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"CAN'T YOU WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT THE BAHAMAS which isn't about sharks?" asked Steve, our Managing Editor. So in trying to do my best to please him, I set off for a trip aboard the mv Aqua Cat, a shiny new and recently commissioned liveaboard that appeals to divers with a wide range of skill levels.
Aqua Cat operates out of Nassau's Paradise Island. Normally she travels around that body of water between the Exuma Cays and Eleuthera. Built in Australia, she is of that same generation of dive boats operated by Mike Ball out in Queensland and PNG.
She is a spacious and stable 35m twin-hulled vessel, more akin to a floating hotel than a traditional dive-boat, and her crew are briefed to make everything as safe and leisurely as possible for her 22 diving guests, who are accommodated in 11 twin or double cabins with modern en-suite facilities.
I, in fact, stayed in crew's quarters, and yet even my cabin was more spacious and with better facilities than those provided by many other liveaboards for their paying guests. My only complaint? The television tended to get accidentally turned on by my foot and wake me in the night!
And who were those guests on Aqua Cat? Typically most were American, ranging from an architect and his wife who looked like fading film stars and a Danny DeVito character who shared with a Steve Martin look-alike, to a group of jolly fire-fighters from Cincinnati and some deep-diving ex-FBI dudes from Waco, alongside others with assorted American accents.
Inevitably, calls over the Tannoy tended to be a bit "have a nice day", but it wasn't so bad once I'd tuned into Beverley Hills cop mode. Anyway, there were also the Diver readers from a BSAC branch who talked broad Yorkshire.
Three dive guides were regularly available for those who wanted guiding. Otherwise people just dived in groups or buddy-pairs, or simply used the "sharing the same ocean" buddy system. Inevitably someone felt at the end of the trip that they had not been nurse-maided enough on dives, while another revealed that he had been surprised to be asked rather firmly to stay with his buddy.
I deduced from this that the crew was used to dealing with a wide range of skill-levels, and quickly decided who was capable of what.
The crew were of American, Canadian, English and South African origin. Some seemed quite young. I noted that the boat's videographer/photographer cried when she flooded her camcorder. This indicated a certain lack of the cynicism which she will surely gain when, like me, she has flooded a few more.
Other than that sad moment, the spirit on board was one of good fun and there was nitrox (a notional nitrox 32) available for those certified to use it.
All in all, Aqua Cat seemed like a large hotel with a deep swimming pool at the rear where they changed all the animals every few hours. So what about the diving in that pool?
"Cool!" said the majority.
I'm not a great lover of slugs, even if they do have colourful bodies and feathery gills, so my heart sank when the first dive-briefing revolved mostly around nudibranchs.
Alas, one or two of the formally stupendous coral walls we visited were completely weeded-out, with not a fish in sight. They were coral reefs which were now dead.
Whether they were just very ancient reefs or more recently demised, I don't know. Suffice to say, none of the Americans on board had heard of the Kyoto agreement, nor of George Bush's attempts to avoid it. Nevertheless, most of the assembled company judged it to be "cool".
Other sites were vibrant with life and once we got into the Exumas' 50-year-old Land and Sea Park, things got very busy indeed. In fact, there came a time when I had to choose between a solitary dive on reefs at Danger Rocks, a place frequented by numerous and various large grouper (and Caribbean reef sharks too) or to snorkel in a nearby lagoon with a couple of lemon sharks that were known to live there. I chose the former while most others went ashore.
"How was the shore trip?" I asked later.
"Cool!" came the unanimous reply.
They'd seen the skeleton of a sperm whale that had washed up on the beach, a gigantic victim of a tiny plastic six-pack retainer. They'd seen the lemon sharks. I'd had to content myself with being mugged by 14 assorted large, hungry grouper at the shark-feeding site.
Aqua Cat was at one of its permanent moorings, near to another mooring where the itinerary called for regularly staged shark feeds. I had decided to swim over to it, a distance of about 300m, in the hope of ambushing an unsuspecting passing shark with my camera. Instead, as I approached the reef I was the one ambushed - by the groupers and two free-swimming remoras looking for a host.
The Bahamas have become so synonymous with shark dives that every operation seems to be expected to do at least one during a trip, and the crew of Aqua Cat are no exception.
They use the chumsicle system. A frozen barrel of fish parts is suspended from a line with a float and moored to an immovable point in the seabed, in this case Aqua Cat's mooring pin. The Caribbean reef sharks swim round and feed from it as it defrosts.
I swam round with one of the crew with our cameras while most of the guest-divers remained firmly rooted to the sandy seabed. Relief Captain Ron free-dived down with his camera from time to time. Luckily, none of the other guests twigged that we three were in no danger, swimming with the sharks as we were, and no-one got between my camera and the swirling predators. No-one, that is, if you don't count the half-dozen large black groupers.
