Great White Shark Video from Morocco!

H/T Shark Year Magazine

Regular readers of the blog know I love my sharks and they know that when those sharks are Great Whites, they should also know by now that my favourite Great White Sharks, are Mediterranean ones!

Check out the video taken in Al Hoceima in Morocco earlier this month. It's not the first time I've blogged about GWS in Morocco either...

Love seeing these! :)

Behind Blue Glass Released To The World TODAY!

AVAILABLE HERE (ENGLISH WITH SPANISH SUBTITLES)

Spanish language article here!

"For years some of the largest Great White sharks ever landed, were caught off the coast of Mallorca, sometimes less than one hundred metres from popular tourist beaches. These captures abruptly stopped after the second largest White Shark ever caught was brought back to the dock by fisherman, Xisco Perez. The year was 1976, the year Steven Spielberg's JAWS was released in Spain.

The story has remained largely untold outside of Mallorca until now, David Diley explores why, along the way taking seven unwitting volunteers into the deep, to show how important sharks really are, how shark encounters are actually a positive thing and show the world what is truly at risk.

This was the first film I ever made and features content never before seen on TV, including eyewitness accounts from the people who were there. Behind Blue Glass premiered to a packed room in Portals, Mallorca, in May 2011, after its DVD release earlier that year."

Two years ago, whilst working towards getting "Of Shark and Man" funded, I figured, rather later than I should have in all honesty, that in order to help me get said funding, I should really actually go and try my hand at making a film!

I'd wanted to do a comprehensive piece about Mallorca's Great White Sharks for years, since my first visit to the island in my early teens and thanks to an email out of the blue from a certain Mr Brad Robertson, asking my advice on his Shark Diver course, after having stumbled across this blog, the wheels were set in motion for the start of a pretty amazing journey!

I'm not going to tell the whole story again, this blog post will tell you everything you need to know as a back story...

So, here's the big news...As of today, you, yes YOU, can now see Behind Blue Glass, in its entirety, in full HD, thanks to Vimeo's new "On Demand" feature which, to be frank, looks to be quite brilliant!

Behind Blue Glass was released on DVD only last year, available to buy direct from Palma Aquarium, but I'd been looking around for ages for a place where I could offer a digital download in return for a small fee but everywhere seemed to charge through the nose, take large cuts of sales and make it overly difficult to just get the thing out there.

I've been waiting for On Demand to be launched since I first heard of it last year. Available only to Vimeo Pro members, On Demand actually makes the whole process easy to do. You upload your film, give them your paypal account details and launch your film. They take 10% and that's it. It's so simple! All you need to do is visit the page click "Watch Now" put in your card details and you get to stream the film from Vimeo on any device, anywhere, for as long as I am a Vimeo Pro member so basically, years and years. You know that the majority of your money goes to the Film-Maker which is where the majority of your money should go but often doesn't in more traditional distribution agreements.

The film is very reasonably priced at $5.99 which is £3.95, or €4.58 at the current rate of exchange, in fact, it's under-priced to be honest, for 37 minutes of film, you're practically stealing it from me ;) After I have covered my own costs, a percentage of each sale will go towards Asociacion Ondine and the ongoing Mallorquin conservation projects we are running, currently at our own expense.

So, why should you pay your hard earned money to see this film? Firstly, it's almost certainly the most in-depth documentary about Mallorca's Great White Sharks ever made, certainly the most detailed English language film on the subject, on the planet.You also don't know this story, it's a brilliant story and you are absolutely guaranteed to learn something new.

Having watched the film again last night for the first time in a while, the amount of content and factual information is pretty staggering. There is a wealth of info packed into less than 40 minutes, probably more than you would find in other, shall we say, "bigger budget" and more "professional" productions and not just that, the whole thing comes from nothing more than just wanting to make something fun, a little bit different and to tell a great story. There's no cynical attempt to try and sell you things, it's just a guy who really loves sharks, making an interesting film to hopefully appeal to other people who really love sharks!

