Still getting ready...

Work is not allowing me much time to really get everything together for this Seychelles trip next week, but I am flinging things in a bag as and when I think about it. I am seriously excited about going, but there is a lot of work to clear. As I said earlier in the week, this kind of remote, mothership/live aboard trip means we can only take limited gear, so from a photography point of view, this is what I will be taking :

• two Canon 1D MK11 cameras
• Canon 16-35mm f2.8L lens
• Canon 70-200 f4L IS lens
• undecided at the moment between Canon 15mm fisheye and Canon 24-105 f4L IS lens
• Canon 580 EX11 Speedlite flashgun
• Hoya polarising filters for the lenses, plus a back-up one for the 16-35 lens
• my 10.6 inch Fujitsu laptop - this thing has done fantastically well for me, it is a real workhorse
• Freecom portable external hard drive
• Sandisk memory cards, cables, battery charger etc.

I am also going to sneak my new Van Staal reel in to my bag, with a travel-style heavy duty Greys spinning rod and a few lures. At night I can mess about a bit off the boat when we have done the flats fishing, there are always loads of GTs hanging around the boat, and big dogtooth tuna are there as well. If I hook a monster one of these I expect to be smoked !! Last year I had a reel emptied in about five seconds, I have never seen anything like it.

I shot a really good looking winter stillwater trout feature for Trout Fisherman magazine earlier this week. Nick Hart and I managed to get the material we needed before the rain came in. Really lovely little fishery called Valley Springs, and Nick did well to catch a few good conditioned rainbows with the size 10 Stalking Bug you can see in the photo above. The feature will be in Trout Fisherman sometime soon. These smaller stillwaters really make you work as a photographer, for their very nature somewhat limits what you can do creatively, especially when the skies are overcast. But I reckon this kind of shoot sorts the men from the boys !!