Tiger sharks and guano

Trip Start Feb 14, 2010

Trip End Aug 01, 2010

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BBFS

Flag of Bahamas South Bimini Island, Bimini, Bahamas
Monday, April 5, 2010

Been a good week or two since last I wrote. A visiting course of students from Miami passed through for a week of shark diving and long-lining, and now everything is pretty much back to normal.. if you can call this normal. The highlight of the course had to be the vertical long-line though, which we did over in deep water in the Gulf stream. We hooked two tiger sharks, the largest 3.28 metres long, and got to swim in the water with it and get our pictures taken once it was tightly secured to the boat for a work up. We'd all been holding out for this, me especially, as this is the first tiger shark I’ve seen and it was up there on my geeky species-to-see list: I am ticking them off slowly one by one. For some reason I’m convinced this is not as sad as train-spotting but sometimes I’m not so sure. You should have seen everyone’s faces when they said we could get in the water with it.. 20 seconds later -I kid you not- everyone was kitted up on the bow of the boat looking like a bunch of dorks in fins and masks waiting for the final ok to jump in.

Other highlights (though not necessarily appreciated at the time) include being forced on to a stage infront of a couple of hundred Bahamians in a dance-off against other guys in the lab. Each of us was paired up with our very own Bahamian behemoth of a woman, all of which initially ran like deer in a forest fire when the compare asked for volunteers to dance with the visiting 'whities’; apparently they then asked for payment once the travesty was complete. Anyways, don’t ask me how I ended up in this position, I’m still not sure.. especially since I was stone cold sober at the time, and in the worst mood ever, ready to head back home for an early night. Hats off to Andrew though (Captain America), who saved the moment by taking the bull by the horns (quite literally) and led the contest with the most enthusiastic set of grinds and rolls I have seen outside of MTV base. Who’d have thought these women could even get their legs that high?

Anyways, we are now famous on the island and have already been spotted and identified as ‘those dancers from last night’.. so I guess we can’t complain. It was all part of ‘Junkanoo’, the Bahamian carnival named after a slave trader and master known as ‘John Canoe’. The festival was buzzing, and the bands sounded incredible; such a great vibe, with the whole street dancing and shaking to the deep vibrations of the base drum.. pretty much like an obese Lanzarote Carnival without the Meringue. There are some photos of the night on facebook, along with brief video footage of one of the bands in full swing. What else to tell you? I speared, cooked and ate my first fish recently: a delicious Hogfish baked in lemon juice and served with rice (also documented photographically in all its stages from free swimming fish to plate-served filet). I also went for a couple of dives and got caught up in a swirling school of horse-eyed jacks that were attracted to my bubbles (truly ‘awesome’), and today I spent the afternoon sat out on a tower in the baking sun for four hours looking for sharks in the surrounding waters. I’ve also seen my fair share of excrement this afternoon, as I had to scrape several inches of guano off the tower before it was safe to sit on, and one of the lab dogs has just done a big steaming turd by me as I write. A beautiful counterpoint to the melancholy beauty of the rest of the day I feel.