Behind Blue Glass will always be very special to me because it was an amazing experience to make it and because of everything that has followed it. This was my first ever attempt at making a film, not my first film after film school, not my first paid job, I'd bypassed all of that, this was the first time I had ever attempted to produce, direct, present and shoot a film...Ever. Only eight months prior, I was working as a Recruitment Consultant with my only experience being filming sharks on diving holidays and making videos of myself and my friends acting like idiots whilst drunk on New Year's Eve!

Of the four man crew (well, three men, one woman) only Liam had any experience, this was literally four mates, three of whom  had no idea what they were doing, trying to complete an enormously complex and ambitious project, in fact looking back, the goals I set were completely unreasonable, naive, way too ambitious and complex but somehow, we managed to pull it off through sheer bloody mindedness and determination.

We absolutely ran ourselves into the ground on this film, the average shoot day lasted 14 hours, one day on pre-production, Brad, Bea and I started at 3am and didn't finish until 1am the following day with no breaks. Also nobody really got paid, most of you reading this will be paid more today, sitting at your desk than the people involved in this film got for three weeks of solid grind. It was incredibly hard work but one of the happiest times of my life.

 

OK, let's be honest, it's far from perfect, it's rough and ready, there are things I would do very differently now, knowing what I know but you know what, who cares? I really don't think that matters because taking into account what we had to go through, I still look at this film as a pretty incredible achievement. That's not me blowing my own trumpet, that's testament to everybody who rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in to help us make it. Brad and Bea almost killed themselves to make this happen with their sheer effort and passion, Debora, Roman, Manon and the guys at Palma Aquarium were an amazing help. Jaime Ros, Soller Museum, Gabriel Morey, all the volunteers, Xisco Perez, the list of people who gave their time and effort, free of charge to help get this made is huge and without them, it wouldn't be what it is.

Huge thanks also to Richard Theiss and Lawrence Groth for the additional footage which again, they contributed for free.

So for the imperfections, the fact that the sound department was either Bea or local kids, Brad and Bea being handed cameras and expected to do a crash course in cinematography whilst actually shooting segments on the spot, the obligatory "things not working properly at the worst possible time," the fact I had to wear sunnies through most shots due to an eye problem and the often improvisational approach to film-making, I am incredibly fond of this film because not only is it way better than anyone's first film should be, it has a heart and soul at its core of people just wanting to do something good and start something.

And start something it did. Behind Blue Glass was the big first shove behind the marine conservation projects now being rolled out by Brad and Bea in Mallorca, Brad is now running a full time Conservation NGO, people suddenly started taking an interest in marine conservation, including the media, it directly led to "A Ray of Light," one of the headlining films in this year's Beneath The Waves Film Festival and also taught me more in three weeks on how to shoot films than any film school could, meaning it helped enormously in the making of "Of Shark and Man." It's fascinating to me to see the enormous progression and growth from film to film and Behind Blue Glass has a lot of the credit for that.

Anyway, that's enough from me, are you sold yet? If you're interested in sharks and that still doesn't encourage you to part with the cost of a packet of fags to see this film, then you're probably not actually that interested in sharks...

Buy Behind Blue Glass HERE

Edit: Muchas gracias Patric!

Huge Great White caught in Morocco

 

It's not a great picture, I know, but this was sent to me by Debora Morrison at Palma Aquarium and was passed to her by a friend of hers in the Moroccan port of Kenitra.

Debora also sent the photo to Brad knowing that we both share a passion for Mediterranean Great White Sharks but, this is the Atlantic and Morocco is in Africa right? Well, yeah but hear me out...

This 4 metre plus female was caught last week by what looks like a Tuna fishing boat and its docking was witnessed by someone described as a "reliable source," and passed on to Debora's friend,  a Guardia Civil with the Servicio Maritimo. The reason this capture is of particular interest is the time of the year, and the proximity to the passage between Africa and Spain, where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean.

 

Xisco Perez's 2nd Great White, Mallorca 1976

The Mediterranean is known for numerous notable White Shark captures with Italy and Malta usually at the forefront of discussions on the subject but the Spanish coast, around the Balearics and the stretch of coast taking in the Ligurian Sea, around the South of France and Northern Italy have all contributed heavily to the Med's White Shark pedigree, albeit with less publicity.

