the photographer

taking pictures underwater is not an easy skill. i've been doing it for 12 years now but still i don't think i'm good at it, even if my underwater digital slr camera is a very nice piece of equipment. but there are guys who just know much better than me how to use it. one of them came for a visit to take pictures of the new hotel & dive shop. his name is gerald nowak and he's a professional photo journalist. his portfolio includes all the big german dive magazines including 'tauchen', 'unterwasser', 'aquanaut' and 'atlantis'. he did just two dives on our house reef in less than optimal conditions, but the results are quite impressive.

the diver in the photo is rudi robisch, the bavarian manager of the other orca dive club in hamata. together, they found some nice objects like this small school of batfish.


gerald and rudi even found some big fish like this malabar cod which is great news to us and the new dive shop.


finally gerald found these two - at 6 o'clock in the morning. that's why we look a bit tired. thanks, gerald, for the pictures. we really enjoyed your company.

diving the red sea

while we wait for the completion of the new dive shop, fränzi and i go out on the boat almost every day to get to know 'our' dive sites. the dive boats are huge compared to the day boats we use at ningaloo.

the boats look nice but they also are very slow. it takes up to two hours to get to the dive sites but we don't mind too much because the boats are spacious and comfortable. so, we just hang out and relax with our customers on the sun deck.


working on dive boats in egypt is an easy job compared to the work divemasters have to do in australia. all the hard work - filling tanks, transporting cylinders and gear to and from the boats - is done by the egyptian crew members. all we have to do is to make sure everything runs smoothly and to look after the divers. sometimes we feel like guests on the clean and tidy boats ourselves.

the dive sites are mainly colorful coral gardens. probably the most beautiful hard and soft corals in the world. but there is not much big fish left in these waters. obviously, it has all been fished out by the egyptians who even used dynamite for many years. i learned scuba diving in the red sea 15 years ago but it was a completely different story back then. there were big fish and sharks everywhere. but now? in four weeks we haven't seen one shark. so, we started taking pictures of ourselves instead.

sometimes we get to see a 'big cod', as they say here, but the fish they mean would be considered a rather small cod at ningaloo. we appreciate the marine life at ningaloo even more since we dive here. it reminds us of how it once looked here in the red sea before they threw dynamite overboard. i hope the ningaloo reef will not face the same fate with all those recreational fishing boats going there in increasing numbers these days. it becomes a rather sad experience to find one single big fish in the sea after weeks of diving, like the big napoleon wrasse we encountered two days ago on a dive site called 'shaab claudio'. when it approached us, we saw that its lips were badly deformed and infected, from being fed by hand or from a fishing hook - we don't know. to us, this magnificent fish looked rather lost and lonely.

salam aleikum from egypt

no more ningaloo for the next few months.

fränzi and i decided to go somewhere else for a while. we accepted a job offer from a company in egypt. fränzi always wanted to dive the red sea. so, why going there as a paying tourist for a week or two if we can go there for a year or so - and get paid?! the job is to open a new 'orca dive club' in the south of egypt, near the sudanese border where it's less crowded than up north. they just build a new four-star hotel near a tiny village called hamata - our new home for a while. when we got here a few weeks ago the hotel had just opened but the work on the building for the dive shop was put on hold because of the 'ramadan' in september. it's the building on the right hand side. in the background the red sea including our 'house reef'.


we thought living in a hotel is gonna be tough but it's not. we enjoy the service, the egyptian staff are very nice people and we love our large room with a dome-shaped roof and a large balcony.

i reckon we'll become really lazy here as we never have to clean, cook, do the dishes or anything like that. they even do the laundry for us, including ironing. life really is not too bad here...

kimberley video

finally i finished the promotional video for the great escape charter company. in march, fran and me spent two weeks cruising the kimberley coast on mv great escape. the task was to compress 6 hours of video down to a 7 minutes emotional ad. we are pretty happy with it - it reflects the beauty of the australian kimberley coast. we think.

famous 'stumpy' and first manta rays

we swam with a well known whale shark called 'stumpy' today - i did, not the customers - as 'stumpy' was too close to the reef and it was too dangerous to put the groups in the water. 'stumpy is by far the most famous whale shark at ningaloo reef. click here for an article on 'stumpy'. for more information about this shark click here: A-001

the other good news is that the first oceanic manta rays have arrived at ningaloo reef. every year the stay here in large numbers between may and august. it's always more than just a bonus on the whale shark tours to snorkel with manta rays while the spotter planes look for whale sharks. they are gorgeous creatures.

a fin lovin' whale shark

today we swam with two whale sharks of which one was very curious.

it was a 2.5m male shark constantly chasing the snorkellers - they didn't know where to go a were afraid of getting their fins bitten off. this shark was good fun.

nice big shark

the first big shark this year - almost 8 meters long. this whale shark has been encountered every year at ningaloo since 2002 which is great news. for more information about this shark click here: A-130

first whale shark this year

first time out this year and we had a great shark in clear blue water. it's a 4m male whale shark that has not been identified before. for more information about this shark click here: A-450

another whale shark season

in 2008 i'm back on the gold boat 'darling isabelle'. the crew is completely new this year but fran helps out on the boat so will spend a lot of time on the water together which is great!

a nice day out on the boat

the weather was gorgeous so fran and me decided to take our boat out for a scenic and a snorkel.

my good old friend big al and his girls loved it as much as we did.

kimberley cruise

fran and myself were lucky enough to be invited on a luxuriuous cruise along the stunning kimberley coast. we spent 14 nights on board the beautiful 'great escape', travelling from broome to wyndham in the north of western australia. the vessel takes 14 customers max, each of them paying about 15000.00 australian dollars for the two-weeks-cruise. fran and me paid ... nothing! she was the domestic, i was the videographer on the boat. we even had our own cabin. we swam in freshwater ponds, caught some barramundi, did some great bushwalks, had a lot of 4-star-meals and escaped the saltwater crocodiles. the kimberley coastline has the most spectacular scenery we ever came across and we highly recommend this trip to everyone - if you have the cash ;-)

fränzi comes to ningaloo

she finally makes the big step and leaves switzerland behind for a while. we gonna live in exmouth together for at least a few months - very exciting! on the way from perth to exmouth we camped at the famous pinnacles, of course.