Our Favorite "Secret" Dive Spots Around the World, and Updates On The Most Significant Underwater Movie Ever Made

SPEAKER_02 0:13

Welcome to the Deeper Blue Podcast, your weekly guide to everything that is happening around the world underwater. My name is Stephen Whelan. I'm the founder of DeeperBlue.com, the world's most popular diving website. Every week, the Deeper Blue Podcast covers everything that's happening in the scuba diving, freediving, diving travel, and ocean advocates world. So join us as we explore the Deeper Blue. Hi everyone. Welcome to episode 20 of the Deeper Blue Podcast. It's a special edition of the podcast for you today. We'll have the usual roundup of news just in a minute. But after that, we're going to gather all the amazing co-hosts of this podcast together for the first time for a fantastic roundtable discussion about our favorite secret dive spots around the world that we get to share with each other and of course you. So before we get to that, I've got two really quick requests. We're episode 20 now, and we've had a phenomenal set of guests that have been on the podcast to date, and we're starting to look at what our next set of guests might look like. There are really so many inspirational people in the diving and ocean worlds that we want to talk to. And so what we really want to hear from is yourself about what you want to hear and get on the show as far as interviews are concerned. We're open to all ideas, so drop us a note at podcast at deeperblue.com with your suggestions on who to feature and why. We also want to hear from you on your best dive ever. As you know, every week we share some fantastic dives from listeners all over the world. And like guests, we're also looking at our next batch of listener submissions. And to be honest, we'd love to hear yours. It's dead easy to record and send in. Just head to deeferblue.com slash best dive ever. And we have a fantastic little widget that you can use right on your computer or on your mobile to send in the audio straight to us. So with those two things, uh, let's head straight in to this week's diving and ocean related news. The big news of the week is that the iconic James Bond, Sean Connery, has died aged 90. I heard the news just before starting recording this episode and immediately went and looked at my James Bond collection and dug out and watched one of my favourite Bond movies of all time, starring Sean Connery, that is Thunderball. It features some epic underwater scenes, including Bond assaulting the Spectre underwater base using scuba equipment, spear guns, and some high-tech underwater scooter for the 1960s, which of course was all extremely high-tech at that time. Having a look around and obviously watching the film and feeling very nostalgic, a couple of bits of trivia came to mind. The first one being that the diving equipment Bond is supposed to be using is a rebreather, which obviously is quite a common piece of equipment these days. However, in reality, rebreathers in the 1960s weren't quite as small as they depicted on screen. So what Bond was using and the other underwater stunt artists were actually two small cylinders stuck together with a small mouthpiece. However, they weren't actually functional. So those scenes are actually being done on breath hold or free diving as we would call it these days. The other bit of trivia is that Sean Connery was taught to dive by a chap called Stuart Cove. Now, Stuart is the owner of a dive centre that actually bears his name as Stuart Cove in Nassau in the Bahamas. In interviews that Stuart's given, he has said that poor old Sean Connery was petrified of diving. However, in good old Bond style, you would never know that when watching the action on screen. It's so sad to hear that Connery has passed away as he was an iconic Bond, and watching all those underwater scenes was really an inspiration to me and was part of what I looked at around taking up diving all those many moons ago. So here's to you, Mr. Bond. More moving news this week as we've seen some behind-the-scenes photos pop up from Avatar 2 that filming has restarted in New Zealand. Kirk Crock, the founder of Performance Free Diving International, who has been involved in the production, was seen in a photo alongside British film star Kate Winslet performing some underwater stunts. In interviews, Winslet has been quoted as saying that she was able to learn free diving through Kirk and has achieved an impressive seven minutes and 14 second breath hold. Although it's not entirely clear if this was oxygen-assisted, that's a means of increasing your breath hold by breathing oxygen-enriched or pure O2 prior to breath hold. Kirk, who has been a guest on this podcast, is back in New Zealand and did mention to us that they're using techniques around technical free diving. There's a couple of articles on deeperblue.com around this, which uses things like mixed gases to improve recovery time and diving time around free diving. So that might be the case that Kate Winslett is using some form of mixed gas to help her recovery and improve her breath holds. What he did say though, and it was December last year, when he mentioned to us, and we interviewed him, and he told us that he felt the new Avatar 2 film was going to be the most significant diving film ever made. Something that truly gave us goosebumps because the whole film is based around an underwater village and people, uh the Narvi, I believe it's called, that the whole film's going to be about. I can't wait to see the film, although it's not due to come out to December next year, 2021. So in the meantime, take a look at deeperblue.com and check out that behind the scenes photo from one of the producers and all the commentary and discussion that's gone along with it. Free diving news now, as we heard from the organisers of the Infinity Depth Games held in Cyprus over the 9th to the 18th of October. In a somewhat smaller event than previous years, 13 competitors gathered in Larnaca in Cyprus to compete across disciplines such as Constant Wait, Constant Wait No Fins, and Free Immersion. Overall winners were Christos Papadopoulos from Greece and Natsumo Mitsuno from Japan. The competition itself didn't disappoint, though there were some amazing conditions and a couple of national records fell during the course of the competition, including an Austrian record by Burgit, Stand Hartinger, and from India Selena Samantha. I don't know about you, but I truly am missing out on seeing all these epic free diving performances that we would normally have seen during the course of this year. In the meantime, I suppose we're going to have to suffice with these smaller and more intimate competitions. And if you take a look at the news item and also on the Facebook page, there are some truly epic, stunning photos from Dan Verhoven, the iconic underwater photographer and filmmaker who is often at these competitions. Halloween has just come and gone, and a whole load of diving history was put up for auction on October the 31st. 400 diving related lots went under the hammer, including some gems such as diving helmets from the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as some beautiful antique diving books like the 1870 Bottom of the Sea and 1874 Wonders of the Great Deep. I personally didn't get to bid on anything as I was out for a socially distanced trick or treat with my kids. Plus, I'm pretty sure that my family would be complaining bitterly because they definitely don't need any more diving paraphernalia or stuff sitting around the house. But if you were involved in getting any of the auction items and managed to pick up something historic during the course of the auction, we'd love to hear from you as to what you picked up. Finally, for the British divers amongst our listeners, there's a fantastic new book that's due out on the 25th of November this year called The Wild and Temperate Seas. The new book covers 50 dive sites across 15 locations in the United Kingdom, stretching from the Northern Islands of Scotland to the south coast of the UK. The book covers almost every aspect of UK diving, from wrecks and locks to reefs and caves, and there really is something in it for everyone. The book is not just the work of one man, although the main author, Will Appleard, is a very experienced diver. He has collaborated in this instance with some of the most well-known divers in the UK to garner their insights about their favourite dive locations. Collaborators on the project include Alec Gibson, Dan Bolt, Elaine Whiteford, Jason Brown, Jake Davies, Kirsty Andrews, and Stuart Philpot. It's available for pre-order right now if you go online, and you can find out more information about where to go online at deeperblue.com. So that's it for the news this week. Catch up on everything around the world underwater on deeperblue.com and also check out our social media profiles on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And finally, as always, if you like what you've heard, please subscribe, like and comment wherever you hear your podcasts. They really, really do make a huge difference.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

