So, you off to Fiji for a year or so, to work as a diver and underwater videographer/photographer….and your weight limit is 28KG. This the is story of what's involved in baggage weight loss. You as simple as you might think….

The biggest problem Barb and I have is always getting to your new destination for work. We usually have a fair amount of stuff to lug around. As well and all your clothes, personal effects, toiletries, medical stuff, books etc we also have to bring our dive gear which consists of regulators, BCDs, several wetsuits, fins, masks, lights, spare parts and accessories. And on top of that is our technology stuff. We each have a laptop (decent size as we need to edit video and photographs). Then you need storage, so that means hard drives. We currently have about about 3 TB (Terabytes) of data (video takes tons of space). And we have the video/cameras, so a camcorder, two little cameras and a DSLR. You need the accessories that go with them, lenses etc. And finally the underwater housings for the video/cameras – not small things.

When we worked in the Caribbean, things weren’t too bad. Airlines, because you were in the general area of the States, allow you to take two bags, 30KG each, so 60KG of luggage per person. However once you move out of this region, then the problems start. I hate airlines and their luggage rules.

Flying to Malaysia wasn’t too bad. We knew where we were going and we knew we where going to stay in our house, which was provided by our boss. We packed everything up to 30 KG each (our allowance), then sent the rest by DHL, as it was much cheaper to do this than pay the ridiculous excesses baggage charges of the airlines. We flew with Qatar and they were fantastic. The girl at the counter let us take another 15KG, without charging the extra UKP40 per kilo they could have charged. When we got to Malaysia, our extra DHL stuff had arrives, and some friends (thank you Matt and Vic) brought more stuff over with them when they visited us.

Fiji presents a more complicated challenge. It’s in the middle of nowhere, very expensive to send stuff to, and we are unlikely to get many visitors from home, as it’s a rather expensive yacht we are working on. So it’s all about preparation.

Technology has come on leaps and bounds in the last few years. Our laptops haven’t become smaller, as we both like a large screen to work and watch movies on. But the peripherals are another matter. When we travel we have one backpack that has nothing but 3.5” external hard drives, Lightscribe DVD burner, power adaptors and cables. It weighs nearly 20KG just by itself!! So we must miniaturize. Luckily Singapore, where we are at the moment, it the perfect place to do this.

The first things to go are the 3.5” external drives. These have served me well over the years. I have about five or six of them, from 120GB to 320GB in size and they store all my old video and photos. But they take up plenty of space and weight, especially as they need their own power transformers. easy to replace now, just buy a few 320GB to 500GB 2.5” drives, they are powered by USB, so no additional power adaptor needed and save around 10KG of weight.

Next is my Lightscribe burner, which again is bulky and heavy. Lightscribe is a system that allows you to burn pictures onto a DVD or CD without the need of a printer. You just need a special disk and away you go. It has been very useful for producing great looking DVDs. I just discovered that LG now makes a tiny Lightscribe burner that is powered by USB, so again saves a lot of space and weight. We actually bought this is Bangkok while we were there as it was cheaper than in Singapore.

Another weight loss option is with my video camcorder and it’s underwater housing, For the last three or four years I've used a wonderful tape based camera and a great underwater housing for it. The housing is fairly big, tape is easy to use, but the housing, as well as it’s own weight, also needs about 4 KG of lead weight handles to make it sink. I’ve wanted to move up to HD (high-definition) video for a while, so this is the perfect opportunity. HD camcorders are now really small, the use flash memory to record to (so no tapes needed) and their housing are smaller to, so need much less weight to sink them. The downside is that the format the record into needs a very powerful computer to edit smoothly. There are some solutions/workarounds to this problem that i won’t bored you with now (thanks Dad for the upgraded laptop ), so I've now gone ahead with this.

The final weight loss will come from clothes etc. As we are working on a live-a-board yacht, we really don’t need that much. We have a ‘company’ shirt to wear, so we really only need some shorts, a tee-shirt or two and we should be OK. As we’re going to Fiji via Barb’s folks in Melbourne, (thanks Bev and John) we can leave our excess stuff there.

As you can see, it’s not easy to travel with our jobs. There is a lot to think about, to upgrade and then to run around cites, as we are always looking for the cheapest and best deal. We are techno-freaks, and love our toys and gadgets, they add to our quality of life, as it’s hard to be away from family and friends for suck long long times. Thank goodness that storage gets physically smaller in dimensions while getting larger and larger in capacity..