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.
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