The next morning we woke up at 5:30 (I will be taking night showers while here because there is no point to get up early to shower when I will be playing with dead fish and ocean water all day). At six Moos and some other crew came up from the lodge so we could load up the buckey (an antiquated rusty truck) with the wetsuits, booties, chum (dead fish) and all other things needed for taking out the clients (tourists) that day.
They split us up into two shifts, the morning and the afternoon shift. I was on the afternoon shift (so was Alex and Josephine and one of the new guys, David) so I sat in the house and worked on my resumes until Julia called at around 10:30 to have us meet the boat at the harbor. We then helped unload the wetsuits, and the booties, and generally clean the boat, before heading back up to the volunteer house to rinse off and hang up the wetsuits. Then it was my turn to work on the boat.
I volunteered for data collection. So we loaded up the clients and all the equipment and set out. The water was realllllly calm and the boat ride out was quite pleasant. We got out there and I helped Josephine hand out wetsuits and booties to clients while Alex chopped up chum in a large bucket (think trash can sized). In the bucket goes mushed fish, anchovy oil, and tuna, yumm…) When that stuff gets on you there’s no getting it off. (I touched the fish head bucket while loading up the buckey in the morning and the smell was still on my hands after lunch and multiple washings.) Before we could even get the cage in the water there was a large shark swimming around the boat. There were other boats chumming in the area and the shark wanted to see what we were up to.
Then Grant (one of the skippers) showed me about the data collection. We took the water temperature, and current, the wind speed, air temperature, the water depth and visibility among other things. Then we began to record the sharks that came around the boat. We’d have to pick a distinctive characteristic about the shark that way we’d know if the same one came back multiple times (which they tend to do). We mark on the data sheet if they go for the bait, or get the bait, which direction they come in on, whether it was a horizontal or vertical approach.
We also draw in where the shark has parasites like copepods, or bite wounds, scars or memorable skin pigment. Some of the sharks in this area are tagged as well, and we write down if we see the bright orange tags in the shark. Also important is whether the shark is a male or a female and how big it is. (Most of the sharks we see here are adolescents so they tend to be between 2 and 3 meters long or 6 and 10 feet long.) We ended up seeing 11 different sharks with a few memorable ones. One shark had an old bite mark on his cheek. He hung around the boat for almost two hours and actually stole the bait three times. Another shark, a female, had rope burns around her tail; she was quite feisty and ended up chomping on the cage right in front of some guy (he ended up touching her because her nose was through the bars and all us volunteers were REALLY jealous!) The last shark of the day was also the biggest, being around 3 meters long, he went for the bait a couple of times before swimming past where Alex was chumming, eyeballing her and then biting the boat near the motor, then swinging around and biting the anchor rope. After that is was time to go so we pulled up the cage and then I tried to help with the anchor but ended up missing the line with the boathook (whoops). We were able to grab it a few minutes later so no harm done.
We went back home, where we all cleaned the wetsuits (dunking them in this big bucket full of water and neoprene cleaner) and then had dinner. Emma made roast vegetables and chicken which was delicious. We all hung around the kitchen and chatted for a while. Whoops forgot to introduce Mikey. He got here early in the morning and went out on the first trip. He’s from London and after a month here, is going to go and work in Australia for a couple months. Anyway most people made an early night of it by heading to bed around 8pm. Though Mikey and I were up till the late hour of 10:15 on our computers. Haha it seems so early but we do get up at 5:30 in the morning…
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