Sea kayaking on Morecambe Bay

A beautiful sunny day, flat seas and high tides-what more could you ask for!

Oceanminds

I've just discovered a new and exciting idea. Oceanminds is a social networking site devoted to marine interests. Sort of like facebook for the oceans. you can join at http://www.oceanminds.com/

Spearfishermen kill tiger shark

This is all a bit after the fact, but for those of you who haven't heard the story....http://www.nypost.com/seven/03122009/news/...ooth_159201.htm

The long and the short of it is that a group of spear fishermen while out fishing for tuna shot and killed a tiger shark. Their apparent motivation for this was that they felt that thye were being threatened by the shark. However examination of the video(!) that they shot shows no sign of aggresive behaviour at all. I used to spearfish back in South Africa, and we regularly had to deal with sharks, normally a bang on the nose was enough to turn them, or if they were really determined, they got away with my catch-but I never envisaged actually shooting one.

In my eyes, they further darkened their act by selling the video they had shot of the event. It is here http://video.aol.com/video-detail/diver-fights-off-12-foot-shark/3475778870

I guess the truth is that when we venture into the water with a gun (or on land for that matter) it gives us the option of using it in self defense as we see it. We are all probbaly quick to pull the trigger when we have a trigger to be pulled! These guys did one of these two things
1. the shark was cruising them and they panicked (this is not cool to admit to!) and shot it and then realised that they had to finish the job. The after the fact marketing of the event was a positive spin on what was a gut panic reaction.
2. the shark was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time-it swam into Craig Clasen's sights whan he was keyed up and he pulled the trigger. This happens! Again all the events after are simply to justify this.
For more info see wetpixel at: http://wetpixel.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=29214 or join the Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=74037951270 The latter has 3379 members from all over the world.

Yet more pictures from Capernwray

I was lucky enough to make the most of this lovely weather we are having here and get in for a dive on Wednesday afternoon. The water was gin clear, and the sun was streaming through-lighting everything up. My plan was to find the Sturgeon and try and get some pictures to emulate Dereks and Mark's, but the Sturgeaon had other ideas and wasn't in his normal haunts. I did find the new big black Sturgeon over near the Candida, but he wasn't in a mood to be photogenic! Got some good piocs of the Cndida, and then the helicopter on the way back. Once I got near the slipway, I noticed and old Brown trout that seemed to be shadowing me-so I got a load of pictures of him too!

More diving pictures from Capernwray

Sturgeon picture at capernwray

Sturgeon.
Originally uploaded by hsacdirk

This is one of those pictures that I really wish I could say was mine! What a fantastic picture. It is actually an inspiration-I've been in diving a few times to try and re-create it!

Migrating from Wordpress to Blogger

I wasn't happy with the look and feel of the blog being embeded within a frame, rather than being intgtrated into the www.adamhanlon.com sites look and feel.

The smumug support forum on Dgrin is an amazing source of nformation with some incredibly talented and helpful people on it. It is amazing these guys and girls willingly give up their time to help "mugs" like me out!

Anyway, there was a lot of posting about customising a blogger blog-but the options were very limited on Wordpress-so I bit the bullet.

The actual customization went pretty smoothly-just following the excellent instructions on the dgrin forum-then how to get the posts from Wordpress and onto blogger. After a fair ammount of googling and some trial and error, and I found Blog2blog This amazing bit of free software works like a charm-many thanks to it's writer Paul Cooley!

So you will be reading this post on my new blog-I plan to run down the wordpress one over the next few months.Please bear with me while I get the links etc up and running

Friends Found - Sharks of Tiger Beach Bahamas

Check this out! Beautiful film of amazing animals:

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!