Dick of the day....Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Prime Minister Harper indicating by a show of fingers how many sharks will be left in the sea by the time his government decides to ban the importing of shark fins

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a dick on many levels. His political views make him a dick, his policies make him a dick, even his hair cut makes him look like a dick...quite literally. But today, he made sure to further enshrine himself in the "Temple of Dicks" by declaring that Canada will not ban shark fins.
My analysis of this declaration: Prime Minister Harper  - YOU ARE A DICK!


Let's listen in on his comments regarding a recent national petition campaign by the NDP fisheries critic and Shark Truth Vancouver calling on the federal government to ban the importing of shark fins:

”Canada does not favour a ban of shark fins. We do, however, and we’ve been very clear that Canada supports only the humane harvesting of sharks.”
                                                                             - Stephen Harper,
                                              dickhead extraordinaire and destroyer of mother nature

Seriously, how the hell can you fin a shark humanely? It's not like they anesthetize them or someting? It's not like the fins will grow back and the shark will swim off happily. It's not even like they keep the meat? I guess Stephen Harper plans on going on the finning boats to check that they meet his high standards or "humane" finning...whatever the hell that means. And what the hell is he doing saying "Canada" does not favour a ban? I bet if Stephen Harper put out a national vote asking "is it important to you that Canada continues to import shark fins" the resounding answer would probably be "no" because most people don't eat it in Canada and I would hope that many more can spot barbarism for the sake of a few dollars when it's staring them in the face.


Well Mr. Harper, congratulations!! You've rightrously upheld your position as an insensitive dickhead who is out of touch with reality yet again and this time you've also made sure to ensure tens of thousands of innocent sharks are slaughtered for a bowl of freaking soup! When I left Canda what seems like a million years ago....well it was more like 10...but anyway...when I left, I swore I'd never move back home as long as there was a dickhead in the Prime Minister's chair. Sorry friends and family back home...I think you might as well just give up on me ever returning for more than a quick xmas hello.


If you'd like the read the full article in the Vancouver Sun you can do so by clicking HERE



Cheers from the fishbowl
J

Koh Tao Dive Briefing - Dry Land edition

As we all know, the diving lifestyle isn't just about the fishies and their friends. It's also living and travelling to amazing locations, living life on white sand beaches and meeting people from all over the world. Divers are known for their adventurous spirit, their laid back outlook on life and their general friendliness but let's not forget the other thing divers can do pretty well...party.

It's pretty difficult to wash up on white sandy shores and not indulge in a little bit of island style "R&R". For many of us who are travelling divers it's often a difficult balance between those 6am wakeup calls on dive days and those 6am bedtimes after a night out at a beach hut bar under the palms. My recent flood induced escape to Koh Tao was one such balancing act. Fortunately...or is that unfortunately?... the surprise "get the hell outta Bangkok because the deluge is coming" nature of this particular vacation meant that finances were a bit low and I couldn't afford to dive much...which left extra time for every diver's other favorite past time...viva la beverage! viva la dancing! and while in Thailand: viva la bucket, viva la fire dancing, viva la vida !                                              



Fellow evacuee Carrie seems to be able to resist the temptation for long enough to smile for the camera. Me on the other hand, has apparently been glamoured by the irresistable powers of a bucket of strawberry margaritas.



                                                                                                 

Koh Tao is a pretty small place and the area where most of the dive shops, hotels and restaurants are is pretty condensed and centralized along a strip of beach called Haad Sairee. A night out on a beach in Thailand tends to be pretty much the same whereever you happen wash up. Music, pillows on the beach and boys spinning fire. It also contains all of the following:

1) drinks of questionable alcoholic quality served in plastic sandcastle pails
2) drunk young European/Austrailan tourists skinny dipping
3) drunk young European tourists trying to pick up other drunk young European/Australian tourists
4) enterprising Thai bar boys trying to pick up drunk European/Australian tourists

5) drunk European/Australian tourists who think they are invinsible running through flamming skipping ropes while the Burmese fire boys laugh their asses off as the singed eyebrows and leg hair piles up. 

6) some sweet ass dancing by all of the people mentioned above plus a few Thais tossed in for good measure

7) DMs, instructors, and DMTs all dipping in to the above activities to varying degrees

As you can imagine nothing, I repeat NOTHING beats people watching on a night out on Haad Sairee. 

