The walkman cost $7.00

The Walkman cost $7.00 on the Koh San road and I am guessing it could have been bought for $2. But I was grateful, because the Walkman, like a lot of the kit I was using, was borrowed.

I had managed to rustle up two VHS machines, one perched on top of the other, so that I could record two tapes at once. The Walkman was plugged in for audio so that I could dub a soundtrack on to the tapes and that was it, though not quite up to SOHO standards I was making money, on a little island in the Gulf of Thailand.

A housing and a camera in Singapore

I started out on my career making underwater video after I bought a housing and a camera in Singapore. I had just passed my instructor exams in Malaysia and had the foresight to see that after a while teaching, I would want to try something new.

My teaching days were sometimes a little unconventional. At one school I was not only teaching diving but boat driver as well, meaning that I drove one of the Thai long tail boats that are a cross between a surf board and a boat with an exposed prop behind waiting to shred you should you lose your footing. It was great fun. One day I hit a storm on my way home that was so bad that I had to wear a diving mask to see where I was going because the rain was horizontal, one Polish student was screaming 'we're going to die' as water poured over the sides from the 2 metre waves so I just steered and shouted 'it's, OK I'm a professional'. It seemed to work because we made it over the reef more submarine than boat.

There was one Swiss guy making video at the time of my arrival

Underwater video on Koh Tao at the time was an unknown affair. There was one Swiss guy making video at the time of my arrival who was on the run from the authorities as he had escaped from jail a number of years before. Of course now underwater video is big business with every dive shop including video as a service, but at that time we were making it up as we went along. Dieter is his name, he recently gave himself up to the authorities for an amnesty that said he had to serve a fraction of his sentence. The irony being that after he served his time he was arrested on his way back to Thailand as Interpol had not taken him off their records...to get back into the country he married a Thai girl and changed his name and so on...  

'never dive alone'

One of the main rules of diving is 'never dive alone', but as soon as you picked up any kind of camera that went out of the window. I practiced free diving so that if anything happened I could make it to the surface from any depth, in fact one time I got down to 30 metres and up again but my lips were so blue I looked like I had been munching blueberries, but I loved those little free diving sessions. I would love relaxing on the sea floor in the shallows of 10 metres where the light was good, sometimes falling asleep to wake finding my breathing apparatus rattling in my lips, I seemed to have the will to live and it never left my mouth.

I had a few good breaks while I was there like the fact that one dive owner, Mr Ban, let me operate for free from his dive boats, I didn't have to work too hard to pay the cheap rent for a Koh Tao bungalow and didn't worry too much about building up an empire. Sadly Mr ban was murdered in a contract killing after I left the island, but that's another side of life in South East Asia best left for another story. 

Clown fish to Whale sharks

So, the video. Well this was in 1997 so there wasn't really any laptop editing gear around so I did it all in camera and it worked out pretty well, I spent a lot of time underwater filming anything from Clown fish to Whale sharks and became so comfortable in my environment that I really did have a second home underwater...there are bits of underwater video amongst this little collection of snippets from my videos up until now or perhaps a little more underwater in this one..editing in camera with such strung together equipment left me with a gung ho attitude that put me in good stead when I returned to good old Blighty, in fact I started to specialise in filming festivals and outside performances because these need the kind of skills I picked up in the seas off of Thailand, like just getting that shot now because you won't get another chance. 

I have neglected my camera in recent times, but this film club is renewing my interest, so watch this space.