Hi, I'm Paul Strike, co-founder of Fourth Element. And you're listening to the best 30 Minutes About Diving. The Deeper Blue Podcast.

SPEAKER_06 10:07

Hi, it's Jason Leas, producer of the Deeper Blue Podcast. Today we're doing something a little different. Normally in this part of the show, we would have an interview with someone of interest from the ocean community. But today instead, we've gotten all the co-hosts from the podcast together for a discussion of some of their favorite hidden dives from around the world. And so you know we plan on doing more of these as the co-hosts are a very knowledgeable but also super fun group of people. So we hope you enjoyed this as much as we did. And if you have a site for the next discussion, please let us know. Today we have our superstar council of all the co-hosts of our show. We have Tech Clark, Megan Henny Greer, Sarah Richards, Lyndon Wolbert, Steven Whelan, and myself. And today we're going to talk about something that this was actually a choice of topics that I wanted. Whenever I'm on a dive trip or talking to an average diver, one of the things I always love to hear is if there's one place in the world that most people don't know about that you've dived, that's amazing. I would love to hear about it. So I'd love to hear from these people who've dedicated their lives to diving. If there's one dive around the world that they're like, this is unknown, but people should know about it. So why don't we start with force of nature, Sarah Richard, and tell us where you think is one of the most epic hidden dives in the world?