The chumsicle lasted so well that I had time to shoot a roll of film and go back to the boat and load another which I was also able to shoot during the feed. Then all the passengers from the boat proceeded to hunt among the coral for souvenir teeth that the sharks might have lost during the proceedings.
I wanted to go back to this site the following morning because, feed or no feed, I knew the big guys in the grey suits would still be patrolling the area. But the grouper gang had other ideas.
Well I need never photograph another Caribbean species of grouper again. I have plenty of close-up photographs of tiger groupers, Nassau groupers and big black groupers.
"Cool!"
I didn't pass up the next trip ashore, this time to see the iguanas that live on some of the small cays in the Exumas. We walked ashore and the iguanas poured out of the bushes and scuttled around us like so many large marauding rats. They are quite aggressive and competitive. The game was to feed them with bits of bread while avoiding getting bitten yourself.
Did you know iguanas can jump? Several people learnt that lesson the hard way that day, and I think my fading-filmstar friend felt it a little less than "cool" when he saw the amount of blood you can get out of a punctured thumb.
Aqua Cat's fast annexe boat SeaDog was used for such shore excursions. Once out of the Land and Sea Park, it was also used for snorkelling trips, with spears and Hawaiian slings, to get lobsters, though few passengers seemed very effective at that art.
Naturally, our Yorkshire friends put up a good show for England, but the most lobsters were taken by the two captains, Mark and Ron, who made a separate excursion in the Aqua Cat's little RIB. I found a lobster-trap with a moray eel in it. It seemed grateful to be released.
The Bahamas are famous for their wall dives. At Dogs Rocks Wall I saw enough trees of black coral that had escaped plunder for those selling to the jewellery trade.
Besides the magnificent walls draped with assorted sponges, the other main topographical features of the area are the undersea "blue holes". These are areas where limestone caves were formed during the last Ice Age, when sea-levels were lower. Many of these cenote-type caves are actually beneath the seabed now and in places their ceilings have collapsed to reveal extreme depths.
From the air, these holes are identified by being very dark blue against the lighter shade of blue of the surrounding shallow water. Hence the term "blue hole".
They form entrances to cave systems that can pass right through to the other side of an island, hence they can puff and blow with the tidal difference.
Jake's Hole puffs out very cold water at one tide and sucks in at the next. Our dive guide obviously had no intention of going in but I am told by other crew-members that it's really interesting. I missed out on that one, although I hesitated over it during a night dive and watched a whole school of fish suddenly get sucked inside.
Night dives are easy. There is plenty to look at, including numerous lobsters parading out in the open, and different forms of muscular crab. It's simple to get close to animals like scrawled filefish and spiny puffers which prove too timid to approach in the daytime.
Then there are the triffid-like basketstars that look like bracken until you realise that they're moving stealthily. I was lucky enough to spot an octopus, even though it was putting forward its whole repertoire of disguises, but once I had it in my sights it was forced to pose for my camera - like it or not!
Octopuses really are amazing animals. They have tiny discs in their skin which they can revolve at will to alter their colour or indeed their texture.
This one pulsed from pale blue to dark red. In between, it went through phases with brown stripes and spots. What a show! Another diver, watching me at work with my camera, said afterwards that he thought it really cool. He wasn't wrong.
The water is so warm that many of the passengers dived in T-shirts and shorts. We Brits and the crew preferred full suits, which proved their use after a night dive on which we had to pass through a layer of stinging sea wasps drawn in by the lights of our torches.
Suits makes divers look better, too. I mused that some of the groups of divers without suits tended to look like unfortunate passengers who had fallen from an aeroplane.
Another blue hole, near Nassau, is really large. It's about 50m across and 200m deep - effectively a wall-dive in a circle. It makes a perfect hunting ground for those who like to get close to animals.
A school of horse-eye jacks circled nervously within it during my first dive, constantly searching for a way out until they twigged that they had to get shallower. During the second dive, the same thing happened with a school of fast-swimming Spanish mackerel.
These constantly circled so that all you had to do was maintain your depth and hold your breath until they came round again on this natural merry-go-round. A little silky shark also found itself in the same psychological trap.
Best of all, a whole family of nurse sharks lived on and frequented the sandy area around the rim of the hole. This meant that it was easy for me to get lots of close-up encounters, because if my subject upped and swam away, as nurse sharks tend to do, it swam around the rim and all I had to do was to swim across the middle and lie quietly for it to circle up to me.
So I now have more nurse shark pictures than I can shake a stick at, as well!
"That was cool!" exclaimed one of the other passengers, who had seen me lying next to a pair of nurse sharks which were in turn lying fin-in-fin.
At Hammerhead Gulch, I was escorted by three large grey angels which seemed to enjoy looking at their reflections in my camera dome-port. These fish really are ubiquitous and can be encountered at every dive site. At Dog Rocks Wall, I saw a school of metallic-looking oceanic triggerfish. I never knew you could see these in this part of the world.
