Two years ago I traveled to Grand Cayman for the 10th Annual PADI Total Submersion. That's an international event that happens every year with divers from all other the world, but mainly from the US, that show up at the Sunset House in Grand Cayman and dive for a week, dive from boats every morning or dive from the shore on the beautiful house reef. We had a lot of fun at that event. There was the famous Pirate Party, the Rum point party with local celebrity The Barefoot Man singing "It's a Moray" on the tune of "It's amore". Hilarious. There was the house reef and its wide variety of critters: turtles, eels, groupers, rays, a submarine and a statue of a mermaid. Priceless. But not this year. After eleven years, PADI decided to change the location and picked Curacao, an island 40 miles north of Venezuela, part of the Dutch West Indies. Like Saba.

Unlike Saba though, the island is easily accessible with direct flights from Miami and some other places on the East Coast. We took the red eye from LAX and arrived in mid afternoon at the Lions Dive & Beach Resort where we were greeted by the team of Ocean Encounters which was to be our dive operation for the length of our stay. Just like in the previous Total Sub, teams were formed to group people on dive boats. The schedule was clear and the dive shop was well organized to cope with the 60+ divers our group was. The PADI package included accommodation for 7 nights with breakfast buffet, 4 days of 2-tank boat dives and three parties with dinner or drinks included. Optional activities were offered when we arrived. I signed up for a Cuban buffet, a dive at the famous "Mushroom forest" and a dive with dolphins in the wild. Cool.

The rooms at the Lions Dive & Beach resort were nice and amazingly well air conditioned. A nice 66F (19C) greeted us when we stepped in. Quite a refreshing feeling when it's 90+ outside. We had chosen an "Ocean view" room and we could indeed see the ocean from our balcony, although partially obstructed by palm trees. We were on the second floor which proved to be a good idea as the terraces on the first floor were regularly visited by giant but innocuous iguanas. The hotel also offer pool view rooms at a slightly lower rate and ocean front penthouses at an outrageously higher rate.

The resort is a few minute walk away from the Curacao Sea Aquarium that hosts all sorts of local marine critters and oddly enough pink flamingoes. It is also a major center for dolphin "education" where children and adults alike can interact with the smart mammals. They are the ones who organize the dolphin dive... So my dolphins won't really be wild will they? The plot thickens. Are they coming from the infamous Japanese cove where tens of thousand are slaughtered and a few captured and exported to marine parks throughout the world every year? Apparently not. These dolphins come from Honduras where they have a surplus. The breeding program seems to be successful although it is not uncommon for dolphins to breed in captivity. So the dolphin dive will be with animals from the aquarium but in the open water? Yes? And the dolphins stay? And then they go back to the park? Are they retarded dolphins or something? Weirder and weirder... But anyway our dolphin dive was scheduled on our last day so we still had time to wonder about it.

PADI Dive Society hosted events are fun because at the raffles and parties that they organize they give you a lot of goodies. We had a backpack full of stuff some useful, some less. We got a nice hat, a cool T-shirt, a "night dive" training material (DVD and booklet) and a 64MB USB thumbdrive which would have been put in the less usefull (someone said useless?) category if it hadn't been especially aimed at storing pictures for the Scavenger Hunt Photo Contest sponsored by PADI and Olympus. Those who know my love for Olympus cameras may wonder why I don't laugh my ass off at the irony there. No comment. Yet.

By 5pm on the day of our arrival we were at Hemingway's, the local bar. Nice cocktails, terrible food, island time service. While sipping on a rum punch we saw a couple of divers going for a shore dive. More than an hour later, still waiting for some snacks to go with our drinks, we saw them come back. They told us they saw cuttlefish which is cool because I've never seen cuttlefish. That was all however, no rays, no turtle and certainly no mermaid at the Lions Dive & Resort house reef. Maybe I'll stick with the boat dives...

