Top tip: Dive destination, Tawali resort, Papua New Guinea PNG
June 26, 2008
“PNG is perhaps the Last Diving Frontier. It’s not the easiest of places to get to but it is a destination for divers who want undiluted adventure”.
At BB-Films.com we usually plan our diving trips at least a year in advance and recently we’ve been considering out 2009 summer trip. After considering Galapagos, Hawaii, and Papua New Guinea, we’ve settled on PNG. Our reasons are simple, its relatively undiscovered and we don’t think it will be that way for much longer.
Getting to PNG truly is a monumental undertaking involving no less than 4 flights from Europe, 2 stop-overs each way and no doubt some bone-cruncing speed boat trips for the final leg. But we learned something from a previous trip to Utila, Bay Islands, Honduras that still strikes a note of truth 2 years later:
If it takes 3 days to get to, then its going to be empty… Perfect 
)
In all likelihood we’ll be staying at the Tawali resort near Alotau:
“Tucked away, only accessible by boat, sits what may be Papua New Guinea’s best kept scuba diving secret – Tawali Resort. Welcome to the exotic culture of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and to Tawali Resort. Located on a volcanic bluff overlooking the clear protected waters of Milne Bay, Tawali offers travelers a unique location to dive, relax and enjoy the unspoiled wonders of this magnificent part of the world.”
Have you been diving in PNG? Any recommendations/comments/tips? Please post and let us know.
Red Scarlet: 2x higher quality video than HiDef for under $3,000?
June 9, 2008
There is a digital video revolution underway and RED are leading the way.
We’ve been keeping our eye on these guys from RED for some time since they launched a 4,000 pixel wide format digital video camera (that’s 9 mega-pixel video!!) for under $20,000. Although by the time you add lenses, tripods, digital storage and other accessories you can expect to get closer to $100,000 all-in.
Now RED have announced a smaller 3,000 pixel wide version (a mere 5 mega-pixel!!), called RED Scarlet which should retail at about $3,000. Taking into account lense costs, light accessories, storage and Gates housing (when they get round to producing it), this should price a complete underwater filming rig at around $20,000.
Oh, did I mention it can film at 180 frames per second?
Yeah – bring it on!!
Visit RED’s site
Our Oceans are turning into plastic… are we?
March 27, 2008
“This article is a poignant reminder how important it is to discard of waste responsibly when you’re on/near the Ocean…”
From BestlifeOnline.com:
A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility…and worse.
Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.
It happened on August 3, 1997, a lovely day, at least in the beginning: Sunny. Little wind. Water the color of sapphires. Moore and the crew of Alguita, his 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran, sliced through the sea.
Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered Alguita’s course, veering slightly north. He had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats purposely avoided. For one thing, it was becalmed. “The doldrums,†sailors called it, and they steered clear. So did the ocean’s top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters, flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert, a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it.
Some of the most obvious victims are the dead seabirds that have been washing ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic: things like bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging bird, resemble baitfish.
Vast iceberg breaks off Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctic
March 26, 2008
A vast iceberg has broken away from the Antarctic coast, threatening the collapse of a larger ice shelf that is now “hanging by a thread.
Satellite images have revealed that about 160 square miles of the Wilkins Shelf have been lost since the end of February, suggesting that climate change could be causing it to disintegrate much more quickly than scientists had predicted. “The ice shelf is hanging by a thread” said David Vaughan, of the British Antarctic Survey(BAS). “We’ll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be.”
Professor Vaughan was a member of a BAS team that predicted in 1993 that the Wilkins Shelf could collapse within 30 years, if the pace of global warming continued.
“Wilkins is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see things happen this quickly. We predicted it would happen, but it’s happened twice as fast as we predicted.”
The rise of British sea power
March 23, 2008
A barge towing an inverted windmill to the mouth of Strangford Lough will launch a new programme to create sustainable energy.
Britain is set this week to enter a new age, generating energy directly from the seas that surge around its shores. On Saturday a strange, 122ft- long contraption, looking like an upside-down windmill, will set off from the Belfast dock that built the Titanic to produce the first electricity ever brought ashore from British tides.
The device “the first of its kind anywhere in the world” is expected to start a revolution which could lead to our island nation getting a fifth of its power from its surrounding waters, and to the far north of Scotland becoming “the Saudi Arabia of marine energy”.
Remarkably, the pioneering device, which will start producing power from predictable and clean tidal energy, is the fruit of the vision and persistence of a single campaigning engineer, and has been developed by a small West Country firm.
Later this year, in another global first, a wave energy power station developed by an Edinburgh firm is to be installed in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Portugal. Next year, an even bigger one, off Cornwall, is expected to start feeding electricity into the national grid, and yet another is planned for the Orkneys. And Marine Current Turbines, the firm behind SeaGen, has joined with the utility company npower to develop a tidal power station off Anglesey.
Britain has the best tide and wave energy resources in the world and the official Carbon Trust estimates that they could together provide a fifth of our electricity. Yet, until recently, successive governments have set their face against developing them.
