For the first time in the 15 years that Julie and I have been a couple, we’re separated for more than a week. Julie is on her way to the Bahamas to dive with Oceanic Whitetips. That’s what she’s telling people anyways. Her real motivation is wild pigs! Honestly..wild pigs! She saw some pictures made by Alex Mustard last year, and she wants to meet those pigs. At first I did not really want to go, but I wish I had gone after all because being home alone sucks!

I’ll be joining Julie in 11 days for a second trip diving with Dolphins and Tiger Sharks.

When you travel as much as we do, you quickly accumulate a huge amount of photos. Even though we do our best to catalog and keyword our images as we take them, we are continuously behind in cataloging our images. Not only that, we also have a large backlog of thousands of images.

Couldn’t this be something you can outsource? I’ve been thinking about just that, but it’s probably quite difficult. You need to find someone that is knowledgeable about marine life or is capable of looking up species in books or on the Internet. As if that wasn’t hard enough, you also have to trust this person with your images. Maybe we’ll find someone one day, but I’m not holding my breath.

On our recent trip to the Banda Sea, Julie and I visited the Banda Islands. These islands are in the middle of nowhere, and would have been forgotten in history if it weren’t for one small detail: they were the only islands in the world where the spice nutmeg grew. In the 16th and 17th century these tiny little islands were the center of the spice trade, and therefore the center of many sea battles. My native country The Netherlands (Holland) played a big, and sometimes sinister, part in all the trade and fighting.

Even back then corporate power was almost equal to the power of kings and queens, especially the company called VOC, which in English is known as the Dutch East-Indies Company. It was a major trading company, and had large stakes in the spice trade, and therefore the spice islands.

During our short stay on Banda Neira, where an old dutch fort still dominates the harbor, we found some locals selling old VOC coins. The locals find them when they build houses or work on the fields and I bought one that is more than 250 years old. There are lots of them in dutch museums so it’s not that rare, but it’s a nice reminder of this trip to the past.