Charmin'
Marven
When TV naturalist /TV natural Nigel Marven invited John Bantin to join him on the trail of giant sea creatures and tiny vampire birds, our correspondent found himself reaching new heights while having to keep an unusually low profile.
The current was ripping past. Exhaled air poured away horizontally from our regulators. I was grateful for the reef hook I was able attach to a convenient rock. Nigel Marven was resolute, gripping a boulder of volcanic lava with the red woolly gloves he had pressed into service. Even at 18m, his tank of air would last only 30 minutes. I had taken the precaution of arming myself with two.
We studied the midwater in hope of seeing our quarry, elusive schooling hammerheads that would reveal themselves like ghosts before melting back into the gloom.
Back at the surface I declared: "I'll bet you wouldn't get David Attenborough doing that!"
"He's my hero," came the reply.
So who is Nigel Marven?
Raised in Hertfordshire and educated at a local comprehensive school, Marven read botany at Bristol University and went on to a career with the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol, first as a researcher for such programmes as My Family and Other Animals and later as a TV producer, making series including Super Sense and Land of the Russian Bear.
Projects like these have taken him all over the world. "Half the year I spend in remote places," he says.
His 12-year professional association with Attenborough ended when he crossed over to ITV and found, much to his surprise, that the company not only wanted him to produce but also to present its natural history programmes. He says he had never thought of himself as a presenter before.
giant step
Giants, in which Marven is seen snorkelling with a great white shark, diving with a Greenland sleeper shark and wrestling large snakes, thrilled audiences on ITV earlier this year. He is now working on a series called Giant Creepy Crawlies, which will include the giant octopuses found near Vancouver Island in Canada.
Marven, now 39, might hold Attenborough in high esteem but his own character is very different. His working style is different, too, more along the lines of The Naked Naturalist. He is raw and believable and appeals to a new generation of viewers.
"A lot of children watched Giants," he told me. "I try to be spontaneous, not boring."
Life of Birds and Fishing for a Living on BBC were partly shot in the Galapagos Islands and Marven returned there this summer to shoot a vampire finch sequence for Bloodsuckers, to be broadcast on ITV on the night of Halloween. The crew was also there to shoot some sequences for Discovery Channel's Shark Week Uncaged, which is hosted by Marven. I went with them.
We set off from Baltra Airport in a 100-year-old wooden gaff-rigged sailing ketch, Sulidae, and landed on Wolf Island. We had special permission to go ashore and climb the steep cliffs, where we would find a breeding colony of several different varieties of booby.
A type of finch has evolved that is peculiar to Wolf Island. It feeds on the blood of other birds by constantly pecking at them while they brood, or before they are able to fly.
Quite happy to jump off boats in the middle of the ocean, I am no rock-climber. I nearly died when I realised I was expected to make it up those cliffs, but after a few days I grew quite well-practised at it.
I quickly became included within Nigel Marven's crew, probably because we shared a similar background and sense of humour. Nigel is a natural performer, as anyone who has witnessed his one-eared elephant joke will testify.
Discovery Channel producer Harry Hanbury, who suffers from almost terminal seasickness and was clearly more at home in an office than in the field, was sometimes the butt of his jokes, but it was always good-natured and taken as such.
micro-surgery by night
There was fierce loyalty between Marven and his sound-recordist Mark Roberts, both, like me, from St Albans. "I would marry Mark Roberts if I could," he joked with me, "providing I could still have sex with women!"
Marven is in fact married to TV presenter Jenny Hull, whom he met while filming How Do They Do That?
Roberts is a resourceful young man. I could have fallen for him myself, after he spent a whole night on a rolling boat, while others were being seasick, performing micro-surgery on faulty wiring on my underwater camera housing.
Marven, a big man who tends to be very touchie-feelie with those with whom he feels comfortable, is no paragon of sartorial elegance in the field.
He rarely combs his hair and, after some days, we had to insist that he washed his shorts for the benefit of everyone else on board. What he does have is immense enthusiasm for his work and the subjects of his films.
