Little Cayman - unirdna and cdavis reporting

[jimqpublic]

Guys those are awesome videos. I've been trying to explain to my kids what this new sport I've taken up but they didn't really comprehend. Then I showed them the videos and now they both want to go diving too.

Actually my 5 year old girl does. My 3 year old boy does but only if it's shallow enough to stand.

Jim
Long Beach, CA
New diver

[cdavis]

Thanks, Jim. Credit Ted and the camera. The old saying about "a picture is worth a thousand words" is right on, and a video is even better.

I didn't take either of my boys on that trip, too exploratory. After seeing the videos, they're both about ready to cut my throat.

Connor

[unirdna]

Originally Posted by cdavis

"a picture is worth a thousand words"

Check your mailbox. You should have about 500,000 "words" in there by now.

Then, brace for the impact from the boys.

...and thanks to everyone who posted their comments.

*It should be noted that (among others) every time you see a set of white fins, Connor is the photographer. I'm printing 11x8's from a couple of your shots, bud. Couldn't have confounded the relatives without ya !


- Ted

[Fondueset]

Outstanding work!

[unirdna]

Return Trip - 2007 - videos are up.

High Resolution .WMV format. DVD (MPEG2) files are much better quality, but those are over 200mb each - too big for my hosting site.

Thanks to Connor Davis for making this happen (again).


Click to launch in media player, or right click and choose "save target/file as" to download.

Part 1 ~ 25mb

Part 2 ~ 20mb


Ted

[Fondueset]

Nice work Ted! Outstanding footage!

[trux]

Great videos! Also the server is incredibly fast - the 25MB file downloads in just 10s!

[icarus pacific]

Tasty stuff, guys!

[jimqpublic]

Great! I want to be there!

[Fondueset]

Claire was along on this adventure - that's her in the Omer Bermudas in the first vid - and took a few pictures with her little casio. I've uploaded some of them to Cayman along with Teds. She has a way of capturing aspects of her environment that might otherwise go unnoticed.

[cdavis]

Great videos Ted. My thanks for the effort; adds a whole new dimension to the trip. Loved the pic of Claire taking a pic of the turtle. The dolphin kick in reverse was a scream. Flying through the crack in fast and slow motion was great. Hey, where are the giant, live, dinosaur pics?? Those are Way to good to miss. You got another vid coming?


As always, Little Cayman was good, very, very good. Without question, one of the worlds great freediving destinations. Weather was not quite as good as last year, as you can see, but it did not slow up the diving at all. When the water is 81F, 80-100 ft vis and its almost flat calm, occasional rain is no impediment. For a detailed description of what the diving is like, look back to the first few pages of this thread, last years trip. We stayed a McCoys again and they treated us just as good as last year. The food was even better. This year we did some things different, had a car to go where and when we wanted. Did the whole island, bird sanctuary, beaches, iguanas etc. Even ate out one night. This was the pleasant result of having a wife who understands that there is something else in life besides diving. On the reef there seemed to be more turtles, at least they were more friendly, coming right up to us at times. We saw what were almost certainly some of the same fish from last year, the 60 lb grouper, big green turtle, etc. One interesting observation, the sharks were much less curious about us, none of the close passes, fast cruise, look excited kind of thing that we saw last year. I’m pretty sure now that they had never seen freedivers before we got there.

I discovered a new trick, dolphin kicking. I’d been practicing, getting ready to use Jons mono and discovered it’s harder than it looks. However, after getting the hang of it(sort of), coming up from depth was much easier, no leg burn, less urge to breathe, lots of power, maybe faster, very nice. This, I’m going to work on. I never did get the hang of the mono, but bifins and dolphin works great.

Discovered something less pleasant. If you are line diving in Cayman with a drop line considerably deeper than the available vis, get far out of sight of the wall. Current carried us in too close and we snagged Jon’s line. Current did not look like much, but it pulled my buggie board float under before the line attachment broke off the float. I grabbed the end when it was only about 10 ft down and could not swim it to the surface. Sorry Jon, we'll get you another one.

My thanks to all who could come and to DB for making it possible to contact everyone. All I did was post a notice asking who wanted to go and, voila, lots of divers. DB's acardet is my old grad school room mate who I had lost track of. This was our first trip together in a lot of years. His girl Pat shows up in several parts of the videos. For someone who just started, she is getting down there. Fondueset’s Claire and Kathleen were great company. Claire is quite a diver. Ask her how the night dives at 2 am were, I never realized how maneuverable a mono could be until I watched her(not at 2 am, I was way to weary for that stuff). My son Preston is 14, was along and turning into a good diver. And having my wife Karen along to share the fun was wonderful.

Now, next year. Anybody up for Cayman again? How about somewhere exotic, like the volcano/marine park in Dominica? Anybody been there already? So many places to dive, so little time.

Connor

[unirdna]

Originally Posted by Fondueset

Claire was along on this adventure... She has a way of capturing aspects of her environment that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Yeah, like when she used a giant urchin as hand-soap. I have footage of Claire getting her hand punished by a visiting diver as he removed tiny spine pieces from her hand. Those may have been fine tweezers, but they were about as gentle as using a chainsaw for brain surgery. I didn't include the tape in either of the dive vids because I didn''t want my relatives revisiting their dinner. The whole process took 30-40 minutes of what had to be constant agony. The cheerful expression on Claire's face was sureal and.....eh.....mildly disturbing - sort of like when you are about to crash your car, and you look over to see your buddy smiling. The face didn't fit the situation....

I am tossing around ideas for a 3rd video - a sort of hodge-podge, odds-n-ends amalgamation, using the rest of my tape. The landing video on grand cayman, looking through the front window of the puddle jumper is a view most haven't seen.

[nostres]

Originally Posted by unirdna

Return Trip - 2007 - videos are up.

High Resolution .WMV format. DVD (MPEG2) files are much better quality, but those are over 200mb each - too big for my hosting site.

Thanks to Connor Davis for making this happen (again).


Click to launch in media player, or right click and choose "save target/file as" to download.

Part 1 ~ 25mb

Part 2 ~ 20mb


Ted

Wow Ted! Those are great videos, there's lots of beautifull images in both clips. Thrux is right about the speed, they download in no time. How did You achieve such a good quality for online sharing? where do You host them?

[unirdna]

Thanks nostres, and to all. I poured a lot of time into that 2nd one, especially - using new tricks inspired by the movie "300" . The videos are encoded at 750kbs, .wmv - a lot of bang-for-your-buck when it comes to quality vs. size. They are hosted on the University of Wisconsin server - the UW is where I work. Staff get 200mb of hosting space; pretty handy, and better quality than youtube.

[nostres]

...and better quality than youtube.[/quote]

much better, no comparison. It's good to be at University of Wisconsin, 200 Mb storage is nice to have. For a moment I thought it was high def but then I realized it was "just" photo camera. Those little toys are so powerfull and 30 frames progressive is actually better than interlaced footage from any digital camcorder. My Panasonic Lumix camera also has wide screen mode with 848x480 resolution, that is better than DVD! in the pocket size
I didn't see "300" yet but now I know what kind of editing to expect there
Great job, very nice editing
One famous bicyclist said "it's not about the bike" when it comes to editing it's not about the software, it can be done nicely on MovieMaker