I have long held a theory that the Mediterranean supports a small population of resident Great White Sharks, primarily based around the central Mediterranean and Adriatic but that it also sees a yearly influx of large, adult sharks, primarily females, from the Eastern Atlantic, which pass through the straits of Gibraltar, possibly to give birth or following particular prey items. There is scant information available about this Moroccan shark and myself, Brad and Gabriel Morey are trying to find out more, if we get it, you will of course be updated.

Sightings of large White Sharks off the cost of Eastern Spain, even captures and beachings, whilst not common place, still happen with enough regularity for it to be a geographical feature of significance. You might not hear about them, but they happen, several large Great Whites have been spotted off the coast of Barcelona and Valencia, captain's of cruise ships have told me directly that they see one or two Great White Sharks at the surface, every year, on the crossing from Ibiza to Nice, a friend of Brad's saw one from her yacht around September/October last year and Xisco Perez, the man who caught the last Great White on record in Mallorca (also the second largest White Shark ever caught) told me he had found a large Tuna floating at the surface with an enormous, characteristic bite taken from it, a bite he is certain came from a Great White and that would have been around September 2010.

 

A six metre plus Great White, Mallorca 1976

I believe that these Eastern Atlantic Great Whites pass through the Strait of Gibraltar in the winter, the majority of which bisect the stretch of water between Spain's east coast and Mallorca's west, making their way around the north eastern point of the island, before moving in to the region of the Ligurian Sea and down the coastline of Italy. Of course there have been captures and sightings in areas outside of this route but when looking at confirmed captures of Mediterranean Great Whites, the majority fall in to this locale.

 

Let's look at some facts surrounding the data I have from the Balearics. There have been twenty-seven confirmed captures of adult White Sharks between the 1920's and 1976. Their captures provide a major clue as to what these sharks were doing there as every single one was caught in nets designed to catch Bluefin Tuna. Of those captures, eleven  ( 41%) were caught in the months January to March. Of the ten individuals which were gender confirmed, nine were females, none of the twenty-seven were less than three metres in length and eleven were confirmed or estimated to be larger than five metres. 79% of these Balearic Great Whites were caught off the North East coast and in 1969, three five metre long specimens were captured in the space of only five days, from the same place.

 

One of those 5 metre White Sharks from 1969

What has all this got to do with our Moroccan friend? 

Could she have been on her way into the Med, maybe even to travel the route mentioned above, traversing southern Spain, Mallorca, France and Italy before making her way back out of the Strait of Gibraltar and into the Atlantic? Possibly. I for one would like to think so and hope she has friends luckier than her who manage to avoid the various man made hazards on the way to make it.

The surprising thing for me has always been that we don't actually see them more than we currently do. Ask any tourist about Great White Sharks off the coasts of Mallorca, Ibiza, Spain and France and most would recoil in horror but when speaking to fishermen in these areas, most will have a story to tell and the vast majority will barely flinch because for them, Great White Sharks are simply an occasional part of the scenery, usually destroying their nets and stealing their fish. Anybody who knows, who wants to see sharks, knows the first people to ask are fishermen as it is they who spend more time on the water than anyone. Ask any Mediterranean fishermen about Great White Sharks and they will almost certainly tell you their own story and that yes, they are still there and they are big.

There is precious little research into Mediterranean Great White Sharks and whether they spend all year in the Med or not but I would love to know more. The Mediterranean brings with it cultural politics in the different countries and it must be said that, for an area of the world where tourism is so vital, particularly with visitors from the UK, I dare say a good majority of people would certainly not want the subject of enormous Great White Sharks prowling just offshore to be discussed in public with any vigour.

However, we are coming up to Med White Shark season so if you're visiting, keep your eyes peeled and cameras ready because well, you never know...

My profiles:

Sarah Shark Episode 2

 

You may remember a couple of months ago, I stumbled across Sarah Richmond, or "Sarah Shark" as she is better known who had made a half hour documentary about Wobbegongs which was really, pretty good! I had never heard of Sarah before but what I thought was great about what she was doing was that she is obviously a passionate shark lover and was out there doing something positive, creative and something which was of a very high standard, higher than I was expecting if I'm being honest.

