Juan Manuel is my new hero, plain and simple! Since the Bell RocketBelt of the early 1960’s, the world has been disappointingly devoid of this amazing invention, but no longer. Juan Manuel, a self-taught engineer from Mexico has been working diligently for nearly 30 years to develop a working rocket belt and now he has.
Supposedly [...]
Spencer Tunick is an artist known for assembling large groups of nudes, arranging them in aesthetically beautiful ways and photographing them. He assembles these monumental projects using volunteers in various cities thru-out the world. I first became aware of his work when Courtney and I visited Montreal several years ago and stumbled across one of [...]
On our sixth and final day of diving at the Socorro Islands, We headed back to San Benedicto to dive at “The Canyon” and, we had hoped, another stone pillar rising up from the sea floor called “The Boiler”. By this time in the trip, the weather had turned fairly bad for Mexico, and we [...]
We steamed the better part of the night from Roca Partida back to the island of Socorro where we would be diving a site called “Cabo Pierce” and another stone pillar called “La Pitite Boiler”. Normally we would have made our way to these sites on Days 2 and 3, but we wanted to take [...]
With only three days left to dive on our trip, I was admittedly wishing that we had chosen another dive site for the day. My primary goal of this trip was to spend a great deal of time on my rebreather, but the swell was simply too great, and I was diving open circuit to [...]
Roca Partida is not so much an island as it is a small lava plug from an extinct volcano that has otherwise been eroded away into the sea. This rock pillar is only about 300 feet across at its widest point, and it descends almost vertically to a depth of 250 feet, where only then [...]
After our last dive on “The Canyon”, we began steaming to Socorro Island. I can’t say exactly when we arrived because I was sleeping, but I seem to remember that the journey took around ten hours. Our dive site for the day was called “Puntatosca“, which was basically a series underwater lava flows that took [...]
Our first day of diving at the Socorro Islands was was on the northernmost island of San Benidicto at a dive site called “The Canyon“. This site was chosen because of its general lack of swell and current, and was to serve as a warmup to the more challenging conditions to come. We were told [...]
I’ve just returned from diving at the Revillagigedo Archipelago, also known as the Socorro Islands. This small and widely distributed Pacific island chain lies about 250 nautical miles southwest off the tip of the Baja California peninsula at roughly 18° N 112° W. Known for their unique ecosystem, these islands are sometimes referred to as [...]
When I was a kid living in Reno, Monarch butterflies were almost as common as grasshoppers. I used to take them for granted, but now they have become so rare that seeing one is a real treat.
Last weekend, I noticed one flying around some clover flowers and quickly grabbed my camera to shoot some photos. [...]
