The last few of weeks seem to have been underwater photography season. It all started with a really excellent seminar by Alex Mustard and Martin Edge which could almost have been entitled, "Everything you wanted to know about underwater photography". I ended up making several pages of notes to remind myself of the key points. If you're interested in reading my notes they are here. The seminar gave me some ideas for things I could make to use while I was diving in Egypt. The most successful of them was a simple and inexpensive snoot constructed from an Ikelite diffuser and a discarded soft drink bottle. Here's a description of how it was made.
To make my snoot I needed an Ikelite diffuser so I popped into Cameras Underwater where I saw one of their staff spending at least ten minutes with a customer not selling anything. It might sound strange, but I thought it was great. Instead of the customer leaving with some crap he didn't need, he got some good advice and hopefully will return in due course with a much clearer idea of what to buy.
The flight to Hurghada was with Viking who have some unenviable reviews. I did a little preparation this time and paid through the nose for 10kg of additional baggage allowance. Five pounds per kilo is vastly more than the cost of carrying an additional kilogram, but still half the price of overweight baggage at check-in time. The five hour flight was particularly arduous because the seats were extremely close together. So my knees were resting on the seat in front and I couldn't open my netbook properly or get my tray table fully open. The flight wasn't one of the real horrors I had read about, but I won't be rushing to fly with Viking again.
On arrival at Hurghada we were met by Blue O Two staff who sorted out our visas and shepherded us out to the waiting mini-bus while our baggage was loaded through the back window. Hurghada isn't a large place, so it was a short ride to the Hurghada Marriot where our boat, the Blue Horizon, was moored. The boat was excellent with a well organised dive deck, comfortable salon and spotless dining area. On the top was a sundeck with space for at least a dozen divers and at the front of the boat was a jacuzzi which I never got round to trying. My cabin was up in the bows which could have been interesting if the going got rough, but this was not a problem because the moorings were all very sheltered.
There's not much of a holiday diary this time because life on a liveaboard quickly gets into a routine. Every day started with an 05:30 wake-up call followed by a dawn dive. Then breakfast (eggs, eggs and more eggs), another dive before lunch. In the afternoon we went for a dive, surprise surprise, and then another dive after dark. Finally we had dinner and sleep.
I didn't have Dangerous Dave with me this time, so I paired up with the charming Anna who started the week with around 40 dives and was a little tentative about blue water diving. By the end of the week she had turned into a pretty sound diver and had discovered some of the disadvantages of diving with a photographer including being used as a model and waiting around for ages while I was taking photos.
I had packed my full length 5mm suit because I was expecting water temperatures in the low twenties celcius. But I had forgotten that it sticks to me like glue. That's great in the water where there's no icy rush down the back of the suit, ,but it takes me about 20 minutes of struggle to get into it, not ideal when everyone's waiting to go diving. Added to that the water was unseasonally warm so I would have been just as happy in my shortie.
I spent a bit of time trying new things, some of which worked better than others. I discovered that aiming a snoot is trickier than I expected. When you've only got a spot of light a few inches across a wobbly old Ikelite arm really doesn't hack it. Despite this I ended up with some reasonable photos in my gallery.