I boogied, I drank, I watched in awe... it was worth every sip of my bucket of...sex on the beach. I shudder to think that I was drinking that sludge by the bucketful but hey, they get tastier the more you drink.

Sometimes a picture says a thousand words...I'll just leave it up to you to fill in the blanks.

Fellow evacuees, my brother and neice, recovering from a night out on the buckets.

  





When you look at this man and say "Hey I could do that...no problem!!"
You've clearly had too many buckets.
As too many drunken tourists have found out the hard way...
NO, you CANNOT do that!!! Unless you plan on burning off most of your body hair!
Oh liquid courage! It doesn't just affect one's confidence in the game of love!!!



Who says that dogs can't enjoy a night out on Haad Sairee too? I found this lovely young lady excellent company and she didn't try to steal my drink while I wasn't looking! 

.

Epic Jenga...'nuff said

And after a long night out it sure doesn't hurt to wake up to this...

I'm gonna miss you Koh Tao!

Cheers from the evacuation zone

J

Win stuff!!! All the cool kids are doing it!

Hello again faithful followers!

Well Blue Season Bali have done it again! It's mini-contest #2!

"Oh Joe! This is so exciting!!! What does Blue Season Bali want to give me this time??"

Well I'm glad you asked!

How about a new Suunto Zoop dive computer!!! Yes! It could be all yours! No more pesky dive tables, no more floating above your dive leader all dive, no more guessing how cold the water was! Fantastic! The freedom! The excitement! The piece of mind!

"Holy Crap Joe, that's awesome!!! So how do I win??"

I'm glad you asked that too!!
All you have to do is tell Blue Season Bali about your PADI OW instructor. Tell them why your instructor was good and what they did to help you become the super diver you are today.

You can get all the info on how to enter by clicking HERE

Good Luck my dive buddies!
Let's all Win!!!

Cheers from the fishbowl
J

Koh Tao dive briefing...underwater version

Hello my faithful followers!

Again, many apologies for my lack of posting but the flood waters have been rising here in Bangkok which resulted in me heading for the dryer lands of the South for 10 days to try to escape the creeping, typhoid laden wall of water that was slowly approaching my home and workplace. Now that I'm back in Bangkok (and the water seems to have stopped a few blocks away from my neighbourhood) I am able to post a little Koh Tao dive briefing to wet (no pun intended) you appetites!

One of my favorite views - watching the sea, beer in hand -

Haad Sairee, Koh Tao

Ahhh Koh Tao! As I said in an earlier post Koh Tao is where I learned to dive and ever since has snuggled down and taken up residence in a happy little corner of my heart. Cute, cosy and chocked full of buckets, beautiful bodies and beaches - Koh Tao is one of my favorite places in Thailand. Conveniently, it's also home to some great and easily accessible diving! Because I had just returned from diving in Bali and had not really budgeted for another diving adventure, I had to curb my appetite and only pop under the waves few times. The self-denial was difficult but I managed to survive. I got down for three days of diving in total.

The first day I had a morning dive at a site called " Hin Peewee" It was my first dive of the trip and set the bar a little low...on the visibility side that is. Due to some wierd tides and the runoff from an early morning rainstorm the visibility was about...uh...25cm. Ya, total brown out. We ended up aborting the dive after 20 minutes simply because we couldn't see anything at all. Although completely annoying and not even remotely interesting I don't mind doing a dive like this every once in a while because it keeps me on my toes and reminds me of how good I usually have it! - admitedly I don't particularly like paying for it!
Dive fun-o-meter: 1
Interesting-stuff-I-saw-o-meter: 0 - does sediment count? What about the tank of the person next to me...oh wait, I couldn't even see that.

Dive #2 was much better. After a change of sites to "Red Rock and Nang Yuan caves" and a 1.5 hour surface interval the vis has cleared and we were back up to about 18meters vis. This is a wicked dive site that decends onto a big underwater "rock" with a horizontal crack running along the center at about 12meters which is home to lovely little critters such as Jaan's pipefish, nudibranches and banded cleaner shrimp.
While we were snooping through the crack we heard the unmistakable "ping" of a tank which only means one thing...something cool!! So we shallowed up a bit and came face to face with a big fat hawksbill turtle grazing away and looking grumpy as they tend to do. After realizing that we were there only to gawk and ruining his lunch he took his leave and so did we. The rest of the dive was through the Nang Yuan caves which is a series of connected swim throughs rather than caves. All in all it was a good dive with lots of fishies and more :)
Dive fun-o-meter: 8
Interesting-stuff-o-meter: 8 - yay turtle! Yay pipefish!

