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.

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.

whale shark under boat

today i swam with my first whale shark this year! a very special one, too. probably my best whale shark encounter in 9 years of sharking at ningaloo reef. i was out on my own boat late in the afternoon when i found an 9m shark feeding in a bait ball surrounded by reef sharks and a manta ray just off south passage. my girlfriend fränzi and me swam with it for about half an hour.

at some stage the shark found our 5m runabout more interesting than the bait ball. it swam off towards the drifting boat, circled a few times under the hull...

...and finally gave it a kiss on the side with its head out of the water. it even pushed the boat around a few meters while fränzi sat on the boat.

it was fränzi's first ever whale shark - can you be more lucky?!

boccia with kangaroos

camping in the beautiful cape range national park is always good fun and very relaxing. my girlfriend fränzi and me really enjoyed a game of boule on the beach just before sunset.

at some stage fränzi and me had to stop playing - it was just getting too dangerous for our friendly referee...

new boat

today my new boat arrived in exmouth! my dad and i picked it up in sydney a few days ago and towed it all the way back to exmouth - that's just around 5500km.

thanks daddy!

welcome to ningaloo

g’day from western australia!

it’s my fourth year living in exmouth and still i just cannot complain - i love it here! most of my friends back home in germany don't really have a clue what i do here - so i decided to start my own weblog. me and my camera want to give you an impression about my life in a very special place on this planet.


the australian north west cape is a very remote peninsula with just one little town of 3000 people, 1200km away from a proper city, 800km away from any traffic lights. paradise is just around the corner: pristine beaches, an almost untouched coral reef, a clean warm ocean plus the fascinating australian outback. all this is very crowded - with animals, not people: welcome to ningaloo reef and cape range! i spend a lot of time diving with all sorts of pretty fish – from the smallest to the biggest ones, which are in fact the whale sharks. these gentle giants visit ningaloo reef every year from march to july. you will learn more about them very shortly – i hope you will come back regularly to check out what i'm up to. so long – take care!

marcus