An Evening with Jamie Watts
2007 September 27 (Thursday) 19:00

How to find the world's best dive sites at the best times of the year (and the best years):
a marine ecologist's perspective

You should have been here last month, last week, yesterday..... Most of us know that sinking feeling when we arrive at that far off destination to find we've just missed the big marine life spectacular.

So how do we avoid squandering precious vacation time on false trails? Jamie Watts is a marine biologist with lots of hands on experience from the tropics to Antarctica. Jamie's not just got an insight into the animal kingdom. He also thoroughly understands our needs as divers and photographers from his divemastering days with top liveaboard operator, Peter Hughes. Jamie is going to provide you with the invaluable understanding of marine eco systems that will better help you be in the right place at the right time.

We hear all about �world class dive spots, and we see stunning documentaries and underwater photographs. Some parts of the world, at some times of the year, just seem to explode with marine life, and we are becoming ever better at predicting when and where. We all want the wow factor, and most now appreciate that there's far more to that than just coral reefs.

More and more, global marine hotspots, and their charismatic megafauna - the marine mammals, big sharks, rays and giant fishes have become accessible to divers. This presentation is about finding them, where they thrive best and how, when and where to go looking for them.

This isn't random, of course, there are patterns: productivity, plankton, seasonality and migrations all play their part. The aim of this presentation is to bring marine environments together with a global context from the majority of the world that is in effect marine desert, to the world's top marine life hotspots.

Our evening with Jamie Watts is going to be fascinating. Jamie has a number of scientific papers to his credit and is enjoying a burgeoning career as a freelance writer on marine life topics.

The talk will be held at King's College, London; meeting at the shop first. Call or e-mail to book your place.....

As always, we look forward to your company,

Jamie Watts and the Ocean Optics-Mavericks Diving team.

Jamie is a marine ecologist and fisheries biologist, and an old friend to Ocean Optics. He has a particular interest in high-productivity zones and the scope and scale of marine food webs. Jamie splits his time between fisheries research, consultancy and guiding trips to remote high-productivity regions, most recently polar regions. He has researched just about everything that lives under the sea, from coral reefs to copepods to king crabs to colossal squid, and in a former life worked on liveaboard and land-based dive boats all over the world. After two years on the Antarctic island of South Georgia and then the Antarctic Peninsula, Jamie has just returned from a season in the Arctic.

Read the pdf brochure.