Attenborough crew’s boat sinks in Amazon
SIR David Attenborough’s film crew had a painful reminder of the dangers of the Amazon rainforest when their boat sank and a cameraman was pierced by 70 underwater spines.
The crew had been filming how fire ants survive floods by building a raft with their bodies for Sir David’s A Perfect Planet BBC series.
In what producer Huw Cordey dubbed “the shoot of a thousand stings”, two crew were on the boat when it capsized and sank on an Amazon tributary in Peru with the equipment strapped to the roof.
Assistant producer Toby Nowlan and cameraman John Brown managed to swim clear but faced losing a month’s worth of precious footage when 40 cases of filming equipment were lost or ruined. Luckily, one set of back-up drives survived and the amazing ants episode can be seen on BBC One tomorrow.
Huw said: “There was of course a certain irony to this incident.The crew had spent four weeks filming the unsinkable rafting ants, only to end up sinking themselves.”
Weeks later cameraman Alex Vale was left in agony after being peppered with palm spines as he waded neckdeep to get underwater shots of the astonishing ant raft.
Huw said: “Unfortunately, he didn’t see the spine-covered palm in the inky water and he walked straight into it.
“Despite the protection of his wetsuit he was peppered from nearly top to bottom – 30 in his chest, more than 10 each in his hands and wrists and more than a dozen in each leg.” Some of the spines were removed by the crew but others were stuck in Alex’s skin, putting him at risk of serious infection in the hot conditions.
He was flown home where a foreign bodies clinic in Bristol removed the embedded spines surgically.
A Perfect Planet: Weather can be seen on BBC One tomorrow at 8pm.