Giles Shaxted

It seems that Amazon.com is carrying shark fin soup through a third-party vendor, Pacific Rim Gourmet. With all the controversy surrounding shark fins and the horrible practices used to harvest fins, Amazon should be ashamed to be carrying shark fin soup and should rectify the problem immediately by pulling all shark fin products from their catalog.

What you can do:

1. Leave feedback at Amazon’s product page for Dragonfly Shark Fin Soup
2. Send e-mail to Pacific Rim Gourmet at customerservice@pacificrim-gourmet.com and write a letter of protest to:
   Pacific Rim Gourmet
   75-5660 Kopiko Street, Suite C7-210
   Kailua-Kona, HI 96740
3. Write to Amazon.com at Advantage Customer Service (advantage@amazon.com) and
   Investor Relations (ir@amazon.com)
4. Spread the word through your webpage, blog, etc.
5. Boycott Amazon.com until they comply
6. Join our discussion in the Wetpixel.com forums

[EDIT: Less than 48 hours later after a small bombardment from Wetpixelites and a few others I assume Amazon has made the product unavailable, however there are more out there selling to countries where it is illegal such as Asianfoods.com]
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A while ago now at Eden Rock I was out diving (summer time last year before the hurricane literally just before) with my good friend Alex Mustard.

We had purposefully chosen this spot in order to find some silver sides in caverns.

Silversides are a very ‘Cayman’ photo and are typically only found during the summer months so it makes it an unusual one or something that not everyone gets to see as it is seasonal too.

Anyway .. I believe my camera was messing around back then and so I took the chance to model for Alex and he got some great photos which have been doing the rounds on various different publications but this curent Advertisement for the Cayman Islands is my favourite as it makes me the new ‘Poster Boy’ for the Cayman Islands!!

With anyluck my world fame will not hit me too hard and I will be able to still go to the grocery store and do my shopping and lead a fairly normal life.

Recently I have seen lots of people having a particular laugh with Google spiders etc. Well I wanted to do something fun for me .. so I was thinking about linking to my own site and seeing how long it would take me to get up in the google listings with that term.

idea has come from: echeng and his “Male Hotness Redefined” and from John Styn’s Workout recognition in google images. What should I go for …

… I was also going to try trackbacks in this post .. that would be a first for me as I never knew what they were or why before .. but no one else with a journal uses them that i know of .. and besides I don’t have the trackbacks in my posts .. do i ? I must go check

Anyway .. now that I have helped Eric and John in their google quest onward with my own ..

Cayman Cowboy lets see if I can make google recognise Cayman Cowboy as a major link to my site and hence when you search for it you will find my site http://giles.shaxted.co.uk Now this obviously has a little bit of meaning to me as Cayman Cowboy was a term that was used in Rodales to describe Divemasters in the Cayman Islands about a decade ago, when i first started working here. The principal behind a Cayman Cowboy according to the article was that all the divemasters on this island, and they named a few companies and almost names, were womanising man whores who would do anything for money and anything to get in a girls pants, which for the most part is true, but I don’t remember it being done in an offensive way. It was just unfortunate that this female femanists journalist came down undercover to write her article entitles The Cayman Cowboy. Which for the record was true just emphasised the wrong points. But we have to say thank you to her as she thought she was slaggin us off and ruining our future hopes .. the spring break afterwards was majorly rammed with American Teens and just a little older all because the girls made their way down here to meet a Cayman Cowboy and the guys their age followed.

It’s never been quite the same down here since then, divemasters now may think they are living the life of a Cayman Cowboy but they are barely even scraping the surface but thats ok .. let them have their fun, i had mine.