Well, Sarah's back and this time she's tackling the far sexier and much better known, Great White Shark.

 

I'm a bit of a fan actually, there's something incredibly likable about Sarah as a host and she's clearly very passionate. What she does extremely well is that she doesn't allow this to manifest itself into some chest beating pious war cry blinding by inaccuracies and anti-human propaganda, in fact, quite the opposite. She sticks to the facts , involves the general public and allows the viewer to make his or her own mind up.

This episode, like the first is clearly aimed at an already sympathetic audience and has an almost innocent quality to it, it's not trying to be arty, controversial or sensationalist, it just is what it is, a small group of talented and passionate people doing something they all clearly enjoy doing and that's one of its major strengths.

In this episode, Sarah and the team look at the issue of shark nets, film some very big and beautiful cuttlefish and go cage diving with the White Sharks off Port Lincoln.

The shark nets issue could have been a bit more in-depth maybe but then again, the episodes last less than half an hour and they more than cram enough in without anything seeming like it's been brushed over so this section in particular more than gets its point across.

It's filmed well, the sound is good and once again, the graphics used to illustrate certain points are top notch, a real professional edge to everything. The basics are done well also, Sarah's narrative and pieces to camera are delivered articulately and at a suitable pace which although sounding obvious, gets the points she's making across well. Pieces to camera aren't easy, a lot less easy than you probably think and it's something she does very well.

 

The White Shark footage is good too. It can be restrictive filming from a cage with angles and shots being somewhat limited, add to that the time constraints of what I imagine was only a couple of days at sea to get the shots but they did a really good job.

I said in the previous review that what Sarah and her team is doing isn't groundbreakingly original or completely new, but it doesn't need to be. It doesn't hide behind a glossy veneer of "art" to make up for lack of substance. It is what it is, it gets a message across and it's put together and promoted very well and people are certainly seeming to take an interest. The highlight of this episode, well, both episodes put together for me, is a simple reaction, a three second scene where, when passed by a very large shark, Sarah jumps up in the water squealing with delight, it's those honest, unscripted moments of enthusiasm, enjoyment and positivity, which often do far more to help sharks and the image of sharks, than constant images of death and slaughter.

Well done again Sarah and the Sarah Shark team, looking forward to part three!

As for me, well, coming soon will be some info on "Behind Blue Glass" which I am hoping will finally be released very soon and also some progress reports on post production for "Of Shark and Man" which after having spent the last six weeks reviewing, cataloguing and filing a month's worth of footage, I can tell you, is looking like it's gonna be pretty damn special! Keep your eyes peeled and join the mailing list!!!! The feedback from the private teaser promo which you will only have seen if you are on the mailing list, attended the BiteBack fundraiser or are one of the select few I sent the link to directly, has been nothing short of phenomenal.

have a top weekend!

My profiles:

Behind Blue Glass - Finished!

Great news about Behind Blue Glass, after a total of approximately one thousand man hours work, the film is now finished! A master DVD is ready and the full HD 1080p version is exporting as we speak, twenty hours in, only fourteen more hours to go!

From day one, this was a big task, not only was it my first ever attempt at making a film having no experience of doing so before, the opportunity also happened to arise at the sharp end of the major preparations for my first feature film in Fiji, production of which begins in only one week and six days. Behind Blue Glass was also made on what can be described as a "micro budget," a four man crew, three of whom had pretty much zero experience and has been edited solely by myself on a £500 laptop which has made some of the post production process a very slow, laborious experience.



With all that in mind however, I am more than confident in saying that the quality of the end result, far belies the limitations in regards to resources, it looks great!

As for the content, I am more than happy, the film features interviews with Xisco Perez and Sr. M Ferrer, two men with first hand experience of Mallorca's Great White Sharks, Gabriel Morey, Marine Biologist, Fisheries and Conservation Minister and member of the IUCN and Brad Robertson of Ondine Escape. Behind Blue Glass also stars some brilliant members of the pubic, from the ages of 16-62 who get confronted with the opportunity of a lifetime but how do they react? Of course, the film also features underwater footage of the other stars of the show, the sharks themselves!

