The World Festival of Underwater images is held annually in Antibes (near Nice, France) around October-time. It's aim is to promote the main cultural and sport activites relating to the underwater world, and to be a meeting of lovers of the sea. It is a large exhibition running over four days, with a couple of hundred thousand visitors expected to pass through. There are exhibitor stands from artists to t-shirt vendors and from sculptures to magazines. Our favorite is the second-hand diving equipment and camera stand, where quite often one can find good examples of vintage diving equipment. There are competitions with many categories for both still and moving images. The stills images are displayed in a gallerly, while the movies are screened throughout the event in a number of mini-theatres. Being the only event of its kind in the world, the festival attracts the best productions and the largest number of international personalites of the underwater world. The festival is organised by the Spondyle Club, which was created in 1966 and was once one of the biggest french underwater diving clubs. The festival itself was founded by Daniel Mercier in 1973, and has been running annually since, growing steadily along the way. The Antibes region is considered the birthplace of sport diving, where Guy Gilpatrick created the sport of goggling (1930), Yves LePrieur founded the first diving club (1934), while Hans Hass, Jacques Cousteau and Dmitri Rebikov were all visitors to the area. Even today at the festival you'll still find the real original pioneers of diving. It has become an Ocean Optics/Mavericks Diving tradition that the whole team goes out to the festival to enjoy the atmosphere and company, as well as to get a few dives in our vintage diving equipment. We call this our annual pilgrimmage---we'll enter the competition, meet friends from around the world, and dive only the old-fashoined way. The Optics/Mavericks team have taken home two of the Our World Underwater Scholarship Society prizes for a young european underwater photographer, presented at the festival. To that end, you'll find that the shop is closed for the Antibes weekend, as noone wants to stay behind and miss out. See also:

Antibes 2007

Antibes 2006

http://www.underwater-festival.com/en/index.html

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