After 5 straight days of glorious sunrises, sunburned afternoons, and 7-layers-of-clothing-nights, we finally broke the white shark tracking record! The new world record for continuous manual tracking of a white shark has now been set at 106 straight hours, four hours more than the previous record set by Ryan Johnson five or six years ago. Yes, we were all delirious at the end of it, and yes, we were starving for a properly cooked meal that didn't come in a chip bag or some other form of portable calories.......but it was all worth it, every second of those 106 hours. In the course of those 5 days, I saw humpback dolphins, common dolphins, cape gannets diving for fish, seals playing around our boat, and white sharks attacking the bait ropes at the cage-diving boat. It was so spectacular to follow our tagged shark around seal island at night, waiting for a lone seal to venture off the rocks to, presumably, become her next meal. Equally amazing, was to see how close our shark, Pinocchio, ventured to the area's beaches. Sunbathers and sand-castle builders sat on the beaches, completely unaware of the real reason our boat was cruising up and down the coastline. Residents of Mossel Bay come in close contact with their famous white sharks every day, and almost none of them realize it.......equally important, they all walk away completely untouched by these so-called "man-eaters." Maybe it's time for a name change, but in the meantime, we'll let our tracking record rest until we try to set an even longer one in the coming weeks.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Breaking Records.
After 5 straight days of glorious sunrises, sunburned afternoons, and 7-layers-of-clothing-nights, we finally broke the white shark tracking record! The new world record for continuous manual tracking of a white shark has now been set at 106 straight hours, four hours more than the previous record set by Ryan Johnson five or six years ago. Yes, we were all delirious at the end of it, and yes, we were starving for a properly cooked meal that didn't come in a chip bag or some other form of portable calories.......but it was all worth it, every second of those 106 hours. In the course of those 5 days, I saw humpback dolphins, common dolphins, cape gannets diving for fish, seals playing around our boat, and white sharks attacking the bait ropes at the cage-diving boat. It was so spectacular to follow our tagged shark around seal island at night, waiting for a lone seal to venture off the rocks to, presumably, become her next meal. Equally amazing, was to see how close our shark, Pinocchio, ventured to the area's beaches. Sunbathers and sand-castle builders sat on the beaches, completely unaware of the real reason our boat was cruising up and down the coastline. Residents of Mossel Bay come in close contact with their famous white sharks every day, and almost none of them realize it.......equally important, they all walk away completely untouched by these so-called "man-eaters." Maybe it's time for a name change, but in the meantime, we'll let our tracking record rest until we try to set an even longer one in the coming weeks.
