Mother and Baby’s Day Out
This is what you get when you understand and respect the whales: a mother and her calf for one hour, on their terms.
The Full Half of the Glass
For every yin, there is a yang. One moment passive, the next minute aggressive. There is a time to strike, and a time to stand down. To seek new thrills, or just to stand still.
I am normally a glass-half-empty kind of guy, but my rantings and ravings need to be balanced by some semblance of positivity, lest the universe go out of whack.
So here’s looking at the glass half-full:
License to Kill
Update, 24 September 2022: I thought I was done with Malpelo after this tragic accident happened, but in 2018 I met Tony, the owner of Ferox, when he was just starting trips to Malpelo. Tony sailed this 11-mm-hull ice breaker from Sweden to Colombia when he bought it. I found all safety equipment, including firefighting gear to fire suppressants, when I did my personal tour of the boat. Ferox and Tony made it possible for me to go back to Malpelo.
Learn about my trips on Ferox here: Malpelo Liveaboard Diving
Lost divers in Malpelo.
You have the right to kill… as long as you are in the arms of the Colombian authorities.
After a very windy and bumpy sea crossing from Puerto Mutis, Panama, we arrived in Malpelo, Colombia.
As usual, we tied up on the mooring at Altar de Virginia, a dive site on the northeast side of Malpelo that provides shelter from the wind (when it blows in the right direction). Weather had calmed down and conditions looked good, just a bit murky in the water.
As it was bumpy on the way in, we had decided to postpone setting up the dive gear and I had yet to give a briefing on how to dive Malpelo. (For those of you who don’t know Malpelo, it is a serious dive destination—the briefing needs to be clear and the divers, attentive.) Just when I was on my way to gather our guests for the briefing, a guest asked me, “Who is that in the water?” Our skiff was also out there, so at first I thought it was Juan, my colleague, checking the dive site and the visibility. It was not Juan. It was Peter Morse, a lost diver from the Colombian dive boat Maria Patricia. Lost since around 4:30 pm the day before, and it was about 7:30 am when we spotted him…
Another Year of Traveling — Part One (At Sea: Nautilus Belle Amie and Yemaya)
This year has been, as always, a lot of traveling around and a lot of navigation in the seas. After a monthlong visit to Sweden, I found myself in the shipyard in Ensenada, helping to put the finishing touches to Nautilus Belle Amie, a new liveaboard vessel. A crazy project with so many challenges to solve, we had day and night shifts—sometimes I worked both—with around 60 people more or less climbing on top of each other just to finish everything before the deadline. I was on the first trips to Revillagigedo and they were not without problems; the boat turned out very well later on, though.
Another Year of Traveling — Part Two (On Land: Batanes, Philippines)
On the northernmost tip of the Philippines, not very far away from Taiwan, there is a group of 10 islands called Batanes islands. Only the largest three are inhabited. It’s known to be a weather-swept place, where all the typhoons pass through. The indigenous people are called Ivatan and have their own language and, I would say, their own culture as well.
I have traveled around in the Philippines and been to quite a number of provinces; this place is extremely different from any other I have seen, in terms of its people, landscape, and environment.
My Personal Black(list) Book
Updated: 15 February 2019
On rare occasions when I am on the internet, I would sometimes come across these travel advisories that inform people how safe, or suitable, a country is to travel to. I have also observed diving forums to be doing the same thing—letting divers know where to go, what places offer the best diving, and which operators to avoid. Fair enough.
Well, there are two sides to a story. Or two sides to a coin. Whatever. I have been guiding for over 15 years now and diving, even longer than that. Having met my share of difficult clients—and great people—I have decided to come up with my own blacklist in support of all the guides and operators who had, and are continuing to deal with inexperienced divers and/or blind bats and/or impossible clients and/or insensitive people.
Goodbye, Guadalupe. Hello, Socorro.
It is early morning on the Pacific, outside of Baja California. I am navigating towards Islas Revillagigedo, having just finished our last dive at Isla Guadalupe. It is a 16-day repositioning trip, ending our season with the great white sharks in Guadalupe and starting the season in Socorro (as it is most popularly called, although Socorro is just one of the four islands in the Revillagigedo archipelago) diving with giant mantas, dolphins, and 11 species of sharks. From January through April, we also get to see humpback whales underwater.
Officer by Day, Gigolo by Night
It was the year 2000 and I was done running a dive center in Stockholm.
One day I received a telephone call. “Hi, I’m Ann Krafft. We are looking for a Watersports Manager on the cruise line Royal Clipper.”
“A cruise ship? Hmm, I’m not sure,” was my quick reply.
“Please check out the website before you say No,” she said.
I did. And I saw her… She was a beautiful 5-masted 400-foot ship built that year in Gdańsk, Poland.
So Ann Krafft and I talked again. She mentioned that it was a high-standard boat and the crew can’t have tattoos, piercings or long hair.
“Those are exactly what I have! And I’m missing a front tooth…”
Having a Bad Hair Day in Malpelo
When a 5-knot current flattens your hair and drags your bubbles behind you, forget about taking photos. Just hang on for dear life.
I Stared Death in the Face and Lived to Tell the Tale
Belgrade, 1999. For most people, January is a time for beginnings and transitions, an opportunity to look back to the lessons of the past, and forward to a positive outlook in the year ahead. It seems that I wasn’t around when the gods were handing out the optimist gene. While everyone else was busy starting on their new year’s resolutions, I was still intent on getting to Africa in my kayak, aiming to finish the journey that I had embarked on the previous year.