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Well, I'm glad that you've asked me this question during COVID, because I feel like I've discovered some of the best dive sites, secret ones, during this time. Because I mean, before before this all happened, really part of what I was doing was visiting popular dive sites, popular dive communities, um, you know, and recording them and getting to know people there. So I wouldn't have had that many like secret places, but now I've been locked down in the UK. Oh my God, it's blown my mind. There is like some places here which like I probably would have rolled my eyes at very naively before this year. And I think one in particular has got to be um just off the coast of Devon and Cornwall, where I had an absolutely incredible experience just a few weeks, month ago, where I got to swim with blue sharks. And not only did I swim with blue sharks, I also saw bluefin tuna, I also saw a sunfish, which in my 12 years of diving, always diving around Bali, every place that you usually see sunfish. I never ever seen one. I saw one in the UK, but it's just absolutely mind-blowing. So it's just amazing. Yeah, it's about half an hour off the coast of uh Falmouth in Cornwall, and yeah, we we had like five, six blue sharks. Um, it was COVID regulation, so there was only four people allowed on the boat. Somebody cancelled, very bad form. So there was just two of us, just two of us, um, just surrounded by these.

SPEAKER_02 13:03

Wouldn't you call me, Sarah? I'm a you know, I know I'm not thinking I would have come.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

Uh Mr. I won't dive unless it's a dry suit. Didn't call you, that's why.

SPEAKER_06 13:10

Because it's cold. Did you say that does it have a specific dive site name, or did you did you say that?

SPEAKER_01 13:20

I mean, it's not a dive site, it's like, you know, you just kind of go out and uh the fishermen kind of know where these the these sharks hang. So, but all along the coast of uh Cornwall and Devon, you can find them around April to August.

SPEAKER_04 13:34

Was it really uh Sarah, was it really deep water, like a blue water dive type of thing?

SPEAKER_01 13:38

Yeah, yeah, really deep. Yeah, but you know, the great thing with the the blues is they come right up to the surface. So I mean, yeah, and they sometimes give you a little nudge here and there, which you know is just an incredible experience. And I've I've dived with blue sharks in Baja, California before, but this was at a whole different level. It was just, it was so special, and especially to have it in my home waters. That's awesome. Really cool.

SPEAKER_06 13:59

That's great. Good one. What about you, Megan? What is there what's your secret dive that you're like this is epic?

SPEAKER_04 14:05

I rekindled a very deep love for a place this summer when my son and I were road tripping back from the Keys back here to Colorado, and we uh he had never seen a wild alligator. And so I was really excited to stop at my old, my old swamp stomping grounds. Um spent a lot of time diving in the swamp back in the day, you know, and uh we we called it the black swamp, and we ended up seeing over 20 beautiful alligators just like doing their thing out in nature. Um, one of them was like 11 and a half feet long. We saw this nine-footer right next to us. We weren't diving because my son's very little, but this was my old diving place, and it had been so long since I had been back to the swamp, and I had forgotten how much I love that. I mean, I I'm not usually at a loss for words, and that's happening right now. So, I mean, that it was it was really like a spiritual experience for me going back there. And at some point I will be diving out there again because I there is no place underwater that I've ever experienced like the swamp. You know, there's always this negative kind of connotation that can go with the swamp, and it is one of the most stunning, magical, never-ending kind of treasure trove to explore. And underwater is like mind-blowing. And so that that is my secret place that probably won't be frequented by a whole lot of people, but for for you know, a diving locale. But it was really an amazing experience too to share that place with my son. I he was like, Are we gonna go in the water? I said, no, buddy, you're bite-sized. Like, we're not gonna go in the water. He's only seven. But it was really cool to get to show him these prehistoric creatures so up and close. We were able to see, in particular, this one we were kind of standing on the bank, and he was under this overhang and came out, and it was a nine-foot gator, and he just had the most beautiful scoots on his back, and he had this moss growing all over him, and it was the bomb.

SPEAKER_06 16:16

That's a lesson. The black swamp.

SPEAKER_04 16:19

The black swamp.

SPEAKER_06 16:19

That's all me. It's on my list. All right, Lyndon Walbert.

