Meet the Spotters

Welcome to the first Blog for Critter Spotter. We look forward to sharing our stories, photographs, videos and more importantly the Ocean’s amazing critters.

This blog and site was inspired by our passion for diving and finding new and exciting creatures. We have been lucky enough to have a “house reef” in our front yard and been able to spend hundreds of hours exploring the whole area. No dive is the same, there is always something new to discover.

A bit about us

The creators of Critter Spotter are John Warmington and Sandra Kaye – we just LOVE diving! Our passion is the Ocean , and we don’t let the fact that we are no longer Spring Chickens deter us from being in the water every weekend and whenever an opportunity presents itself.

John’s interest in marine life was inspired by his biology teacher, Ted Bramblebee at Toowoomba Grammar School, Queensland Australia in the early 80’s. Having qualified to dive in 1981, John regularly made the trip from Toowoomba to Tweed Heads in New South Wales, Australia where he first learned to appreciate the underwater environment.

In 1999, John was given the opportunity to pursue a life-long goal to live in the tropical South Pacific, and has been resident in Vanuatu ever since.

John has dived throughout the World since qualifying, then in around 2013 met a group of Vanuatu divers known as the Havannah Bay Grey Seals and since that time John has basically dived every weekend.

It was during this time that John became interested in underwater photography. Starting with a simple Sony compact camera in this later evolved to a Sony RX100II set up in July 2014 and currently a Nikon D500 DSLR with all the associated bells and whistles.

In early 2018 we permanently relocated to Havannah Harbour in Vanuatu . At this stage Sandy had never dived but enjoyed snorkelling, then she decided to try and got the bug. 400 odd dives later Sandy is now a Dive Master and very confident diver and over time Sandy has developed her own passion for creating underwater videos.

Being right on the water has enabled us to dive our house reef hundreds of times, with every dive being an opportunity to discover and photograph new creatures. We have become the true underwater team!

Learning underwater photography has been a wonderful journey, one learned through trial and error, hundreds / thousands of hours in the water and learning from books, online courses and wonderful photography forums.

It has been a huge learning experience, lots of errors and mishaps along the way, lessons learned, skills developed and most importantly feeding a never ending PASSION and recognition for just how lucky we are to have such an opportunity. We just wish we started 40 years ago!

We would love to share our journey with you, from absolute novices to taking photos that enable us to share the exquisite beauty of the ocean critters often found close to shore and to showcase our home, Vanuatu to the World.