We admit it, we’re geeks. We named our cat Cisco. We got him in 1994, and for 13 years he’s been the light of our life. This cat has an amazing personality and allowed us to stay in his kingdom. On july 7th we had to let him get peace, after a short sickbed. It was one of the hardest things we have done.

We’ll never forget some of his crazier moment. Like the time he managed to wrap a plastic bag around his tail and ran around the house being chased by a bag. Or the time he kept coming home with little dead chicks, and we had to sneak after him to find out someone several blocks over was feeding them to him because they were old and couldn’t separate our cat from theirs. Or when he used to make a god awful noise at night because he wanted to get out, and he would position himself just so all his howls would somehow harmonize and double in volume. Or the way he would curl up between us at night and would glare at us if one of us dared to move. The way we would say “EARTHQUAKE” to each other when he would jump off something upstairs and shake the house. Or the last time we cuddled with him before we had to bring him to the vet for his final trip.

We’ll remember all of it.

I’ve written a review before about the StiX arm system for underwater photography. The creator of that system, John Zeiss, is a great guy that really listens to suggestions. Several people have asked if he can make his buoyancy floats in black instead of white. So of course he did.

You may be wondering why anyone would care, are we that fashion conscious? The reason for black floats is that white floats look a lot like tasty little fishy morsels to a hungry shark. If you’re doing a trip like we’re doing with Tiger Sharks you really want dark floats.

We have put another gallery online, this time with our photo’s from our last trip to Raja Ampat and Komodo. It was a very long trip, starting in Indonesian Guinea, through the Banda Sea, down to Flores, and from there to Komodo and finally to Bali. It took almost 4 weeks, but it was an extremely fun and productive trip.

We saw many critters that we’d not seen before, including a lot of nudibranchs, juvenile batfish, hairy octopus, and many more. The area around Komodo now ranks as our favorite dive destination.

You can see these and other images in our galleries section.

You want to do a deep dive, but you don’t want to go outside. Julie and I did just that today at a place called Nemo33. Located in Brussels, a 2 hour drive from our home, Nemo has a 110 feet (33 meters) deep pool, with several platforms at 15 and 30 feet, and an actual air chamber around 30 feet. I went there to make sure my dentist had fixed a broken tooth correctly and didn’t leave an airspace, instead of finding out somewhere in the middle of the ocean that they had.

Even though the concept of Nemo sounds cool, and I suppose in some ways it is cool, I think it lacks a lot of features. They don’t allow any use of personal gear besides fins/mask, which also includes camera gear. So no pressure testing of expensive housings, or just doing a practice buoyancy dive with a new housing. But it was still fun to do a deep dive in a pool, something that you can’t really do anywhere else in the world.

On the way back from Nemo we visited Gouda, where fellow Wetpixel member James Wiseman was staying for a few days while visiting Holland.