"You need fire in your belly if you want to be any good at this," he said. What did he think of the Galapagos? "It's my third visit here. Ever since I was a little boy I wanted to swim with marine iguanas. It was such a thrill to see what at first I thought were just rocks of volcanic lava, and then to find it was a carpet of those animals. Flightless cormorants are just amazing, too."
We were to be thrilled by the natural phosphorescence of the waters around the Galapagos. As we cruised at night, groups of Pacific bottlenose dolphins would race to the boat to enjoy a ride at the bow. Each animal was totally delineated in the darkness by eerie green light as it raced through the black water.
One could instantly understand the inspiration for the dolphin in A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Marven dragged us all from our bunks to see the show: "Come see the underwater comets!"
shark in a trance
A sea-lion put on a similar show for us. "I shall never forget that image, seeing it swimming round the boat, lit up by the phosphorescence pouring off its body," said Marven, who is keenly conscious of his good fortune in being able to indulge his passion for wildlife film-making.
"It's such a privilege to host Discovery's Shark Week Uncaged - a great honour. I want to make the most of the opportunity." This last sentence seems to be his catchphrase. In the Discovery programmes he can be seen grabbing great whites, touching a tiger shark by the tail, proving that the latest sharkproof suit gives total protection against bites, locating the breeding lagoon of nurse sharks in the Exumas and, with the help of Graham Cove in the Bahamas, putting a shark into a tonic trance!
He had hoped to obtain some good footage of hammerhead sharks in the Galapagos, though unfortunately they proved usually to be too far away and in rather poor visibility. What he did find off Darwin, the northernmost island in the archipelago, were whale sharks. It was a bonus for Shark Week Uncaged.
Charles Darwin never made it to the island named after him but it has a single dive site that is the most spectacular in the Galapagos. It is marked by a natural structure about the size and shape of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and called Darwin's Arch.
The ocean current pushes round it in an almost irresistible way, attracting innumerable pelagics.
During a single dive I saw flotillas of mobulae (like manta rays but smaller), squadrons of hammerheads in the middle distance, massed jacks trying to mimic a slow-moving juggernaut, less-sociable Galapagos sharks and a lone Risso's dolphin that continuously dived around where we held on to the rocky substrate, watching the show.
Most spectacular were three whale sharks swimming together. Alas, the visibility made it difficult to get a good shot of all three, because even with a super wide-angle lens I had to be a long way from these enormous creatures to include them in one frame. I mainly contented myself with what amounted to close-ups from about 2m away!
freight train
Nigel returned from his first dive at Darwin ecstatic. "The whale sharks are such stately animals. Amazing! They make no attempt to swim round you. They simply lumber on in their own majestic way. It's like watching a freight train go past."
Marven likes to hold centre stage, but having been on the other side of the camera for so long, he never loses sight of reality. He appeared ready to accept advice on his performance from any quarter.
However, when it came to improvising a script to take advantage of the unplanned-for footage of the whale sharks, I reminded him that some shark experts say that mammals are more closely related to birds in evolutionary terms than sharks are to fish.
"I'm not saying that," he laughed. "People will think I'm daft!"
My job, taking still photographs of the action, was not easy. For the underwater filming a 16mm Aarton camera was used, but I had no clear idea when it was running.
It was difficult to be sure of remaining out of shot, and I was well aware that the crew would not be happy to see the action punctuated by light from my camera and flash.
I had my uses, however. I wore a twinset with a long octopus hose and this proved a comfort to the cameraman, Jeff Goodman, who would be pushing an underwater housing the size of a small dustbin - no mean feat in those Galapagos currents.
On one occasion, I followed him out into the open water, always being careful to stay directly behind him, while he recorded a passing whale shark. Then he turned to make a 180° pan and held on my dismayed face instead of that of Nigel Marven. But Goodman was true to his name and took it in good part.
Darwin in an aqualung
Marven doesn't make a big deal about the process of diving - it's just a means to an end so far as he is concerned, and that end is close encounters with animals about which most divers only dream.
He took some convincing from me that wearing a diving computer was really necessary. I lent him one. However, what he lacks in interest about the finer points of diving he makes up for in sheer guts, and proved extremely competent in currents that others might have found disconcerting.
