Our Toronto Trip…

Julie and I wanted to thank her sister Susan and her husband Jason for allowing us to stay with them while in Toronto for the ‘family retreat’ last month. We had such a great time and it’s always nice to hear that everyone is doing so well. We also really enjoyed being able to spend so much quality time with the kids. Because of the distance, Julie and I don’t normally get the see them very often and that makes trips like this one very special!

I’ve been asked to keep most of the pictures private since there almost all photos of the kids, but here are a few shots from our outing to an apple picking orchard.
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A Day In Pompeii….

Last month, while Julie and I were in North Carolina for Alice and Carl’s wedding, we had some extra time to take in the sights of downtown Charlotte. One of the better known attractions of Charlotte is the Discovery Place Center right on Main Street. Along with the dinosaur exhibit and the indoor rain forest the center was also hosting a new exhibit called ‘A Day in Pompeii’.

It was a very interesting and educational exhibit detailing the events of a Roman city that was buried in 79 A.D. by a catastrophic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in Italy. The history of this ancient city remained hidden and forgotten until archeologists began to excavate the site in 1748. Here’s a small hand full of photos from the exhibit and our day in Charlotte… Enjoy!
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Fiji DiveTrip Page is Posted!!!

Bula!

Julie and I just wanted to let everyone know that we have finshed editing the photos from our Fiji trip and have posted them in the Dive Trips section of our Website! The pages and galleries are completely interactive and there’s even a Flash Gallery Slideshow with more than a hundred of our favorite photos! As always, you can leave us comments about the pictures, pages, Website or what ever is on your mind… We would love to hear from you!

Also, if your interested in purchasing prints, I’ve just finished uploading a large selection of High Resolution images to our Print Sales Website… Check it out!!

Thanks again for all the support and your awesome comments!

One Last Day In Paradise!

It has been a wonderful two weeks here in the Fiji Islands, but it’s time to go back to reality. Our stay at Castaway Island ended just after one o’clock today as we boarded the ‘Tiger IV’ shuttle to take us back to Nadi. Once there we would make our way back to the airport, grab some dinner and then wait for our 10pm flight back to the States. The airlines wouldn’t allow us to check our luggage in early so we had to watch over it ourselves until the 7pm check-in time! Kind of makes sight seeing a little difficult if you know what I mean!

Anyway, here are a couple of parting photos from our last two evenings on Castaway Island… Enjoy!
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More Photos from Castaway…

Here are a few more photos from our dives in the Mamanuca Island Group… Enjoy!!
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Diving the Mamanuca Island Group…

Our time in Fiji is almost up and we can truly say that it has been a great two weeks! The diving here in the Mamanuca Island Group is different than what we encountered during our first week aboard the Fiji Aggressor II, but all in all it was still excellent. The dive sites were more spread out which meant more travel time in between dives and the visibility was quite a bit lower than it was up North. However, we still had some great dives and took some fantastic pictures to prove it!

This week the Castaway Dive Team took us to a host of sites including the famous ‘Supermarket’, ‘Joe’s Farm’, ‘Wilke’s Find’, ‘Coral Garden’, ‘Plantation Pinnacle’ and ‘Magic Island’ just to name a few! We would like to send a special thanks to Jerry and the entire Castaway Dive Team for making our diving this week so enjoyable! And a huge thank you to the entire Castaway Island Staff… We will be back!!!
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Topside Photos from Castaway Island…

I’m not going to spend a lot of time writing about our time on Castaway Island. It’s not because we don’t like it here… Hell, we may never leave! But as Julie said to me the other day, this is our honeymoon and some things need to be kept close to the heart. I will say that we have had a fantastic time here so far and the weather has been very forgiving for this time of year. It has been a bit windy and there is a lot of crap in the water from the storm two weeks ago, but for the most part you couldn’t ask for a better Fiji honeymoon!
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Next stop… Castaway Island!

After breakfast all the guests were instructed to bring their luggage to the dive deck so that the crew could off-load it to the shuttle bus when it finally arrived. Well, the shuttle bus was almost an hour late which was going to put Julie and myself in a bind because we had pre-paid tickets for the ‘Tiger IV Shuttle’ to take us from Nadi to Castaway Island. The ‘Tiger IV’ is a high-speed catamaran that serves as a shuttle service to all the out-lying islands in the Mamanuca Group. Our boarding tickets were for the 12:15 pm shuttle to Castaway Island and if we missed it we would have to wait until 3:30 pm for the next one. Remember now, the bus ride from Suva to Nadi takes three and a half hours with no traffic… are you doing the math yet!!
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Wakaya to Suva…

This morning we awoke to a fantastic sunrise anchored just off of Wakaya Island. We would only get one dive today before pulling anchor and starting on our journey back to port in Suva. As a result of the perfect conditions at ‘Wakaya Pass’ we found ourselves back on the dive site that we started the week on, ‘Blue Ribbon Eel Wall’. Without going into a whole lot of detail I can tell you that we were all no less impressed this time around! We didn’t run into any big critters, but the awesome visibility and tons of macro stuff more that made up for the lack of Sharks and other large animals one might normally see here.
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More from Makogai Island…

Here are a couple more photos from our visit to the village on Makogai Island… Enjoy!
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