Travelling all over the world to see and photograph sharks and other big marine life sometimes makes me a bit blind to our Dutch wildlife.

Making up for that I signed up for the SharkaTag event (pronounced like sharkattack, but different :-) ) joining the boat organized by the Dutch Shark Society.

SharkaTag has been introduced in the Netherlands after its first research projects were held in the past years in the UK.

I am super thrilled to announce that I have won the National Geographic Frans Lanting Award 2014. My shot was selected as the overall winning image by the jury out of 5000 submissions. Winning this competition means a lot to me and shows that the effort put in planning and executing shoots as well as all the investments in equipment and travels are not in vain.

Above a short movie on when the final results were announced by Humberto Tan and Frans Lanting himself in the live broadcasted RTL4 Late Night Show. I was a bit flabbergasted :-)

After our stay in Umkomaas it was time to set out on the long drive to Mozambique. We were aiming for the Kosi Bay border, which took us at least 6 hours to reach. We left our rental car in the lockup and transferred to the other side to meet our pickup. The main goal of this part of the trip was to snorkel with the inshore bottlenose dolphins of the waters around Ponta do Ouro.