This, then, is an insanely ambitious idea. I’d like to make a television documentary that circumnavigates the globe by way of eighty of the most amazing and unique scuba diving spots in the world. I’m thinking it would run from the great white sharks off Adelaide in South Australia up to diving in the snowy fjords of Norway – possibly even diving under ice in the Arctic, although I’m not sure I’d have the bottle for that.
Asian Diver magazine, who I currently freelance for, recently published a 100 Best Dives magazine – it covers the globe, not just the Asian region. It’s a pity the content’s not available online, as it’s a fantastic headstart in compiling a list of places to dive. Truk Lagoon, where the Japanese war fleet was sunk, Easter Island, the most remote island in the world, Mozambique, home of spectacular reefs and manta rays – and Plymouth, England, my home town, which is littered with shipwrecks and which has been well-documented by my dad. I think the documentary could work really well with me starting off from here in Thailand, covering some of the key sites in the Asian region – Similan islands, Sipadan in Borneo, Papua New Guinea, Australia – and then cutting across the world to Central and South America via Easter Island, the coasts of the States and onto Africa, heading down to South Africa and Mozambique, taking in the Red Sea, looping into Europe and ending in England, diving with my dad. It’s a bit cheesy, but it is basically all his fault I got into diving to begin with – and I know he’d love to show me all these shipwrecks around Plymouth that he’s documented and saved their stories from obscurity with his books and videos. (see more of my Dad’s stuff at submerged.co.uk).
Besides the underwater stuff, any documentary would need to get a bit of local colour for each location above water too – and what better way than to visit the local watering hole. Hence we’d also document 80 “dives” on land too, where the apres-dive would take place and we could film our discussions of what we’d seen – or failed to see – that day.
I’d imagine this trip would take somewhere in the region of a year to complete. A television documentary is the key way to get the sponsorship required, but closer to my heart would be the fantastic book I could write on the back of it, and the blog I could write whilst we’re actually doing it. I envision that a venture like this would thrive on using the Net to ask the dive community around the world to help us out with suggestions, tips and local knowledge. Plus I think it would actually provide sponsors with a lot more coverage than a TV program. If a blog has adverts for hotels, dive shops and dive gear manufacturers permanently located on it – and perhaps info about them occasionally included in blog posts if it’s relevant to them – then that will have a much greater impression on readers, I think. They would get the sense that these sponsors are actively helping us and care about what we’re doing, rather than just sticking their name at the beginning and end of a television segment. If a rep from Mares not only gives me a wetsuit but takes the time to check it fits properly, that sort of customer service is going to get a lot more interest from readers than another bland corporate advert.
There’s a lot to think about here. For a start, a list needs to be compiled of which dive sites would be visited; time calculated to get from one to the next without suffering a nervous breakdown; the pitch to be sold to a television network; the book pitch to be sold to a publisher; hotels and airlines and dive manufacturers to be contacted to help provide all the flights and gear and accommodation we’d need; local dive shops to be contacted to see if they’d help us out with the actual dives. And that’s just to begin with. It sounds like a total stressmonster. But it’s an idea that won’t go away. If you find this and think you can help, drop me a line – chris@spikemagazine.com
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