Lots of fish were seen in large schools. At one time I saw schools of horse-eye, yellow, and bar jacks within minutes of each other. However, if there is one animal that could be said to be the keynote animal of the trip, it was the Atlantic spadefish.
These are reminiscent of the batfish of the Indo-Pacific but much less brutal in the looks department. They are silvery, with vertical black or brown stripes. Many people mistakenly think they are looking at some type of large angelfish, as they are so very pretty, with their long, graceful dorsal and anal fins.
I rarely saw solitary examples. They came in rather large collections and could often be encountered in shallow water under the boat at the end of each dive. They gave a good show for those hanging on the deco-bar.
"They're really cool," said someone. Well, of course they are!
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Diver among typical soft corals
The ubiquitous grouper in black,
Nassau
and red varieties
One of the jumping iguanas
The 35m Aqua Cat, a hotel afloat
Captains Mark and Ron after a successful spear-fishing trip
Divers search the seabed for mislaid shark-teeth
grouper get in on the act as sharks zero in on the chumsicle during the feed
a yellow jack
Atlantic spadefish were the keynote sight of the Aqua Cat trip
An octopus tries out some impressions
A remora in search of a host
A scrawled filefish spotted on a night dive
Black coral at Dogs Rocks
This moray eel seemed grateful to be released after wandering into a lobster trap
Grey angelfish
a lobster seen in the Land and Sea Park by night
nurse sharks in a blue hole
GETTING THERE: We recommend that you fly direct with BA to and from Nassau, although it is possible to connect via many different hubs in the USA. John Bantin travelled with Discover the World (01737 218802).
DIVING & ACCOMODATION: Apart from a 10% gratuity to the crew, the only other money you will need will be for shopping either on-board or in Nassau, a meal onshore during the last evening, and US $15 departure tax on leaving the Bahamas. Everything else is included.
WHEN TO GO: Almost any time, although you might be wise to avoid the rainy season, September through to early December. Aqua Cat is fully air-conditioned, so it still proves very equable in the heat of July and August.
MONEY: US$ and Bahamas $. All credit cards readily accepted.
LANGUAGE: A sort of English! It's cool!
COST:Discover the World can arrange a seven-night holiday aboard Aqua Cat starting from £1746 per person sharing a double or twin cabin. The price includes flights and transfers, accommodation, meals and drinks and up to five dives a day. The week can also be booked as part of a two-centre land-based holiday.
FURTHER INFORMATION: Bahamas Tourist Office (01483 44 89 00)
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Although BA flies direct to Nassau, it may be tempting to use one of the many less-expensive, and less over-booked airlines that fly to Miami and connect by way of a 45 minute flight from there. BahamasAir has around six flights scheduled from Miami to Nassau every day, and on paper that looks very promising.
But use this route, as I have several times recently, and you might well be disappointed by delays. Use it for the return journey and you could easily miss your connection back to the UK.
Why? BahamasAir seems to have some operating problems compounded by a ground staff who are uninterested. They think the way they work is pretty normal. Don't be surprised to find that your 10am flight leaves at 1pm or later. I met people who had endured 12 hours of mis-information and prevarication before they boarded a plane.
Don't be surprised to find that only three flights actually operate out of the six on the departures list. How they manage to build up such massive delays with flight times that are so short remains a mystery.
Don't try to ask the BahamasAir staff. They got attitude! And that comes from everyone asking them the same fool questions such as: "When will the plane actually take-off?" or "How can I make my onward connection?"
As a Bahamian recently said to me: "Why they gotta pull that face?"
BahamasAir is a blight on all those good people who make the Bahamas such an excellent destination. I have suffered those sprints, with tons of luggage, the length of Miami airport to try to make the BA connection after my bags finally showed up on the belt.
I have more than once found myself holding a boarding card with a seat number identical to another passenger. BahamasAir staff don't bat an eyelid at this sort of anomaly.
They can do remarkable things in a short time, too. I have come away with nothing but a Baggage Irregularity Report instead of my underwater photography kit, and a telephone number which when phoned, from back home in the UK, elicited the automatic response: "BahamasAir. We're busy. Please hold." Well, they would be, wouldn't they?
The best advice is to fly direct or add an extra day to your trip to accommodate the many hours needed by BahamasAir in its efforts to supply its 45 minute flight. If you have to make inter-island connections with BahamasAir, stay cool and hope that one day it is privatised.
As the locals say: "Only if you have time to spare, fly BahamasAir!"
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There's a lot more to Bahamas diving than sharks and blue holes (as if that wasn't enough) and John Bantin got a generous helping of variety when he spent a week on and off the luxury liveaboard Aqua Cat. His companions found it cool too