SPEAKER_05 16:25

Oh, goodness, no pressure. Back in 2012, I went out with uh, it was four of us went out on a little just ponga panga, however you want to pronounce it, boat, depending what country you're in. We went probably 20 miles off the coast of San Diego. And we were looking specifically for ocean sunfish. That was our goal. We wanted to see Mala Molas. And they had gone out spear fishing and previously and seen a bunch of them under in it's this is the time of year to see them, September, October, when all of the little kelp patties up here, you know, the the water gets warm, and traditionally this time of year, the kelp will start to break off of its hold fasts, and and you'll have these little floating kelp patties of basically kelp that detached from its root system and is floating in a little aggregation on the surface out in the open ocean. And you're out in this pelagic area and you can see so much. In one day, on the way out, our our day was bookended by thousands of dolphins. Pod of thousands. As far as you could see, they came at the bow of the boat. We named one, it was unbelievable. We named this one Snowflake because it had the scar on its side and it was kind of leading the pack, the pod. And then we saw it again on the way in. It was unbelievable. Make your snowflake! It was so cool. And then we saw mola molas. We we swam with molamolas, we saw minky whales, we were in the same water space as we guys, it was crazy. And I just, oh my gosh, harbor seals, sea lions. It was mind-boggling. I'll never forget it. We're sitting on the boat, we're out 20 miles out. It was like glass. The water was in the low 70s. This is unheard of. It was sunny, it was perfect, it was calm. There wasn't even a maybe a slight breeze. We'd already been seeing Malamolas and seen all these dolphins, and we're like, this is amazing. This is great. And we pull out our sandwiches, and then you hear and it's like and we looked around, and there are all these minky whales. Anyway, that so it's not a spot. I have no clue what the coordinates are. It doesn't matter. It was a coordinate at the intersection of my heart and my soul is the coordinate, and we had the best day. It's amazing. So yeah, it never underestimate to echo what Sarah said, what is in your backyard?

SPEAKER_08 18:43

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 18:44

That's why that's why, as divers, we have major FOMO. It's like you don't miss the boat because today will be the day. Today is the day. And you just missed it because you didn't get out of bed. I had a headache. I drank too much, right? From Dima.

SPEAKER_01 19:06

Said none of us.

SPEAKER_04 19:08

I know we're all dismissing Dima right now, right?

SPEAKER_06 19:12

That's a great, that's a great one, Lyndon.

SPEAKER_03 19:14

Um, tech, what about you? Well, first a disclaimer. If there's any environmental abuses that take place in my story, there's not to be no liability associated with so you need to be like, no animals were harmed in the park. Nothing.

SPEAKER_02 19:34

No tech clocks were harmed in the making of this order.

SPEAKER_03 19:37

Yes. So um mine was a place, is a place called Little River Springs. It's outside of Branson, Florida, which is outside of Gainesville, Florida. It's in cave country. And this is next to the Suwannee River, and Little Springs is a spring system. And this is a very popular cave dive site. We all were big-time cave divers when we were in college and everything. So we would take groups and we would go to Little River. And now, what Little River has is this opening, crystal clear water, air clear water, this opening down a limestone tube formation that corkscrews near the bottom. And it's about 60 feet deep that it corkscrews and then goes back into a big, big cave system. What we would do is this dive called the galaxy dive. And the galaxy dive was where we would go at night. So, you know, a lot of it is cavern with some ambient light, but at nighttime, it's full cave, pitch black. We would go down and we would position the leaders of the galaxy dive at the very bottom of the corkscrew at about 70 feet or so. So then they would shut their lights off. And as soon as they would shut their lights off, everybody else, all the way up to the surface, all the way through the cave, would position themselves in all these different spots, hold on to a formation on the roof, and then shut their lights off. Pitch utter black, the blackest of black that you can imagine in a cave at night, and all of a sudden, the leaders at the bottom would take silum light sticks, crack all of them, and cut them open and wave them in the water. So it created these little fluorescent balls that went zooming through the cave. Wow. And you would just see this glow if you were up in the column, just emerge and it would come closer and closer, and then all of a sudden, you would see the little particulates of the Siloom Light stick oil, and it would look like you were in some type of space movie where the This is just going by you at Mach 1. And that was the Galaxy Dive. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 22:09

That's trippy, man. And then the Oh, the screen's getting buns. It buns.

SPEAKER_04 22:15

I see why you did the disclaimer. That's definitely, you know, not the conservation minded thing. But hey, we you didn't know.

SPEAKER_03 22:24

Yeah, this was the middle. I'm an old smart.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

It kind of sounds like underwater quidditch. I was envisioning it. I was like envisioning Harry Potter coming along in his brimsticks to like grab it, you know?

SPEAKER_08 22:42

Yes.

SPEAKER_06 22:45

That's a good one. That's a great one. Uh now, of course, we have the light of our lives, the leader of Deeper Blue. Founder of Deeper Boo, Stephen Wheel. What's your hidden dive that you'd recommend to everyone?

