I was hired by Dr. Owen Day a marine biologist who has been producing educational films about climate change and how it is affecting the marine life in the Caribbean for the past few years. His last film “The Burning Agenda” was aired in many Caribbean islands and had a positive impact on many also succeeding to educate people about many of the threats to our marine environment.

This trip was to travel across the Caribbean doing two documentaries, one on climate change affects tourism and the islands, and the other one on marine protected areas also known as marine reserves or marine sanctuaries.

We started off going to Jamaica where we spent a week driving hours all over the island to do workshops with local fishermen and environmentalists as well as filming the marine sanctuaries and interviewing the fishermen. The Sandals Foundation helped us out organizing for us to stay in a Sandals close to Blue fields as a very large sanctuary has been recently established by the local fishermen there. It is amazing how much good the Sandals Foundation does but that will be a whole post by itself so back to our filming.

The fishermen in Blue-fields were very friendly and took us out on the reef to show us some of the problems they were having with people illegally fishing in the sanctuary and for us to dive and film the marine life. It was quite sad though as there were barely any fish. We did not see any big fish and majority of the coral was dead. We saw more Lion Fish than anything else and that is a huge problem as the Lion Fish eat all the baby fish and consume large amounts per day. The fishermen in Blue-fields actually prepared and cooked some Lion fish for us and they were not bad.

The fishermen recently got some donations from Virgin Holidays and Travel Foundation to set up Marker Buoys to mark off the marine park so that other fishermen know the boundaries and making it easier for the law to be enforced and the fish to start replenishing themselves. I really hope it works because most of the fishermen there are really poor and with prices of everything rising they are having a hard time making a living.

Our next stop was Belize where we dove at the famous Hol Chan Marine reserve site. The diving here was amazing. The amounts of fish will just blow your mind. Every dive we saw tons of marine life and were able to get quite close to film them as they were quite accustomed to humans as it is a huge attraction and tons of people snorkel and dive the site everyday. This is an example of one of the successful marine parks in the Caribbean as it is well patrolled and there are park fees for the snorkelers and divers which helps to self sustain the marine park staff and expenses.

It was a great experience and when the films come out you will see some of the amazing footage that we were able to capture.

After Belize we went on to Jamaica for 3 days where we did one more dive following a spear fisherman on his daily fishing hunt to feed his family of 5. It was amazing to see how long he held his breath for and the depths that he was going down to. He was also dead accurate hitting the fish every time even though most of the fish were quite small. The visibility was not great so the footage didn't come out as clear as possible because of a tropical storm that caused massive amounts of rainfall in Jamaica a couple days before. There was so much rain that people died and houses, bridges, roads, and business had gotten washed away.

Our next stop was to Antigua where we did interviews with the Curtain Bluff hotel owner and a few environmental conservationists as well as a couple government officials. It was cool to see that the government officials were really well educated and knew so much about their environment, current problems, and how they needed to fix them. It was a short busy 2 days of filming then we flew to St.Lucia.

The hotel we stayed at in St. Lucia was an hour and fifteen minutes on the windiest road through the mountains so by the end of it my brother (production assistant) and I were not feeling very well. After a good nights sleep we woke up to an amazing view of the Pitons (St.Lucia’s famous mountains) where i was able to get some cool time-lapses. We did a dive below one of the Pitons and were quite pleasantly surprised at the amount of marine life on the reef. We were diving in the marine park which is so far the most successful marine reserve in the Eastern Caribbean. There were lots of big lobster and lots of small fish. We did not see too many big fish and the parrot fish were a bit scared of people but this is because of bad fishing practices in the past.

Barbados was our last stop where we spent two days running around doing interviews. Now I am back in Trinidad and the editing of the films starts soon to hopefully have the one on tourism finished by mid November and the other one on marine parks finished by January 2011. They will be aired on Caribbean television networks as well as in schools and anywhere else that is requested. I will keep you posted on the release dates so that everyone can get to see them.