Thriller fiction and Non-fiction
My appearance on Scuba Radio, the World’s First Radio Show Devoted to Diving 9-20-14. We talked about the scuba dives I made recently with my dad. And the inspiration behind many of the Mike Scott dive adventures. If you’ve never listened to Scuba Radio, you’re missing out!
You can see the video I made of diving with my dad in Summersville Lake here.
What happens when you ignore your own environmental surveys in the interest of installing a cruise ship dock to bring in more tourists? Unfortunately Bimini in the Bahamas is in the process of finding out.
The Bahamian government has allowed Resorts World Bimini to dredge the coral reefs and install a new dock so a fast shuttle from Florida can bring in day-trip passengers. The boat can hold up to 1500 passengers at a time, nearly doubling the population of the tiny island. In the process, the dredging and the boat propellers are covering the coral reefs with silt, killing them. The very attraction that drew people to Bimini in the first place is being killed.
While this situation is sad, Bimini isn’t the only place faced with this dilemma. Cruise ships bring huge numbers of passengers to island, injecting cash into the island economy. Grand Cayman, already a destination for as many as five cruise ships a day, is moving forward with an environmental impact study to install a new, larger cruise ship dock.
The plot from my first novel, Cayman Cowboys (2005, 2013) touched on exactly this issue. A greedy developer co-opted several key officials from the Cayman government to build a cruise ship dock at the expense of the environment. The book is set at the very real Sunset House (follow Sunset House on Facebook), long-considered the pre-eminent dive resort on an island world famous for its coral reefs and scuba diving and a number of scenes take place at My Bar…world famous for after-dive activities. When I wrote the book, I really thought the people of Grand Cayman would never allow something like that to happen there. Now, unfortunately, I’m not so sure.
The environmental impact study in Bimini said installing the dock was a bad idea. The Bahamian government ignored its own study and allowed the dredging and construction to go forward. I have my fingers crossed that the government of Grand Cayman won’t make the same mistake there. My friends Neal Watson (Bahamas) and Keith Sahm (Grand Cayman) are doing what they can to make sure this doesn’t happen.
Find out more:
Tough Lessons: Cayman Islands looking at Bimini for what not to do
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Working with the fine folks at DUI – Diving Unlimited International, we ran a contest to giveaway a copy of my latest dive adventure novel, Heart of the Maya. In the book, Mike Scott dons a DUI drysuit for his dives underneath an Adena Indian burial mound.
We had such a good response to the contest we decided to give away three copies of Heart of the Maya.
The winners are:
Signed copies of the novels will go out in the mail this week.
If you didn’t win, you can still get your very own copy on Amazon. If you want a signed copy, contact Eric directly at eric @ booksbyeric.com.
For more information about the book, and the opportunity to read the first three chapters, visit the book description page..
A few weeks ago I had the cool opportunity of diving with my dad…it was two days after his 76th birthday.
We’ve dived together several times before, but it didn’t happen in the order you might think. He didn’t learn to dive until after I had moved to California to work for PADI. He told me it was something he was interested in and I hooked him up with an instructor friend back in West Virginia. Our first dives together were in California when he came out for a visit. I wrote an article about it that was published in PADI’s Undersea Journal in early 1999. (Unfortunately, I have lost my copy of that story.)
We’ve dived together several times since then, in West Virginia and North Carolina. There is just something cool you about diving across generations. My daughters are old enough to dive, but neither one has told me they are interested in it yet…and I won’t push them. It has to be their decision. It would be really cool to dive with my daughters, my wife and my dad all at the same time, but I seriously doubt that is going to happen.
Regardless, this is a typical Saturday morning at Summersville Lake around Winter Access when you go diving with your dad for his birthday.
Enjoy!
(I originally posted this video to YouTube right after we went out, but my website was being rehabbed so I didn’t post it there. Fixing that today.).
About this time last year, I wrote about the upcoming Shark Week and why I thought it was important to understand sharks…even for those of us living in West Virginia. And then the week aired and it was terrible. It was sensationalized, fictionalized and false. I was thoroughly disgusted.
Sharks are apex predators, just like lions, grizzly bears and wolves. They live at the top of the food chain and keep animals lower on the food chain in check. The most famous example of the need for apex predators is Yellowstone National Park. When the park service reintroduced the gray wolf, elk became less abundant and allowed willow, aspen and cottonwood to grow, creating habitat for beaver, moose and other species. We have learned those lessons and stopped indiscriminately killing lions and bears and wolves on land. Unfortunately, we haven’t learned that lesson about sharks.
The 1974 book (and 1975 film) “Jaws” scared people out of the ocean, afraid killer-attack sharks were coming to get them in their bathtubs. Peter Benchley, who wrote the book, said later if he had known the truth about sharks, he never would have written the book. He spent much of his later life working for ocean conservation, including protecting sharks.
I often see people post pictures of fishing trips to the beach and they proudly display three- or four-foot Sand Tiger sharks they caught from a pier as if they have accomplished something noble. In fact, all they have done is help throw the ocean out of balance. A few weeks ago a swimmer was bitten by a Great White shark in California. He said afterward that he had swam there his entire life and never seen anything like it. It turned out that people were throwing bait into the water off a pier to bring the sharks in. Right next to a swimming beach.
Realistically, though, anglers aren’t the real problem when it comes to sharks. In some cultures, shark fins are considered a delicacy so commercial fishing boats catch sharks, cutting their fins off and then throwing the rest of the animal back into the water alive to drown. It is called shark finning and by some estimates finners kill hundreds of thousands of sharks a year.
As a species, humans rely heavily on a healthy ocean. It controls our weather, provides food and gives us the air we breathe. It is a place we love to visit in the summer to get away from home. No one knows what will happen if the ocean is out of balance, but I can’t imagine it will be good.
If you want to learn more about shark finning, there are dozens of resources online. Working with Scuba Diving Magazine, I just released a short story that deals with shark finning called “Sharks on Land”. The story is free to read online. Or you can find the link to the story on my website. I wrote the story to entertain and educate at the same time.
As a bonus, the story features Mike Scott, the main character in my adventure novels. You can read a short story for free and see if you might be interested in reading one of the full-length books..