The dive sites selected for us were very varied. We got to go to the East, all the way to Klein Curacao where one of the teams reported sightings of mantas and whale sharks. That was not our team and some serious nitrogen narcosis was suspected as no photos were shown to corroborate that unbelievable claim. Curacao is not renown for its "big animals" sightings. Excluding the dolphin dive, the biggest thing I saw was a big badass green moray and a huge triggerfish (which by triggerfish standards amounts to about 1ft). During the stay, some reported a small turtle (with pictures to prove it!) and eagle rays. My buddy and I were the only one who spotted a seahorse. That landed the both of us a major advantage in the scavenger photo hunt... So all in all, usual Caribbean diving with more fish than in Saba (not difficult) but less than in Long Island. Lots of small stuff, giant arrow crabs (which by arrow crabs standards amounts to about 5 inches), very cool blue banded shrimps in anemones, lobsters, eels, hard and soft corals and reef structures covered in colorful Christmas tree worms.

On that trip, I decided to shoot my G12 in Aperture Priority (Av) at f/8, f/7.1 and f/6.3. Well, if most of my macro shots came out in focus, the camera systematically defaulted to ISO250 which made the pictures not as sharp as in ISO80 or ISO100 where it stays when I shoot Tv. So I think I will stick with Tv 1/125 from now on and reserve Av for very specific high depth of field compositions. I also experienced what I had first discovered in my original G12 review, a clearly non uniform flash illumination caused by the giganormous lens tunnel of both the camera and the case. It seemed that California waters being less clear than in the Caribbean, diffusion is more important and the effect of the lens tunnel is less. In clear 80ft visibility though, I can clearly see the shadow of my lens on some shots. That sucks.

The last day, as planned we had the dolphin dive. The dolphins are indeed brought from their containment area and left in the open ocean. A trainer at the surface and another underwater sort of guide the dolphins to the divers. It's kind of cool to be so close to the animals, but it is still a staged setup and after a few close encounters I realized that the dolphin was more interested in the trainer than it was to interact with me. It was always coming back to the underwater trainer, trying to get some food. The trainer did not have any but that speaks volume of the sort of conditioning their training really is. I do not regret doing it as it is an amazing experience to see these graceful creature swimming around you. I wish I had seen it in the wild for real. What amazed me the most is that after 45 minutes the dolphin just left and went back to its prison. It must have been PADI trained... We had one dolphin on the whole dive which was way better than the previous group who waited for 20 minutes before the dolphins showed up and then left after just 15 minutes of interaction.

During our dive, I started shooting in Program (P) mode but I realized that I was getting a big blur most of the time (Dolphins are fast). I then switched to Shutter Priority (Tv) 1/100s which proved to be better. We were going up and down a lot on this dive, following the dolphin which contrary to us does not seem to have issues with its ears (if it has any) and so I alternated white balance between manual and automatic depending on the depth. As mentioned before, I refuse to be encumbered with a white slab so I was doing manual white balance on patches of sands scattered on the dive site. Not an easy task, especially when there is so much action underwater! I also tried to shoot Tv+flash for a portrait of the animal. It kind of worked out but the flash charging delay of 2 second was enough to miss the money shot. I also tried to shoot HD video. It kind of worked out OK. I was worried that the lack of real-time autofocus would mess up the sequences I shot but by starting to shoot while the dolphin was far, I managed to get a uniform focus throughout the sequence I filmed. I however noticed some encoding issues when I played the clips back but it may be caused by the player rather than the Canon. I hope so.

The day before the dolphin dive, one of my friends got mugged on his way back from town. All his valuable were stolen by a group of 4 guys who also stabbed him in the side. He made front page on the local tabloid. As a result of his unfortunate encounter with human slime, he is now spending 4 extra weeks on the island. There may be something rotten in the kingdom of Holland.

As I do not want to finish this report on that gloomy note, remember that photo contest sponsored by Olympus? Well my buddy made third place and I made second. She got a dive jacket and I got an... Olympus Camera! Now you know why I can't laugh at the irony...