Chumming and Wrangling

This video is from the chum trip yesterday morning. It was amazing. We had six sharks show up around the boat and they were all interested in playing (going for the bait, in other words). They were all being really sneaky about it, too. Nick was the first one on the bait rope and he lost two bait heads to sharks coming up unexpectedly. I was the next to try and, as well, lost two bait heads to sharks--one when one of the smaller sharks did a sort of half breach on the buoy on the bait line, the other when the massive shark just came straight for the bait. After that, Dan, the field specialist skippering that day, took over the bait line. He, too, lost bait heads. At one point, the massive shark we'd been dealing with all morning came straight up at the bait. Dan froze, just watching the huge shark and, voila, there goes the bait. 

Poor quality because it's a photo of a screen shot from a video Nick took.
That shark is probably 3-4 feet away from Dan in the photo.

She must have been a good 4.2 meters long and seemed even bigger because we were on Lamnidae. Usually, we chum off Cheetah but Cheetah's out of the water for repairs for the next couple weeks. Not that Cheetah would have made the shark seem much smaller but  Lamnidae's less then twice the length of this shark. 

This morning was dubbed Shark Wranglers: Intern Edition (after a documentary series Ryan did for NatGeo). I was at the aquarium and the duty for this morning was to get all the benthic sharks out of their tank so they could be weighed, measured, and tagged. They aren't being released just yet but the tags will give us a way to identify the individuals in the tanks, especially during feeding (to ensure any shark doesn't get overfed). We also took the opportunity to remove all the rocks in the tank, clean out the accumulation of sand from the bottom, and rebuild the rock caves the sharks hide in. Let me just say, from experience, that it is tough to hold onto a thrashing three foot long pajama jacket!

Nick, Tammy, and Catherine working to siphon sand out of
the tank after the sharks and rocks have been removed.