ABOUT US
UNIQUE OCEAN EXPEDITIONS
In 2020, Richard Barnden established Unique Ocean Expeditions, leveraging over twenty years of underwater experience and extensive knowledge of Palau and the Pacific region. His focus was on creating exclusive dive expeditions to world class dive destinations through the year. Designed exclusively around moon phases with the intention of capturing unique behaviour and imagery.
From the beginning, Richard aimed to offer a more educational diving experience than the typical dive vacation. He recognized a growing demand for divers seeking unique, natural, and educational experiences. This insight was the foundation of his offerings, which have now expanded to include a variety of world-class itineraries and destinations.
Unique Ocean Expeditions collaborates with renowned operators and local dive guides with in-depth regional expertise. This partnership, combined with their high level of service and expertise, ensures an unforgettable and hassle-free diving experience.
UNIQUE DIVE EXPEDITIONS
After years of filming and guiding around Palau’s dive sites, Richard started to notice pattern’s emerging in this log books and stock photography/videography catalog’s. Fish kept appearing in larger than normal school’s at certain dive sites around certain moon cycles and seasons.
These he would later learn are spawning aggregations. One book which became the bible of spawning information to him was 'Words of The Lagoon' by Dr Johannes, a pioneering scientist in the late 70's. Dr Johannes came to Palau and worked with local fishermen to understand spawning aggregations, something that would take a lifetime to learn without local knowledge.
With that combined knowledge, this would lead on to the pioneering work establishing Palau's Bull's. A closing period of fishing during spawning times, thus protecting these vulnerable events from the every increasing pressure of overfishing. Most of these are still in force today.
Understanding this early work that both fishermen and scientist discovered led to the beginning of products such as UNIQUE DIVE EXPEDITIONS. These products target specific aggregations at certain seasons/months throughout the year for recreational scuba divers to witness some of mother natures hidden secrets - Spawning diving during the day and blackwater diving at night.
EXPEDITION LEADERS
PHOTOGRAPHERS
RICHARD BARNDEN
FOUNDER
BIOGRAPHY
Richard Barnden was born in the UK and recently moved to California. He spent his early twenties fascinated by the South Pacific, mainly Palau and its waters. Spending the next 15 years guiding scuba divers around its reefs before turning his real passion in unique underwater photography into his profession.
Richard has spent more than ten years researching spawning aggregations and their predictabilities, trying to understand each one of their timings and formulas. In 2020 Richard founded Unique Ocean Expeditions, a pioneering educational diving product targeting spawning events around the planet and based out of California. These spawning events are tailored around lunar phases to observe fish reproduction mainly during the early hours of the morning.
By night Richard spends most of his time photographing blackwater night diving either by drifting over deep water in the middle of the Pacific Ocean or making an underwater bonfire with dive lights somewhere shallow to photograph plankton and its environments.
In 2018 Richard put a team of rebreather divers together to photograph the grouper reproduction in French Polynesia, which later went on to win him underwater photographer of the year.
