Well I haven't written in a while, with Christmas, New Year, work and organizing my next big trip taking up just about all my time so here's run down of what's been happening.
Greg and I have been busy planning a trip to Castor Bank off the Northwest tip of Madagascar for the last few months. The planning has not been without it's ups and downs, we originally had a 3rd and 4th diver coming along but one had to pull out due to family commitments and the other due to business commitments, so now it's just the two of us. We have been pool training every chance we get and preparing and fixing gear so we are well and truly prepared. We will be targeting big pelagics like Dog tooth Tuna, Marlin, Sailfish and Wahoo.The biggest problem we faced was how to fit in all the gear we would need and stay within our baggage limits, the solution we came up with was to run just 2 rigs. One for Dog tooth and the other for the other Pelagics.
We figure as only one of us will be down at any one time we just swap rigs after each dive. Our Dogtooth rig will comprise of 25mts of float rope and a 2mt bungee attached to 2 x 20lt solid floats and a riffe 2atm inflatable float with short 2mt bungees between the floats. Our Pelagic rig will consist of a 20mt bungee and 2 x standard riffe inflatable floats with a short 2mt bungee between the floats. As we will both be using guns rigged with breakaways it will be a simple matter of just unclipping and swapping rigs after each dive. This has the added safety of forcing us to ensure the other is safely on the surface after each dive so we can swap rigs. In the event that one of us needs a second shot on a fish we can simply hand over the rig, or clip on an unloaded gun for a potential record fish.
Keeping within weight limits while still having enough spare parts proved to be a problem, but as we are both using the same gear we only need to carry one set. We have also done away with the need to carry mono, crimps and crimping gear and will be using 2.5mm dymeema to replace any damaged shooting line, another saving on space and weight. The shafts for our Tuna guns presented a problem as the 1.8mt x 10mm shafts weigh in at 1kg per shaft so we decided on only bringing 4 spare shafts each, and using much lighter Rail guns and 7.5mm shafts as a back up guns.
We will be flying into South Africa and spending just over a week touring the North East including Kruger National Park, the Drakensburg Mountains and hopefully Swaziland. We then fly to Madagascar and travel to the far Northwest coast and board a boat for our trip out to Castor Bank and other secret spots. We also plan to spend a few days exploring Madagascar and hopefully see a few of the exotic animals such as Day Gecko's, Lemurs and Chameleon's before returning home.
Internet access may be pretty sketchy while we are away but I will try and post some pictures along the way, and will of course post a full report once we have returned.
