If Karma were an animal it would be a Hammerhead, or six.

Look at that smile

I'm not very religious and I doubt I ever will be, however, I do believe in karma and yesterday was the perfect example.

After the three day freeze-fest that was Mini Pit, it was time once again for the monthly shark dive and, without trying to sound like a douche, we wanted something a little more badass than the Caribbean Reef sharks of the normal shark dive.  So, like last month, we went baiting for hammerheads.  This time, for lack of a better expression, shit got crazy.

We arrived at the spot known as the grate (same spot as last time), set anchor, and began scraping the bait.  Sean managed to spear a large barracuda that swam by and had to swim after it so it didn't get away with his spear, with Andrew putting a second spear through it to slow it down.  Meanwhile, I managed to spear a lobster hiding under the grate (which I just made for dinner along with some fried conch) and patrolled around the boat looking for more fish to spear.  

The whole baiting aspect is a pretty strange thing to watch.  Fish (mostly barracuda and jacks) recently caught fishing or spearing are attached to ropes off the back of the boat and someone uses a knife to scrape apart the carcass, sending the shards and chum into the current and off into the blue horizon. To me, the whole thing resembles a bizarre offering; we essentially sacrifice lesser fish to be rewarded with the presence of these ocean gods.  Like last time, it took well over an hour before we got a shark to show up.  He was smaller (about 9 feet) than the one last month, but much less timid and it became apparent pretty quick that he was going to stick around for awhile.  Then suddenly, after about fifteen minutes, a second one showed up and before I really knew what was going on there were three of them circling around and going after the bait.  Once emily gave us the OK, I began diving down and resting on the sand to get closer to them and could barely contain myself.  Like I said last time, swimming with large sharks, especially ones as graceful and elusive as hammerheads, is a drug and I almost OD'd yesterday.  While the whole thing was incredible, the highlight for me was when I hovered just above the sand and had one swim directly at me before slowly and casually turning just enough to pass within a few feet of me.

  Furthermore, needless to say, I about shit myself when I looked out at one point and could see five hammerheads.  Sean, the lab director, has done this many times and was clearly not afraid to "play" with the sharks, hand feeding one a large piece of barracuda and taking a ride on another one's tail fin.  He's the one in this picture on the right.

All in all, we swam with the hammerheads for about two hours.  We estimated that we saw six or seven individual hammerheads and, at one point, had five at the same time.

Had one of those sharks decided to go crazy and carry me off in his jaws, I probably would've had a smile on my face bigger than his...

Mini PIT: Nights 2 & 3...Rubbermaid my day

There are certain experiences in life everyone is glad they've had but wouldn't really want to do again; puberty, dentist appointments, and physicals (cough, cough) are notable examples.  While this wasn't quite the case with nights two and three of mini PIT, it was pretty close.  If night one seemed long, it was nothing compared to the two nights that followed, where a vast majority of time was spent as a human hermit crab nestled under Rubbermaid plastic tubs in order to avoid the wind and sporadic rain.  That being said, forget about Gore-Tex because Rubbermaid is the way to go.  Rarely has such a retarded piece of neglected, Wal-Mart supplied crap ever been more valued.  

Night two was definitely the hardest.  With the winds well over 20 mph it was too difficulty to safely drive the boats along the net, so, as a result, we had to walk check the net the entire night.  This meant a nice, leisurely stroll through waist deep  cold water every 15 minutes in an area where sub-adult lemon sharks were known to occasionally venture...great.  To make things a little easier, we decided to each do two checks in a row so that we would then each have over an hour to stay dry and "warm" on the boat before it was our turn to check the nets again.  

Nights two and three both had their fair share of ridiculous radio chatter and we all went a little bit crazy from cold and sleep deprivation.  The final night, Kristine, Marc, and I spent about two hours writing a song called "Lesbian Check" about how great it was to not find boners (bonefish) tangled in the net during a check...

The hardest part about the final two nights was the utter lack of sharks.  While my net caught seven sharks the first night, we only caught one shark each of the following nights.  However, as bad as the weather was and as miserable as we felt at certain points, it was still a great experience and I had a great time.  

The final night provided a little stellar reprieve as I saw the biggest shooting star i've ever seen (literally the thing went across the entire sky and actually had me scared it was going to slam into the earth Armageddon style) and the sunrise was pretty great.  