 

The film clocks in at just over thirty eight minutes and in keeping with the highly independent "DIY" approach, the film's original music comes entirely from unsigned, underground artists and bands, including Lifescreen, Ten, Back Page First and the one and only Rock behemoth that is Nerve Engine.

The film was shot entirely on Canon 7D and 5Dmkii with a little help from a small palmcorder and the quality of footage is outstanding. The premiere will be held in Mallorca at Palma Aqauarium, most likely at the end of August and looks set to be a pretty fancy affair. After the premiere, you will of course, be able to see the film itself. I am looking into the best ways to do this and it looks like the most likely scenario would be to make it available on two formats, a DVD with additional extras like behind the scenes stuff, the trailer and production stills and also as a HD digital download. 

Keep your eyes peeled for updates, the best way to do that is of course, to go here, scroll to below the trailer and join the mailing list. In the event I can make special offers and discounts on this and future films, they will be for the mailing list members only, maybe something worth looking into?

Spread the word, it's a great little film if I do say so myself and some very dedicated people put a hell of a lot of effort into helping me make this, with no gain for themselves, purely because they believe in the message. Because I went over to Mallorca to shoot this film and because of the press coverage I got whilst there, the issue of shark conservation is now being discussed in the national media and in the coming weeks Palma Aquarium will be rolling out an anti-shark finning campaign across Mallorca and hopefully Spain as well. This wasn't achieved by an NGO or expensive marketing campaign, it was achieved by a small handful of people who believed enough that we could make it happen which just goes to show, it is possible for ordinary people to change things for the better.

Coming soon: News on what to expect whilst I am in Fiji!

www.officetoocean.com

Der der, der der, der der, der der...Silly season is upon us again!

Every year without fail here in the UK we have the "Jaws off the Cornish coast" story but it's started a little late this year.

These stories always seem to materialise when the weather forecast for the next week looks good, that is, when summer looks like it might actually make its annual two week stopover in the UK because that is precisely the time us limeys don the string vests and tight shorts, inflicting our pasty (later burned to a crisp) skin on the world and head to the British riviera.

For those who can't be arsed to click the link, the long and short of it is that apparently two separate fishermen have been "attacked" by an Oceanic Whitetip Shark off the beaches of the beautiful St Ives in Cornwall. Funny thing is, it's usually a Great White but the Oceanic Whitetip seems to be the shark of the moment after its month in the spotlight in Egypt last year.

 

It's the same every year, fisherman says he's seen big shark, press splash it all over front pages after contacting Richard Peirce of the Shark Trust who quite rightly doesn't dismiss it outright, saying nothing can be confirmed until a picture is taken, a few days later a picture appears of a Basking Shark which is claimed to be the offending "man eater" and that picture is then debuffed as a Basking Shark by someone at a university or aquarium and the whole thing is over and done with.

That's not to say there haven't been some viable eyewitness accounts and evidence to back up the claim that large predatory sharks do visit the UK's coastline. I have been saying for twenty years that Great White Sharks do visit our shores but the Oceanic Whitetip? It's a stretch too far for me I'm afraid so I'm calling shenanigans on this one.

Call me cynical but you would struggle to find anybody in the country these days without a mobile phone and on top of that, a mobile phone without a camera on it. Is anybody seriously trying to say that not one but two fishermen saw an Oceanic Whitetip and didn't think to get a quick snap on their phones to back up their story? Not a chance as far as I'm concerned.

On the upside however, at least it looks like the weather is looking good for the next week or so!

Edit:

15/6/2011

As if to completely prove my point above, British tabloid newspaper, The Daily Express, are running this abomination of an article today and not only is it nothing more than a load of non-facts thrown together, the grammar is appalling, "a oceanic whitetip" I mean, seriously, come on!

My point above was these fabricated stories serve only one purpose and that can be proven with these passages in the article, "...Fishermen have booked out hotels in St Ives..." and "Hotel owners yesterday told of a “last-minute flurry” of customers desperate to hunt down the shark."

Crappy weather means less people booking UK breaks so in order to get the punters down there they make up a story of a once in a lifetime opportunity to see a "killer shark."

Yep, they really do think we're that stupid.