Underwater photographs

I have been trying to improve my diving skills and my underwater photography, though I am limited in what I can do by having a fairly basic digital compact for this work. Just before Christmas I had a week in Sharm el Sheikh with a couple of friends, Maurice Wilkinson (who works with me as my sales agent in North Wales) and Charlie Macallister, who has been climbing and diving with us before. We had long days out on the boat, usually getting in 3 dives a day. My favourite dive was called Shark and Yolanda, which is rated by many as one of the top ten dives in the world. Many know it as the place with a shipwreck of Ideal Standard toilets, but this is a wonderful reef at the very tip of the Sinai Peninsula. I was especially glad to get off our rocking boat and into this dive, as I was feeling rather seasick on top of the water – fortunately this soon wore off on the dive.

I am rather fond of anemone fish (clown fish, nemo fish) which only live in sea anemones and have a mutually supportive relationship with them. Although harmless, these attractive little fish are the most aggressive creatures we met, darting out of their anemones to defend them and very hard to photograph as they are too busy attacking my camera. One thing that I don’t understand, and maybe someone out there can educate me – I have never yet seen an anemone that is not inhabited by a pair of anemone fish, but have seen pairs with loads of babies – so where do the babies go when they leave home if there are no vacant anemones?!