Capturing the Moment

The Great Oceana Trip Video      By Myles Gillespie Check out this three minute video encompassing Myles, Jack, and my four country surf/dive/adventure trip. In November and December of 2013 we set off to find the best waves, dive spots and experiences. This video gives a small sample of the incredible time had by all. All footage was shot with GoPro cameras.

Great Oceana Trip in Review  Australia: Adventure Down Under Day 1 of the adventure    Four countries in a month and a half with Myles and Jack as my surfing, diving, and adventures buddies through it all. A lot of planning went into where we would go and what we would do but ultimately it would come down to weather, waves, and a little of that famous Gillespie luck to pull off what I had planned. Now that I am back home in Oahu, looking back at all the pictures and remembering all the experiences, I would saw that we accomplished 99% of everything we set out to do, plus a bunch that we stumbled upon on the way. Exploring inland Oz   It started for me back on Nov 15th with a long flight from Honolulu to Australia. Ending up in Brisbane, late at night, I was thrown into driving a right side steering wheeled car thru unfamiliar territory to a hostel with no way in. I fought the urge to rubber neck as I drove through downtown Brisbane and managed to unhi...

Following the food bin No one know he is there but me: Bull Shark  When I was first getting in to advanced underwater photography I got a lot of advice from a pro photographer named David Fleetham. One thing I remember him mentioning was his desire to go back to a famous shark dive in Fiji, where sharks emerge a few feet in front of you from the midst of a tornado of fish. I later had a couple friends travel to Fiji with a dive trip run by Maui Dreams and they came back with similar stories of this shark dive I just had to do. So this incredible sounding dive has been on my radar for some time but when was I going to get the chance to be in Fiji....insert the great Oceana Trip of '13. And what better way to introduce Myles and Jack to Fijian diving than to go straight to the Beqa shark dive I've heard so much about! A bull cruises close in front I've been talking about this ever since our first dive together in Australia. It is only fitting that this was to...

Frigates Passage, Fiji View from the boat Long walls at Frigates    The big reason for coming to Waidroka, on the south east corner of the main Fijian island of Viti Levu, was to surf a wave way out at sea called Frigates. Frigates is a reef passage that picks up way more swell than any of the local breaks. It takes about an hour to drive out there by boat but it is usually worth the extra effort. We spent the last two days exploring Frigates above and below the waves, and sometimes right through them! Just under the surface- Frigates Checking out the wall at Frigates Twilight Cavern   The reason that Frigates has such massive waves is because the force of those waves from the south are totally unobstructed until they smash upon a huge wall rising from the depths here. Our mission today was to explore that wall. What we found is that instead of being a solid wall, it is pocked with deep canyons, swim throughs, and caverns. Light filters down thro...

Myles and Jack on SCUBA   Our first venture underwater here in Fiji took us to a couple dive sites off the nearby island of Yunaca. It was about a 45 minute boat ride from the main island of Veti Levu. We were the only boat there and the weather conditions looked great from the surface. It had been raining quite a bit lately and because the ocean has warmed up for summer there is alot of particulate matter in the water. Some of it is algae blooms and other is runoff sediment from the islands.  Our first stop on the underwater tour was a 90ft shipwreck of a Taiwanese fishing vessel. It sunk perfectly upright in about 70ft of water making it very suitable for exploring with scuba. Alot of soft coral has attached to the wreck and some big lionfish have made inside their new home. We found a couple of nudibranchs and lots of fish on the wreck as well. Soft Coral colors Inside the wreck    The soft coral really shows off its color under the light from m...