Alex has over the last year or so gotten me in the water during happy hour many times, even with the elements often being against us either through weather or dive shops closing. Todays day of diving is cancelled as we have a Norwester on our hands .. boo hoo.
Anyway .. our dusk dive last night was a very awesome dive, mostly due to Alex’s eyes but there was so much going on .. almost too much. We were in the water for fish spawning as normal, after the last few times of watching and learning their behaviour the process of photographing it became ever easier especially with the SLR capabilities of the D60. There were not many hamlets around, many Rock Beauty’s and also quite a few butterfly fish .. all of which have a very noticeable courtship process. Eden Rock the reef we were at had so many fish on it though that at first it seemed to be putting off some of the mating fish, however they soon became unaware and went about their business. The odd thing is for the first time of doing this dusk diving photography other fish were getting in the shot .. I’d often get a blurry blue chromis flying past in the background .. looks cool but takes away from the object of the photo. At the same time a very friendly turtle cam up to play and it is the second time I have touched a turtle and let me enhance this wording for you by saying rather the turtle touched me. Once in the east end a turtle came up and literally shook my hand .. a breath taking moment that was ruined by a moron of a diver who grabbed the turtle and started throwing it around. I won’t get into that story but there was some unpretty scenes afterwards between myself and him.
This turtle did exactly the same thing .. and I didn’t notice until looking through my view finder he was too close to photograph with my macro lense on.
The highlight of the dive for me though was the great shots of the hamlets I got followed by a wicked Flying Gunnard right as we were finishing up our safety stop before exit.
Mucho thanks of course goes out to Dave and Paul at Eden Rock for being good friends who comp us on our diving on a regular basis.

v=0 Everything is going good in Cayman, I have been lucky with accomodation, thanks to my Boss Mark, then Kelsey, and now Mary. I think now is time to move off the futon at Mary’s and get a bedroom, with a bed, and a bathroom !! I spoke to my friends Chris and Lynne today who work at Divers world .. they have a spare room and would love some rent money .. shame other friends with spare rooms weren’t able to commit to helping me out. Anywho .. life is great .. I have massive potential n0w for making a good life down here with good money, responsibilty and hopefully soon a home of my own.

I have had a good run of things so far, Kelsey being down was the best thing for making me happy, big up the Kelster for me Kelsey love ya chick. Now Alex is down for 3 weeks and that means spare time is spent diving. I have been snapping loads of photos and I thought it was time to share. These have all been taken with my D60 which is kicking ass underwater, it’s finally gotten wet thanks to my New Sea and Sea housing, thanks Dad i could talk more and probably will but I want to put some of the photos up so here they come

www.yup.org.uk is at long last finished .. or at least finished enough for release to get it back into the lime light.

I didn’t do all the coding myself, but the layout and design is all me. I needed some help with the backend, I went to www.rent-a-coder.com for that, cost me $10 to get it to this stage and quite a few headaches along the way. But the last guy I had helping me was great, he finished off what someone else started and we now have a fully working great looking website. And best of all the originaly idea to take the work load off the administrator has happened. As an admin all we have to do is add users username and email address and badda bing badda boom … new user gets sent email address andcan log in and fill out the profile ..and give themselves 8 portfolio images !!! brilliant !
The News is also controlled from online too … so there is no need apart from if creating new pages to ever have to not do it online .. it’s simple, it works and it’s all ours !!

If you are a Young Underwater Photographer ( YUP ) then please feel free to go over to the site check it out and sign up to get your own area to display your own work and get noticed.

Went for a dive on turtle reef on Sunday, did two dives for Wide Angle and Macro photography. Here are some of the photos, and if you want to read more I will post more later about the reef conditions when i finish my article.

    

I had a blast last night thanks to Alex Mustard and Ocean Frontiers

Having never seen anything like this in real life only on video’s my jaw was wide open and I was stunned by everything i saw, I haven’t done a late late night dive like that (10pm) in forever so everything was exciting to me, especially nowadays with my knowledge being much more than it used to be.

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I went diving in Shark Alley over at the East End with Ocean Frontiers I had a great experience actually getting to see the sharks just hanging out, makes me think it was a shame the shark awareness thing stopped as I would have liked to have done something like they used to, but still nice to see a shark which is a very rare treat for me.

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