My wife has, until very recently, been a staunch supporter of the “There are no Whale Sharks” club. She’s been diving all over the world and never, ever, seen a Whale Shark. Even when everyone else around her is seeing them she refuses to accept that they really exist outside their warped imagination. It’s a bit like the NASA moon walk I guess. Some believe it was all filmed in a fish tank in the Arizona desert. Or take that JFK business, although they didn’t use a fish tank there. It’s all a conspiracy, she said. That was until last week when she went diving with Jilly – or Jilly’s mojo to be more precise. At last, now she’s seen one with her own eyes, which is lucky because a couple of days later my 7 year old son also saw one whilst free diving off Sharm Club. 7 years old, 2 metres deep, his first Whale Shark. He was duly impressed but took it all is his stride – as kids do around here.Bizarrely enough, I got a phone call from my 5 year old the same day. He’s in Germany getting his broken arm fixed. Boys will be boys. He told me how they’d taken a ride on a big boat full of cars across the Bodensee. It was really big, but they didn’t see any dolphins. Not even a turtle. In fact, no fish at all. And the water was green…………

Whilst some of us are playing with Whale Sharks and Mantas, full of the joys of spring and love and light, others within our midst are enjoying deeper, darker pastimes. I bet their Auras aren’t yellow either but, whatever the aura, the life of a sub aqua speleologist isn’t just dark, its pitch black. Our resident group of cave diving techies has been surveying the deeper of the caves in Jackfish Alley. To reach the end they travelled 148 metres into the system reaching depths of 150 metres in a final, massive chamber. You’ve only got a few minutes at that depth, so to carry out a Grade 3 survey rather than enjoying total sensory depravation becomes somewhat dependant on Mr.Duracell and certainly concentrates ones mind. Breathing rather strong blends of trimix and using dpvs to cover the distances involved, they have completed mapping both the deep and the shallow, (and by shallow I mean a mere 60 – 80 metres), cave systems. Now honestly. Can you believe that a bunch of jet powered gasheads would ride scooters through cave systems at 150 metres. Totally outrageous. They may say they have it all on film, but so did NASA