          

Pipefishy face!

The next day we did two dives again the first at South West Pinnacles, the second at Shark Island.
Dive #1 - S.W Pinnacles is an open ocean site consisting of a series of pinnacles starting at about 8 meters and decending down to about 30 meters. It was an early dive and we were lucky to be the only ones at the site. We spent our dive cruising with giant groupers (these were whoppers! Definitely dinner for 10..or more), schools of jacks and trevallies, stingrays and bat fish. The best part of the dive was shallowing up to about 8 meters surrounded by literally thousands on baby damsel fish swirling and schooling around us. It was like a damselfish blizzard but it was warm and my eyelashes didn't freeze off!
Dive fun-o-meter: 8
Interesting-stuff-o-meter: 7 - Damsel fish blizzard!

Damselfish!!

Dive:2 - Shark Island...unfortunately there are no sharks here, just looks like a shark fin sticking out of the water :(
This was a cool site with lots of small stuff. Urchin clingfish, sergeant fish, nudis galore and cute little baby cuttlefish. Unfortunately there was also a lot of rubish on this site. I don't know if it was the tides or the location or what but I spent a lot of the dive stuffing the pockets of my BCD full of plastic bags floating in the water. Another cool thing about this site is there is an underwater grave of a man who loved diving and asked to have his ashes buried there. Kinda a wierd thing to come across but cool none the less.
Dive fun-o-meter: 7
Interesting-stuff-o-meter: 6 - the plastic bags but a bit of a downer on the whole experience.

My final day of diving was a full day trip to the famous "Sail Rock". Big Blue Diving (the dive shop I dive with in K.Tao) runs a weekly day trip out there. It takes about 2.5 hours to get to but is well worth the trip. We do 2 dives at Sail Rock and then hit S.W Pinnacles on the way home. What makes Sail Rock so cool is the "chimney". It's a big cylindrical swimthrough that runs vertically from 6 meters to about 18 meters. You can do your intial decent down the chimney popping out of a hole at the bottom or can do it the other way around.  Super Cool tube of diving fun!

Me at Sail Rock!!!

Dive 1 and 2 were pretty similar since they were on the same site. We were told there was a whale shark at the site the day before but alas he or she did not decide to come visit us :( We did see tons of batfish, longface emperor fish, porcupine fishes, angel fish, snappers and fun nudibranches. On the first dive we popped out of the chimney onto a school of tiny baby yellow tailed barracuda! They were only about the size of my index finger. Awww so cute! We also had a visit with a big fat momma moray eel that had to be at least a meter long if not more and had a face off with a couple of very cranky titan trigger fish. All in all, both dives were delightful! Yay Sail Rock. I heart you!!!!
Dive fun-o-meter: 9
Interesting-stuff-o-meter: 8 - cute baby barracuda! 

Dive #3 - S.W Pinnacles. 
I would like to rename this dive the "airsucker super express" since we were diving at 27 meters is wicked heavy currrent which meant that we all huffed up all our air quicker than usual. The dive was a bit short (40mins) but we saw lots of cool stuff. Probably the wierdest thing was a rabbit fish that had a full bite taken out of its back - just like out of a cartoon. He was still swimming along with this fishy buddies but I have a feeling his days were numbered....poor little bunny.  

Beware of injured rabbitfish.

So there you have it ladies and gentlemen. I escaped the murky floodwaters of Bangkok for the fish filled Gulf of Thailand. Upon my return I found my house still dry and everything in the general vicinity to be as it was when I left it. Here's hoping it stays that way.

Stay tuned for my Koh Tao dive briefing - the dry land edition!!

Cheers from the fishbowl and remember to leave me a comment on my Blue Season Bali Best Dive Job application site by clicking HERE, scrolling to the bottom of the page and telling Blue Season Bali why I deserve to win!!!

J

P.S Once again, I can't take pics underwater so thank you to google images for allowing me to steal other people's pictures.