David & Clare Bewick

Christmas 2004

What a busy year it has been. At least that is my excuse for the fact that this is the first many of you will have heard from me in the last 12 months. After a relatively quiet diving year in 2003, Clare and I have been all over the place this year to make up the deficit. We took a week in January on a ‘live aboard’ boat in the southern Red Sea, a week shore based in Menorca, diving in caves and caverns at Easter, a long weekend was spent on Lundy, a Marine Reserve Island in the Bristol Channel, a trip that Clare ran for our diving club on a ‘live aboard’ boat cruising round the Outer Hebrides in August and finally a few days diving in the Bahamas when we went out to see Clare’s Dad for his 70^th birthday in October. Although you won’t believe me, this is all hard work as I now come back from these trips with 4 or 5 hours of under-water video which then needs to be edited down to an interesting length DVD. Although the main reason for this is to aid my unreliable memory, I generally offer copies to other divers on the trips, and have therefore produced about 30 sales at £10 a head. I think that covers raw materials and about 2p an hour labour! Highlights of the footage this year were 20 minutes or so filming seals at Lundy, where they seemed to think I was a fellow seal there to play, and spent lots of time chewing my fins, and a fantastic shark dive in the Bahamas, where we saw a dozen big reef sharks having an afternoon tea of a ‘fish-popsicle’, and I was very glad they didn’t chew my fins! The way this shark feeding works is that the local dive centre freezes a big bucket of dead fish and sea water to produce the fish- popsicle. This is then suspended from a float and chained to the seabed to leave it 4 meters or so above the bottom. The sharks then spend 15-25 minutes breaking bits off until it’s all gone. The great thing about this method is that it replicates their natural feeding pattern, allowing the bigger sharks to dominate the group. Other methods of shark feeding I have seen include hand feeding and remote feeding (where food is dropped down a wire from the surface), both these are spectacular, but run the risk of upsetting the natural behaviour of the sharks. Another good thing about the Bahamas team we dived with is that they didn’t overly restrict the observing divers. We were told to stay at least 6 meters from the food, so as not to enter the shark’s competitive zone, but other than that we were free to move around. Most divers tend to sit on the bottom for this, but I am shark and video mad, so it allowed me to film quite close and on their level. We were warned that as the last piece of fish and ice was grabbed, the shark getting it would swim off quickly to avoid the others fighting for this titbit. As luck would have it he swam straight at me, passing about a meter away as he gulped down the food. It was a fantastic video shot.

Our story of cats this year is bitter sweet. Maggie was put down in July as she had just about given up eating. The final straw was when she started putting her nose up at pieces of smoked salmon. (In the past that was a very good way of losing fingers). The most likely cause was a large abdominal cancer, however we decided not to put a 15 year old cat through lots of exploratory surgery as the vet’s advice was that she might not survive it, and there would be very little chance of doing anything about it anyway.

Given the planned diving trips we did put off the option of getting more pets until later in the year, but finally gave in last month and picked up our new family members, Talisker and Cardhu. They are Burmese kittens, born on 5^th August, one Chocolate and one Brown. The names come from malt whiskeys, Talisker, being the darker variety, is the Brown. We specifically went for Burmese as we know 2 very beautiful full grown ones, who are great fun and full of character. The short hair was also a consideration as we wished to minimise the risk of Clare’s asthma being affected. Unfortunately the latter hasn’t worked and Clare has been to see the local nurse to seek advice. She was on very low medication, and this has been upped a bit, and the kittens are permanently banned from our bedroom. As they grow they will cause less of a problem as they will start moving around the house more sedately, and will hopefully give up their favourite sport of ‘race you up the curtains’, which does increase dust levels a bit! We are keeping them in the house at the moment, but will introduce them to the outside world in the New Year.

Work wise I have now completed a year at the Ministry of Defence. In the summer we moved from temporary office accommodation at Tottenham Court Road, to the MOD Main Building in Whitehall, which had just finished a 3 year refurbishment. I was not familiar with the old setup, but I understand it was a rabbit warren of small dingy offices. We now work in a very modern, open plan layout with up to date IT and excellent catering facilities. I think this is the first time in my career that I have ever had up to date tools to do my job. I have had a couple of big projects to deal with this year, both looking at how we might go about ‘Commanding and Controlling’ armed forces in the future. The main driver for this is the increasingly ‘computer networked’ environment we work in, but a lot of the things we have to consider have more to do with training, organisations and processes, rather than equipment. I am finding it very interesting work and am working for and with some great people. I still have over a year in the job to go, and hope to go back to sea after that. On the social side Clare has come down for a few weekends, where we generally grab a show on the Friday night and then enjoy the rest of London until Sunday evening.

The house has come along a bit this year. The final two rooms to tackle have been the ‘snug’, our smaller living room, and the central hall. Both needed plastering and tiling, and the hall needed a couple of roof windows to let in some light. The snug is about done now, repainted, fire opened up and tiled. The hall still needs painting, but that should happen fairly soon as we are at the ‘sample pots’ stage of decision making. Outside we now have a couple of ponds to encourage frogs and dragonflies, although the other planned work, for me to build Clare a fruit cage, has been delayed due to worker inefficiency.

We will be spending Christmas at Monkton Combe with Jules, Joan and Brenda, I hope you all have a wonderful time wherever you spend yours, and have a great 2005.

By Clare

David has covered the diving for the year – and it was very good fun to play with the seals off Lundy. We sat on the bottom on about 5m of water, with the seals slowly getting closer until they decided we were just very bad swimming seals, and started to play!

I’ve swapped working with Airbus on the Trent 900 engine for the A380 for working with Boeing on the Trent 1000 for the 7E7. Swapping from the French to the Americans has been a bit of a culture shock – although we supposedly speak the same language I do sometimes wonder! I’ve had 3 trips to Seattle in 6 months, 10 hours flying over 8 time zones, and will probably be going back out in January. Washington State is very beautiful – when I was there over a weekend I went for a walk in the Cascade mountains, starting at close to the altitude of Ben Nevis – and not going anywhere near the top of any mountains! I found a local climbing gear shop, took their advice & went to the “Alpine Lakes” which were very beautiful – and shared my lunch with a hungry chipmunk.

The new kittens are great fun. Cardhu is a very elegant little cat, who tends to take “china cat” poses and is generally companionable. Talisker I’ve fished out of the waste paper basket, and out of the bath (luckily only part full) – and he occasionally needs rescuing from the top of the curtains. They spend a lot of time chasing each other at high speed and play fighting, and the rest of the time sleeping snuggled up together.