as I think it should or could. I'm going to go and watch it, I hope you all will too.

Pied Piper of Sydney

Oh sweet sigh of relief, it's the end of 2008. As the hands of time approach midnight for us here in the UK, we look back on another year of wonderment at the inane stupidity of our race. New year always fills me with a sense of excited anticipation, and draws with it a concentration of all the bad things that happened in the passing year as it slides into nothingness. But really, the tingle of anticipation is merely a caffeine jab during an annual coffee break in the endless march of time. Deep down even though we hope for better, in 12 months time we will be thinking of all the bad things that happened in the last year and hoping for improvement.

2009 has been designated International Year of the Shark, an idea initiated by The Shark Group, so to help out in this worthy amassing of likeminded souls in favour of our dwindling sharks, then please join up with the facebook group or the Shark Group list (see links) to keep up to date with what's going on throughout the year.

Whilst I like to keep up to date with shark news from around the world, I rarely post it on here, as there are plenty of avid bloggers from around the world much better at news blogging than I. However, recent events in Australia made me ponder the relationship between ourselves and the natural world.

Thanks to advances in global media aquisition, we can now happily partake in, and enjoy, freely shot home-video standard editing from a consumer-cam shooter on many news subjects. Whislt this 'advancement' is a cursed bane to all in the media industry except the corporate accountants, it does allow us to look at the story without worrying whether some vital information had been cleverly left out.

If you take a look at the first link, you will see what appears to be a disgruntled grudge bearing shark hungrily circling some aussie kayakers, and you would be fogiven for thinking that this might be the case. But, a little later on in the shaky filming, we can see a healthy collection of fishing rods attached to each canoe. I would imagine that the shark was attracted to the bait used in the fishing process, as opposed to the skinny australian kayaker floating on his piece of inert plastic. If we hadn't been able to see that vital piece of visual information, we would have been at the mercy of the writer and his opening paragraph.

rods-a-plenty

The second piece also involves the attraction of a great white to fishing activity, and the couples' close shave as it again bumped their boat. The two events demonstrate well our misgiven superiority over the natural world, or at least a grave lack of education in marine enviromental safety.

crab with extra salad?

After reading these pieces, I imagined how surprised or not you would be if you baited hyenas in the serengeti to get good photos of them, and then got eaten by a lion, and whether there would be a gruff khaki wearing guy in the backgroud claiming they should have all been shot.

Thanks cheap media. THE TRUTH WILL OUT.

Online Traders Drop the Fins.

Members of international conservationists "The Shark Group" are breathing a sigh of relief after online trading giant Taobao.com promised to end its controversial online trade in shark fins.
Taoboa.com, a subsidiary of Alibaba.com has received close attention from various conservation groups worldwide, who have been highly critical of their online trade in shark fin products facilitated by alibaba company policy to facilitate free trade, even in endangered species.
The issue had been complicated by a lack of control in international trade in shark products, and the near impossible task of identifying protected and non protected species. Some shark species are protected by international trade laws, and some are not. Identification of different shark species is nearly impossible once the fins have been removed from the bodies.
This week, Alibaba, china's biggest online marketplace, bowed to pressure and announced that the decision by taobao was a company-wide initiative, and that it encouraged its users to report any incidences of shark fin trade, saying that perpetrators would be "suitably punished". The announcement follows a move to ban all trade in endangered species on the group's websites in an attempt to paint a more ethical company face.
A tireless campaign was mounted by members of The Shark Group to pressurise Alibaba to ban the sale of shark fin products by its member traders. Online trade in shark fins accounts for a significant portion of total fins traded, with a number of suppliers claiming to be able to supply in excess of 2 tonnes per month (around 50,000 sharks).
Although this is a red letter day in the conservation movement's diary, there is still a long way to go. In excess of 100 million sharks are slaughtered every year to satisfy demand for shark fin soup, and online trade represents only a portion of that trade. Open markets exist in many parts of Asia, and The Shark Group was quick to point out that the trade could resurface in other forms, and that demand for shark fin soup remained high.
The shark group was formed in 2007 by Alex "Sharkman" Buttigieg and Ila France Porcher and has quickly gained momentum as a premium force in shark conservation. They have initiated 2009 as International Year of the Shark which has attracted support from all corners of the globe, and this event marks a good start to the year.

