Our World – Underwater Scholarship Society in North America

Okay.  So it’s my last day in South Africa (boo), but at least we made it a red letter one: I dove today with Mark Addison of Blue Wilderness, and it was AMAZING.  To tick off the list, we started the day swimming with dolphins, then dove down to Cathedral Cave and visited the ragged-toothed [...]

I’ve just arrived here in Rocky Bay, outside of Durban, South Africa,  to dive with Mark and Gail Addison of Blue Wilderness.  Mark and Gail have been running this unique marine ecotourism operation for 15 years, and the pioneering efforts they’ve made in support of the natural history of the coast for filming, photography and [...]

Steve Benjamin (Animal Ocean) has been helping me improve my freediving skills — when we went out on the boat today, I was able to dive down to about 13 meters, where these catsharks were aggregating.  Catsharks are beautiful, and later that day we found one on the sand that was no bigger than Steve’s [...]

Today the swell was up, so Steve Benjamin (Animal Ocean) and I took a group of professional photographers out chasing the big wave surfers at Sunset Reef, a surf spot here in Cape Town with a reputation almost as deadly as Dungeons.  We were out there for half the day, and I was absolutely blown [...]

For the past three days (Feb. 6-9), I’ve had the privilege of accompanying Thomas Peschak, Chief Photographer for the Save Our Seas Foundation, on an underwater photo shoot here in Cape Town.  We’ve been out every day on Steve Benjamin’s Animal Oceans boat, and it’s been amazing to watch such a high-calibre photographer at work.  Thomas [...]

On February 5th, after another dive with the seven gill sharks (or cowsharks, as they’re called here) off of Miller’s Point, Steve Benjamin (Animal Ocean) took me up to Cape Point at the Cape of Good Hope, the most south-western point of Africa.  Although it’s not the tip of Africa, it’s definitely the photogenic tip [...]

February 3rd was the day that Steve Benjamin (Animal Ocean) and I went up into the mountains to meet Jeremy Sheldon, Ph.D. student at the University of Cape Town.  Jeremy is doing his Ph.D. thesis on the streams and rivers of the Bain’s Kloof region, in the mountains Northeast of the Cape.  He’s comparing the [...]

What an amazing day February 2nd was.   I’ll take you through the pictures below and explain the chronology that way.
I tagged along with Steve Benjamin (Animal Ocean) on a dive charter to dive with a natural aggregation of seven-gill sharks, or cowsharks (as they’re called in Cape Town) just past Miller’s Point near Simons [...]

Steven Benjamin (my Cape Town guide and owner of Animal Ocean) and I returned from Dassen Island on Sunday, March 31st.  On Monday, Steve took me along on one of his dive charters to Duiker Island, home of a very friendly colony of Cape fur seals.
They were magic to dive with, but seals always make [...]

Right!  So I’ve got some backlogs to do, starting with the day I arrived in Cape Town, South Africa.  I was met at the airport by local dive and underwater guru Steven Benjamin, who operates Animal Ocean, which is an all-encompassing marine eco-tourism operation.  We had some breakfast, and then Steve whisked us off to [...]