Stephen Weir articles, editorials and popular social media weir postings

Shark Encounter Has Diver Using The Word Of Mouth (By STEPHEN WEIR, PUBLISHED IN DIVER MAGAZINE) Backside of Stephen Weir's Dental Implant. Some numbers obscured for privacy If you can see my social insurance number, it means you are my dentist, or I am dead. Eaten by a shark. Lost at sea. Or, maybe I was onboard an exploding airplane that somehow missed the crushed coral runway on a distant atoll. Late last year I got my Toronto dentist to tattoo my social insurance number onto the backside of my new upper left implant. You can’t see it without a mirror and me opening my mouth wide. It wasn’t cheap. But, as a diver who has had a few close calls underwater (all of them my fault), the tattoos give me peace of mind knowing that if my body washes up on a faraway beach, or if fishermen find my jaw in the gut of a shark, there is a good chance that I will be identified and my remains returned home for cremation. I have had two encounters with sharks ...

Yes I broke my @#&£§≤#! ankle birdwatching in the rainforest A NOTE ABOUT TOMORROW'S LUNCH Dear John and Alex: Last Saturday got permission to get into the  Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge  on The Big Island of Hawaii. The huge, usually off-limits Hakalau Rain Forest is located on the  windward side of the  Mauna Kea volcanic   mountain between 2,500 and 6,500 feet above sea level. This year the Forest is only open to the general pubic twice (up from once-a-year). Four-wheel drive required. It is down the mountain from  a dozen observatories including the Canada France Hawaii Telescope. Anyway, got to the rainforest early and my wife and I joined a Hawaii University Ecology professor and went into the forest looking for tiny colourful songbirds. The 32,000 acre preserve was established in 1985 to protect endangered birds and native Hawaiian plants. Our mission was to find and photograph 'akepa , the 'akiapola'au, the 'i'wi and th...

. IT IS ALL ABOUT HUNTERS, THE HUNTED AND THE HAPLESS By Stephen Weir Fidgety. Overheated. Impatient. The man with the double nitrox aluminum tanks and fully accessorized dry suit (with neoprene sneakers and matching gloves and hood) waited as the dive boat was secured to the remains of a Nazi U-boat sunk off the coast of North Carolina five wars ago. One of a dozen club members from Boston, he was sweating both figuratively and literally to get wet. For him this was the ultimate North Carolina T-shirt dive, the reason why he spent close to a day white knuckling it down the interstate to secure a berth at the end of the bench of the 55ft long dive boat Midnight Express. To his right, a photographer from Raleigh stood in the on-deck shower area. He grabbed the ship’s hand-held fresh water hose and filled his thin 3 mm wetsuit with hot water to get himself toasty warm before jumping into the rolling Atlantic Ocean. One diver was dressed for the south, the other for under the ice. Bu...