SPEAKER_02 23:01

So I wouldn't necessarily recommend this for anyone, but I thought I'd take a slightly different slant because this was the closest I ever got to feeling like James Bond. I had learned to dive pretty young, and it was when I was in secondary school or high school. And this was probably when I was about 14 or 15 when this dive happened. The diving club at the school was associated with the military cadet force. So every year we'd have some big wig from uh one of the branches of the armed forces come and do a visit, and we wanted to always do some sort of little midi prank as part of it. So we decided as part of the diving club that one of the things that we're going to do is the the guy was from the navy, so he was going to come down and do um to a little lake just outside where our school was. It was a little lake called Chipstead's Lake. You could literally see nothing in it. I don't think there were even any fish in this lake, but we got dressed in dry suits, we had our full dress uniform, military dress uniform underneath, and we had timed it so we knew when the guy was was coming, and he went on this little dock. So you go and review like all the cadets setting their little teeny weeny boats up there. And what we'd then do is uh two of us would pop up at a certain time and we'd get on the ladder and we'd come up the ladder and we'd get out of our dry suits and we'd give them a salute and off we'd walk. Yeah, in our view, it was like we're doing the James Bond thing, and we'd get graciously out of this dry suit and we'd be in our casino, walking into the city. Actually, we we got out of these, uh, they weren't even our dry suits, they were just from the dive club. So there we are, and we're kind of trying to get out of these dry suits, not quite working. We're pulling bits of our uniform off as we're doing it, and eventually we kind of like come out and we look a bit disheveled. But you know, I felt like a million bucks on that one. I was like, I am James Bonds on this one. Uh I saluted the officer and I walked off, you know, much high-fiving and that's stuff. But it was a really cool, epic, epic dive, really different to uh to things. There was no interesting fish, there was no nothing apart from the fact we got to live out our fancy of trying to be James Bonds for about five minutes.

SPEAKER_06 24:55

Right. And then you put you played back around all night and then got into your Aston Martin and Philly.

SPEAKER_02 25:00

So yeah, we we did nothing apart from our parents. Our parents came and picked us up from school later that day.

SPEAKER_06 25:08

That's a good one. Um well, so I'll give you mine. I work primarily as a photographer and I started as a travel photographer, and I traveled all around Asia multiple times, but there was always this place that was very hard to get to, which was the Andaman Islands. I'd always heard about the Andamans being like this magical place. So I was in India, I flew to the Andaman Islands. I have to say the dives that I did there were amazing. It was so far off the beaten track that they would you go to the dive shop and they'd be like, you can either go to one of our dive sites or you can get a discount and go to a place we've never dived before and help us map it. And that was really exciting. So I did a couple of those. I have to say, you know, there was the whole thing is like I saw I was I was diving between two bait balls of fish of different types of fish that were swirled around me. I saw sea snakes floating by. I it was just it was the wildest, most raw diving I've ever done. And it was also, you know, this is a remote island that you have to fly from Calcutta to and so, you know, I was with a girlfriend and we were riding mopeds around the island. So that kind of added to the feeling of what it was. But I would say that for me, that still stands as one of the best places I've ever dived. And I did one specific dive called the aquarium. And it was just, I think for me, the times that I feel the most in touch with diving is when I feel a rawness of experience, a presence that is unlike I feel any other time in my life, and I certainly felt it there. So it was pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_02 26:36

So that would be my you know that presence usually is your instructor, that's what you're feeling.

SPEAKER_06 26:43

I feel like someone's watching me. Thank you, everyone. These are all the co-hosts of Deeper Blue. Really honestly, you guys make it such a fun thing to do. So thank you all, and um, we'll be talking soon.

SPEAKER_02 26:59

Thanks for listening to the Deeper Blue Podcast. Find out more on all the stories you've heard this week, plus connect to the world's largest online dive community at deeperblue.com. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe, like, and comment wherever you hear your podcasts. These comments and subscribes really make a difference. Before we go, I want to give a big shout out to Jason Elias, our producer. In case you didn't know, he has an amazing podcast about people who have a deep connection to our world's oceans. Connections strong enough that they have dedicated some part of their lives to being in or working on behalf of the water. Take a listen when you get a moment to Jason's show, the Big Deep Podcast. Every week, we want to hear your stories and share them with the world. So please record and send in your short story of your best dive ever. Keep it brief, no longer than two minutes, please. And in it, tell us your name and location, where you were on the dive, what happened that make it so great, and why it's meant so much to you. You can get that over to us at best dive ever at deeper blue dot com, or head to our website podcast.deeperblue dot com forward slash best dive ever. Join us again next week and explore much more of the deeper blue