This past season in Belize we had a professional photographer, Jason Lee, join us on the island. We are very excited about the images and video he took for us, and several of these are still to be published. In fact, be sure to send us an email requesting of a copy of the new brochure when it comes out in print, or download the .pdf version off of our website.

We have had several professional photographers join us on the island in the past: Keith Fialcowitz, Barry Tessman, Eric Sanford, Clayton Anderson, Henry Georgi, Bill Hatcher, Mark Webster, and Peter Mc Dermott are the ones I am remembering right now. Many of our guests have also sent us photographs rivaling those of the professionals, in fact many of our guests
are professional photographers. I literally have thousands of images of our adventures and of our island. It’s a photogenic place!

Still, one of our biggest challenges is faithfully depicting the island in still images. Photos just don’t do it justice. Every year as guests disembark from our boat I hear exclamations “It’s even better than the pictures!” You just can’t give the full surround of being there in a photo. And that’s, of course, as it should be, but it’s a challenge for our marketing department (me).

Many years ago, when pondering this problem, I realized what we needed was an aerial shot. But not a far away one, like one taken from a plane, but a close up one, like one taken from a tower on the island itself. But there is no tower, and we had no plans to build one. How to solve this problem? Then I had the *brilliant* idea (if I may say so myself) of getting one of the passing yachtees to let us climb their mast and take a photo from there. A mast is tall, a mast can get close to the island… so I waited.

A few years went by and then a serendipitous chain of events conspired to make my vision of the perfect island photograph come true. First of all, we had to meet the right yachtees. And we did, Russ and Sue Hills, proud owners of Route 66, a yacht-and-a-half based out of Florida. I met them when one of our beginning kayakers I was paddling with bumped into their boat. I subsequently invited them over for a Belikin beer to thank them for not getting mad at us. They became fantastic friends and returned to visit for many years after (although I am sorry to say that it’s been years since I have seen them.)

I don’t remember how I met the photographer Keith Fialcowitz, but in early 2002 he was scheduled to come out to the island to take pictures for us. He is arguably the best photographer I have met. He travels with an amazing amount of stuff, and is a first-class perfectionist. Even though it’s been years since he was on the island (he joined us at least 4 times that first trip) we still use his images all of the time. Luckily, just as he had arrived, so did Russ and Sue. I had my National Geographic photographer and my yacht mast on the island at one time! Voila!

So I talked all of the guests into showing up for the photo shoot. We dragged all the kayaks and other gear out onto the beach instead of in the shade where it usually lives, and had everyone paddle and sail around in a circle for the picture. The result was the brochure centerfold we have used since 2002.

This was only 3-1/2 years after Hurricane Mitch had hit our island. Mitch took our Dining Hall and several cabanas and gave us a huge, new, treeless beach. This period in our history also coincided with the palm tree disease called Yellow Leaf disease that killed many of the trees. So the island had quite a dearth of shade. Since that time we have planted over 400 trees and we treat the originals that survived (about 500 trees) 4 times a year with an antibiotic specially formulated for palms.

So as every year has passed, the island has become greener and greener, but that centerfold image just stays the same. Never again did I have the perfect photographer and the perfect mast on the island at the same time. And then, they invented DRONES.

This is where Jason Lee comes in. Jason showed up last April with a drone-and-a-half and took some AWESOME pictures of the island. Finally, we get to update our centerfold! Once again we dragged all of the kayaks and other gear out on the beach, and once again we asked our guests to participate in the photo shoot. What a shot we got! And here’s the result.

It is always a big weight off my shoulders when I finish designing our 12-page 4-color Belize brochure each summer. Between the end of one season and the early stages of the next we are sending out old information as I rush to get everything updated all at once. Cully and I struggle to decide which photos to use because we always have so many more than we can fit into our catalog. We had an amazing photographer who came down last April, Jason Lee. He took dozens of amazing shots, both from land and from the air! I’ll be writing more about his drone shots in future posts. The most difficult decision for us is which should be the cover photo; this year we chose a fantastic shot of Jasmine Ardeshiri, one of our kitesurf instructors, on a paddleboard at the island.

The back cover is from one of our guests, Ben Lewis, who joined us in December of 2012. Many times our guests take the best photographs that we have.

So I just finished the new brochure yesterday… it’s not printed yet but it’s ready online! Please check it out, and send me an email and let me know what you think. (And if you find a typo, let me know right away before I go to the printer in Grand Junction to finalize it!) Contact us at slickrock@slickrock.com.

Download Slickrock’s NEW Belize brochure.

Exploring The Aquarium, about a half mile paddle from our island

A new report on the health of Caribben coral reef ecosystems just came out, proclaiming the savior of the declining reefs to be none other than the ubiquitous parrotfish. This fish family is arguably the most numerous of the many fish species we encounter at Glover’s Reef. Some (but not near all) of the parrotfish species we regularly encounter while snorkeling near our island: Stoplight Parrotfish, Queen Parrotfish, Princess Parrotfish, and Midnight Parrotfish. Scientific parrotfish studies have taken place just off our shore by researchers based at the nearby Wilderness Conservation Society island, Middle Caye.

Queen Parrotfish spotted just off our shore

An international report released this week lays out a guardedly optimistic path to coral reef recovery — starting with conservation of an unlikely reef champion — the parrotfish. The report was produced by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the United Nations Environment Program.

Coral reef health requires an ecological balance of corals and algae in which herbivory is a key element. Populations of parrotfish are a critical component of that herbivory, particularly since the decline of sea urchins in the early 1980s; the main causes of mortality of parrotfish are the use of fishing techniques such as spearfishing and, particularly, the use of fish traps.

Many people say that climate change has already doomed coral reefs. But the report shows that the loss of parrotfishes and other seaweed-eating grazers has been far more important than climate change for Caribbean reef destruction so far. While it is true that climate change poses an enormous risk for the future because of coral bleaching and more acidic oceans, the fact is that reefs protected from overfishing, excessive coastal development and pollution are more resilient to these stresses. Even if we could somehow make climate change disappear tomorrow, these reefs would continue their decline. We must immediately address the grazing problem for the reefs to stand any chance of surviving future climatic shifts.

[Photos by Jason Lee (top) and Toby Chung (bottom)]