Mini PIT: Night 1

It's been a long time coming but Mini PIT finally started today.  After waking up at 8 am we worked a half day and then all rested after lunch for a few hours.  At 5 pm, we all woke up and had a not-at-all random snack of lasagna, ham and cheese sandwiches, and rice crispy treats before packing up the boats and heading to the North Sound.

In a nutshell, Mini PIT is three long and glorious nights of gillnetting to catch juvenile lemon sharks in order to get an idea of the population just prior to when the pregnant adult females return and give birth.  There are three gillnets set at different locations around the North Sound, with each net being monitored by a boat team of three people.  A fourth tagging boat stays at the main pen and works up the sharks that are caught and delivered by the gillnet crews.  This nocturnal shark hunt lasts for uhmm, hmm, oh right, TWELVE hours!  Needless to say, a midnight dinner is delivered and by around 2 am all radio chatter has devolved into a mindless and usually X-rated jumble.

Night one is nearly always the most active and tonight we caught 19 sharks, with my net catching seven of them.  Everyone put two dollars into a pot for whoever could guess the correct number of sharks without going over.  Nineteen was the winning number.  I guessed twenty.  Of course.

Its now 10 am and I'm about to pass out till 5:30 when we wake up and do it all again.  A bed hasn't felt this good in a long time, even if it is a tiny, decade old, shit pad that smells like farts and is elegantly covered in prison sheets.

C'est la vie, mais le Pelican est mort

I'll begin with the bad, albeit expected, news; the pelican died.  Considering how badly broken it's wing was, I think we did everything we could for it by resetting the wing, feeding it, and having a vacationing German vet examine it.  In retrospect, I think the lattermost move was a mistake, either that or we mistranslated and "wrap the pelican in towels and keep it closed in a small box in the back shed for 24 hours" wasn't what the vet actually had in mind.  Oh well, in any event this seems to add credibility to my earlier post about the dangers of being a pelican.

In other news, a French film crew came to the lab today to film a promotional video that the Bahamian tourism department hopes to use to attract more of those beret wearing wine & cheese lovers from across the pond.  While two teams of volunteers went out tracking for the day, Marc and I were assigned to helping out with the filming out back.  The first thing I noticed when I went out back was that their camera equipment was probably worth more than the GDP of most African nations (Jim estimated their topside camera was worth close to $80,000 and the underwater camera's resolution was over 8x HD quality).  I haven't really taken any time to explain the incredible micromanager and character that is 73 year-old "Doc" Gruber, but lets just say that, along with being an esteemed shark biologist, he considers himself a professional director, producer, and cameraman, and watching three confused french filmmakers trying to cope with him was pretty entertaining.
The crew filmed several scenes, all staged, of driving the boats, catching, tagging, and releasing juvenile lemon sharks.  Then we set a large net around a section of mangroves and allowed two lemon sharks to swim around so they could get some "natural" action shots.  The crew were nice guys and had stories of filming underwater spectacles that I would gladly sacrifice a small child to witness.

Oh yea, wednesday night is once again karaoke night at the bar and the crew is coming to film us and they've been told i'll sing........shit.  Whiskey.

SHIT PIT!

What dreams are made of

Ever wonder what a 5 month floater looks like?  Well, if you're a lucky volunteer here at the Bimini Biological Field Station, you get to find out twice a year.  Located on a small island and being mostly self-sustaining, the shark lab's septic system thus consists of a 5x5 underground concrete pit which, about every five months, is emptied.  The half-day spectacle that ensued, complete with the Top Gun soundtrack, cross dressing, and an almost entire bottle of bleach, is aptly dubbed "Shit Pit" and, I can promise, did not disappoint. 

Needless to say, I had the last choice of charity clothes to wear

The septic pit is located just behind the lab under a concrete lid and a foot of sand.  Once the concrete lid was removed and the dinner table-sized floater that closely resembled corny meatloaf was revealed, the fun really started.  Using buckets, we manually hauled the loads over to the massive pit dug the previous day and emptied the contents, careful to avoid potentially fatal splashes.  After the fecal raft was removed, an industrial water pump with a fifty-foot hose was used to remove the liquid leftovers as we all prayed that a rogue tampon wouldn't clog the intake and, literally, make our day even shittier.  Luckily everything went smoothly (pun intended) and, after a few final buckets at the bottom, we filled the pit in and recovered the now empty septic tank.