Tiger White's Demise - A Shark's Fate

Blogging is a wierd process. What to leave in? What to leave out? Some blogs seem to follow each and every turn of the week, from important to ordinary, and others, such it seems as mine, only get added to when there is something that just cannot go unmissed.
Whilst it's always good to be inspired to write something by a turn of good fortune, or an unforgettable day in the water, there are weeks that are so full of bad news that writing about them becomes a must. Last week was such a week.
First of all came reports that Great Whites had been killed on the Queensland coast in Australia by drumlines, and then only a few days afterwards came some saddening images passed onto me by my good friend Wolfgang Leander, who had recived them from friends in Aliwal South Africa. Two large tiger sharks laying dead in a boat, the latest victims to the Natal Sharks Board's rediculous strategy of shark nets and drumlines to 'protect' the public from these incredible animals.
It's always sad to see a dead shark, but these Aliwal animals have become like members of the dive community's family. To see them killed in this unnecessary way is more than just another dead body amongst the annual millions that take place.
But more worrying than the dead sharks is the blatant pig headedness of the protectionate that cause this environmental damage. Both the Australian and South African authorities responded in a shocking 'holier than thou' totalitarianist monologue, of the type historically atttributed to military dictators or perfidious religious leaders.
These imposing bodies claim to exist in the dual interests of public protection and environmental understanding. We know the effectiveness of drumlines to be completely farcical, and really how long can large industrial sized gillnets, that catch all manner of marine life in an indiscriminate fashion really be tolerated by an increasingly environmentally aware public. That said, one imagines the scientific practice from these institutions to be driven by aeons old techniques such as disection, coupled with rows of jars full of stained formaldehyde containing yet further disected shark parts, accompanied by coffee stained and scrumpled pages of derelict notes that will never be peer reviewed.
Why? Because the peers have moved on, unlike the Natal Sharks Board or Queensland's Shark Patrol Program who insist on living with the day before yesterdays methodology. Modern science has moved on from the dark days of yore. Population counts, direct observation, satelite tagging, acoustic tagging, bathymetry and eco system viability are the order of today. Yesterday's decrepit methods of studying dead bodies, and the entire cerebral disfunctionality that goes with it have no place in conservation as it has grown to be.
These governmental organisations are failing. They are failing the animals that we have placed laws by which to protect, and they are failing the people that have put them in their places of power. Their outstanding failure to genuinely understand the animals that they have been placed in a position of power to protect, is only duplicating that ingorance on an unsuspecting public.
The tide must change on this issue.

permission to use photos not obtained. please contact in the event of an issue and i will take them down.

Cowes Week 2008

When the water in the UK is just too green to go diving (which is about 360 days of the year!!) there is only one thing you can do....go and get some yacht action. Cowes is a lively little town made explosive with the annual arrival of this massive sailing event. Many classes of craft are there in force, and the shoreside entertainment is not short thrift. But hey, too much time in cold water has seen the end of my dancing days, or maybe I've just become too serious in my not so old age.

Anyway, what draws me to Cowes is not the party scene, but the chance to get some fantastic images of some magnificent craft, being plied by their magnificent crafstmen sailors. There's not much more exilharating (apart from sharks!) than watching a few tonnes of hull being wrenched over towards the boiling murk by many square yards of sail, with a lot of creaking ang groaning, louder than the slap of heavy wave against the port side. No thats not my joints creaking, it's all that superb maritime engineering pitting itself against mother nature and all that a mildly disappointing light August breeze can throw at it. The subtle scent of the broiling Solent, the misty salt air and the creaking and groaning of the worlds finest watercraft are enough to send me on a high, and chasing them about in a RIB trying to get some images that sum the magic up is a challenge that I shall not soon be bored of, at least whilst the sea close to where I live refuses to give up it's underwater secrets.

Pictured is an Extreme 40, probably the most exciting craft on the water today, an absolute thrill to watch and something of an addiction, leaving me hankering for the next time I can see them in full swing.