"I think of Charles Darwin and wonder what he would have made of it all if he'd had an aqualung," he enthused after one spectacular dive.
That Nigel Marven is an all-round good bloke comes across on the small screen, though I imagine his lack of sophistication might offend the old-school natural-history audience.
TV times are changing, however - keep a look-out for the new face of wildlife filming.
DIVE DON'T RIDE
The Galapagos Islands are volcanic and recently formed. There is nothing pretty about them. Most are uninhabited and form a National Park.
Although at the Equator, 600 miles from Ecuador, the archipelago lies at the confluence of two major cold currents from north and south. These cause a pressure that keeps the warm Pacific water from the west at bay. The water is cold, the climate equable and untropical.
Diving in the Galapagos is a matter of great variety. Nowhere else can you swim alongside tropical species such as moorish idols at the same time as diving with penguins. If you love the rare and unusual, there is the red-lipped batfish or the flightless cormorant. You can snorkel in the shallows with marine iguanas or with teams of friendly sea-lions.
Between dives, each island, or even each part of an island, offers unusual or endemic terrestrial species, none of which seems to be afraid of man.
You are not allowed to dive without an official naturalist-guide, and the one accompanying me off Darwin Island surprised me when, after I had signalled that I was out of film, he did an unforgivable thing. He grabbed a dorsal fin and rode one shark, Calgary Stampede-style, around me for about three minutes.
If a tourist had done this, he would have been banned from diving here for life. Macho Juan Carlos - "everyone calls me the Silver Fox" (I had a better name for him after that) - couldn't resist the chance of showing off when he thought no one would see him, not knowing that, at Diver, we tell it as it is!
HOUSTON WE'VE GOT A PROBLEM
Galapagos is one of the more expensive diving destinations. If it's going to be the trip of a lifetime, you want the travel arrangements to be perfect.
Connections to the islands' Baltra Airport are made either via Quito or Guyaquil in Ecuador. European airlines such as Iberia or KLM fly there direct but you need to travel either via Madrid or Amsterdam and be subject to the extra costs that are incurred with European 20kg baggage allowances.
Travelling via the USA allows you to check in two pieces up to 32kg each, usually more than enough even for a diver. The price is seductive - but there is a downside.
My previous trip had been with American Airlines via Miami. My baggage was checked all the way to Ecuador, there was a transit lounge at Miami so no need to go through US immigration and customs procedures. My journey was seamless.
On this occasion I travelled with Continental via Houston. It provided a litany of delays and crises, not least when my baggage arrived in Quito 24 hours after I did.
The same thing happened with other members of my party who travelled the same way on following days. I was glad I had arranged a long layover in Quito before my onward journey.
However, during the day's delay caused by a cancelled flight (and missed connections) on the return journey, I was able to interview more than 100 passengers who had travelled out at different times. I found that 90 per cent had waited 24 hours for luggage to reach Quito!
Travel operators at Quito confirmed that this was more or less normal. During my enforced layover at Houston, I questioned a spokeswoman for Continental about this.
Carla Villaonn told me there was an embargo on excess baggage to Ecuador during summer months. This should not affect those who confined themselves to the two-piece allowance, she said. However, she conceded that the 737-800 aircraft needed to carry extra fuel in case of diversion from Quito, an airport sometimes subject to low cloud. This was sometimes loaded at the expense of passengers' baggage.
When asked what Continental planned to do about it (I suggested it might use a bigger aircraft) she said there might be plans to prioritise passengers' luggage according to need (in other words, the onward connection). As it seems that baggage cannot be interlined to TAMI, the airline serving Baltra, this seems unlikely.
Houston Airport itself is subject to dramatic weather that can also lead to closure and missed connections. So if you are going to Galapagos, use either American Airlines via Miami or go via Europe and pay for any excess baggage.
If you are seduced by the lower fares via Houston, leave at least a couple of hours between flights so that you can clear time-consuming US immigration and customs and make sure you have at least 24 hours before flying on from Ecuador to Baltra.
Don't let a saving of a few pounds on the air-fare spoil it for you. Houston has a problem.
Appeared in DIVER - October 2000