After a lunch that contained neither corn nor anything brown, we were given the rest of the day off.  However, before we could even get up from the table, two locals came by and dropped off a pelican they had found with a completely broken wing.  Despite being a lab dedicated to working with sharks and without anyone trained as a vet, locals tend to bring us any injured animals they find, including dead ones that, for some reason, they think we'll enjoy.  As a result, after locating a visiting german vet staying on the island, the next hour was spent bandaging and caring for the battered pelican, which is currently sitting in a small box in one of our sheds "healing"; apparently that's how they do it in Germany.

Despite wanting to save the pelican, I kept thinking of that eventful day years ago when Matt, Adam and I were told to humanely put down a badly injured seagull at the suggestion of animal control.  On that occasion, however, and without a gun, "humanely put down" turned unfortunately into "decapitate with a machete on the neighbors lawn in front of two little girls".  In our defense, we didn't know how else to kill it and had no idea the girls were there until it was too late.  Plus, as Adam announced, it was attacking...

Snake Lab

With the weather continuing to be problematic, the daily routine here at the lab has been altered quite a bit and the recent highlight was yesterday's "snake hunt".  Bimini is home to the endangered endemic snake specie known as the Bimini Boa.  While at first glance this snake appears to have rather plain black and silver scales, upon further inspection these same scales radiate a rainbow spectrum when properly lighted by the sun.

For as long as the Sharklab has been operating, keeping tabs on the Bimini Boa population has been a side priority.  With winds strong enough to prevent our field teams from going out on the boats, we instead went searching the woods of South Bimini for this elusive snake.  With three teams spread across the island, we were able to find three boas; two large females and one younger female.  My team, which searched the area around Bimini's "Fountain of Youth", consisted of Marc, Andrew, and me. After thouroughly searching the surrounding woods, we found a large female nestled inside a small stone wall.  After reaching my hand in and getting a hold of the snake's lower half, I pulled the snake out carefully as Andrew removed the necessary wall segments.  Needless to say, the snake wasn't exactly happy and found my hand a convenient place to shit and musk all over ("musking" is essentially the snake equivalent of being skunked; they shit out a liquid stench that  can best be described as rotten bodily mayonnaise.  

Back at the lab, each snake was carefully worked up, which consisted of two length measurements (head to cloaca, and cloaca to the end of the tail) and PIT tagging.  As with lemon sharks, the Bimini Boa's that we catch are given PIT tags so they can identified and analyzed to determine their growth and range.  During the work ups, I was assigned the glamorous "shit duty", and was responsible for controlling the final third of the snake while catching the glorious shit and musk they all-too-gladly spewed when scared.

Continuing on the topic of cleaning shit, the infamous "Shit Pit" has been confirmed for tomorrow...this should be interesting.

An attempted summary of a couple slow days

It's been almost a week since my last post so, even though it's late and I'll potentially pass out while I type this, I wanted to give anyone still listening to me a brief update.  The past few days have been on the slower side due to high winds which have prevented us from going out into the field too much.  When this happens our daily work takes an unfortunate turn toward the boring and mindless, with tasks such as repairing gillnets for hours, checking and fixing longlines, and data entry...exhilarating.  Sometimes, as was the case two days ago when we hauled massive cinderblocks out of the lagoon and dumped them in the channel to get them out of harms way, certain jobs can posses a strangely satisfying quality.  However, for the most part, high winds mean high levels of labor intensive and shark free fun for everyone.  With winds in excess of 25 knots (the speed), tomorrow figures to be one such day and has me feeling grateful that I will be on duty and thus able to avoid the inevitable gillnet repair requiring what always seems like 25,000 knots (the kind you tie).

On a completely unrelated note, we have a lot of free time here at the end of the day and between multi-lingual pictionary games, bonfires, rock band nights, and watching movies, i've been doing a decent amount of reading.  Currently, mom you'll be happy to know, I'm reading and really enjoying a book called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon.  The book takes place in New York City in the late 1930's and early 40's during the golden age of comic book.  The plot revolves around two cousins, Sammy Clay and Joe Kavalier, who create several widely popular comic book heroes and explore WWII era Americana with the monetary and social proceeds or their work.  While it may sound a little lame, the book won the Pulitzer prize and is extremely engaging and well written.  Plus, if you have or are planning on taking the GRE, SAT, or any other relatively useless standardized test with a verbal section, Michael Chabon employs a vocabulary which is guaranteed to both educate and make you feel retarded.

Shit pit is looming in the next few days...bet you're curious what I mean by that.