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JUNE 12TH 2005
Hey everyone, I hope you all got my last email, I heard it may not have made it through, anyways, we’re right in the middle of PIT and it’s very exciting. The first day we did our shark dive which I would have to say is the coolest thing I’ve ever done in my life. We all held onto a rope snorkelling in a place called the ‘ arena’ meanwhile Grant would throw in chunks of bait. 15 reef and sharpnose sharks were swimming up and grabbing the bait only a few feet from our faces, some were within touching distance. The bait , which I had to cut the morning of, was just about the nastiest thing I’ve done yet. Blood everywhere, and to think, this is the same guy who didn’t want to take hooks out of a fishes mouth growing up, that shouldn’t be a problem after hacking apart several fish with a hammer, axe and my bare hands! Anyways, I’ve had the chance to meet Dr. Gruber and this guy is just amazingly cool. He reminds me a bit of my dad in a few ways. We started PIT the next day. I was on the away crew which meant I got to go out the first night and man the nets/ tagging boat. The first night we caught 77 sharks!!! This was some sort of record for the N. sound. We are on our 4th night so far and we are well over a 100 (110 as of now , I think) Two sharks died that night due to stress and another the next afternoon, but none since. The National Geographic guys came up at the same time as Dr. Gruber and were on my boat (tagging boat) for a few hours the first night taking pictures. If I’m lucky you might see my foot or elbow in the story The story is supposed to be called, Sharks of the Bahamas and he said it will likely be out in 6 months or so! The first shark of the first night, Charlotte who was on my boat was bitten by a lemon on the hand as she was letting it go in the pen. Just a small scratch really, but a bruised ego as we all got a good laugh out of it. However later on in the evening she was snorkelling the pen (with at this point perhaps 50 juveniles in it) and she was bitten on the leg by a annoyed shark. It left a mark that looks as though Anjolina Jolie left a huge kiss on her calf. It bled quite a bit and because of that she was not allowed to come out the next night (risk of bacterial infection which is prominent in the mouths of all sharks.) I did the first two nights on the tagging boat which takes the sharks from the nets, writes data about them, size, sex, umbilical scars, we insert a pit tag into them (Passive Integrated Transponder), which is sort of like a cash checkout bar code with info when we swipe the PIT tag reader past their dorsal. We then let them go in the large pen until it is time for the North sound to be finished with (otherwise we’ll end up catching them again). The other crews man 3 nets and walk/boat check them every 15 minutes for captured sharks which they send over to us on the tagging boat. The past two days I’ve been on the home team which entails fixing gill nets all day, that sucks. We also caught the very edge of hurricane Arlene which past west of us, so it has been miserably wet the past couple of days. Today it was raining so hard that it actually hurt me :/ Anyways, after we’re done with the north sound, we’ll take a few days off, do some long lining and catch big sharks, perhaps do another shark dive as well as dive the Sapona (a WWI cargo ship grounded in 1926), then we will do a similar PIT program off Sharkland (south of north bimini), which has apparently more sharks than the n sound, and then we’ll finish off with another shark dive and our end of PIT party! I am absolutely loving it here, we got a whole load of new volunteers in for PIT so I’m no longer the ‘rookie’. Anyways, I hope all is well at home and I can’t wait to hear/see you all. I will send some pictures in another email just in case this one doesn’t work. Bye for now
Alec
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"A style that's impossible to define. Prog? Hardly. Tech house? Not boring enough. It's like trippy twisted acid house but deep and funky. See, I told you - impossible."
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