24 hour seal watch

Had a great night out on Cheetah. Given the number of questions: the night vision binoculars were not all that useful. I mean they worked well, but the seals just pop up for a second, and then dive again and you're not sure where they will be next. And the binoculars have a pretty narrow field of vision, so it's hard to find stuff with them. I think they would be more useful for tracking and stuff, but at least for my shift, we barely used them.

So I did the last shift with Ryan, which was nice for a number of reasons. First of all, I got to sleep for several hours: our group decided to do three two-hour shifts. (Ryan was late picking us up, so we only covered 1am-7am... sucks for the other group who had to wait for us to get there before they could leave.) So two people were on each shift, and we only had to do one shift each. I curled up in the "cabin" (cabinet, pretty much) with my ipod and fell asleep. I wore running shoes, two pairs of socks, leggings, jeans, a beater, a long sleeve shirt, two hoodies and a jacket, plus a scarf, a hat, and gloves. I was decently warm at first, but ended up half-covering myself with a sleeping bag, which helped. Once I was moving around watching seals, it wasn't bad.

So I slept until 5, and then got up to watch seals until seven. I was glad to be doing the watch with Ryan (obviously this is shark Ryan, not my Ryan) because I got to pick his brain a little bit about shark research, what is being done, how he gets his ideas, how much opportunity there is in the field, where their money comes from, et cetera. He can be pretty quiet, and I know he gets sick of talking about sharks, but he was really helpful. So we sat and listened for groups of seals, tracked their movement, and chatted. The other nice thing about the final watch is that the sun started coming up. Just as the sky was starting to lighten, James woke up and the three of us were talking about American politics (Ryan was on the O'Reilly Factor promoting Sharkville, and was telling me how now all these super-conservative republicans are asking him to be their friend on facebook). Once again, I was into the conversation and facing totally the wrong way, and a shark breached on our seal decoy about 10 meters behind the boat. We had left it out over night just in case, but weren't chumming or anything. So I heard a giant splash, but saw nothing. Again.

Luckily, six minutes later, it happened again, and for the first time ever, I saw a shark launch its entire body out of the water. It was awesome, a pretty small breach (the shark was mostly horizontal), and a pretty small (2m) shark, but still totally amazing, and right behind the boat. (In case you don't watch shark week as much as I do, breaches are where the shark-- or whale or whatever-- jumps completely out of the water. As far as I know, only white sharks breach, and maybe only in South Africa. I know it was first documented here, and relatively recently. It seems like an unnecessary waste of energy, because they could probably get the seals without launching their enormous bodies entirely out of the water. But they do, and it's unreal.)

By then it was 6:53, so we watched for seals for a few more minutes, then towed the decoy behind the boat for a lap of Seal Island to see if we could get another one. Just as Ryan began to turn the boat to head home, a larger shark did a huge vertical breach, tearing our decoy from the tether and leaving it behind. No one wanted to volunteer to reach in and pull the decoy out from the water, but eventually we got it up using the boat hook and then pulling it into the boat once it was out of the water. There were huge gashes in it, in addition to the perfect row of perforations from the previous breach. This shark really attacked the hell out of our decoy.

We headed in to shore, where two of the other interns met up with us, and we drove up the hill for a big, delicious breakfast where we recapped the events of the morning-- I definitely got the best shift, because the sharks like to feed at dawn. All in all, it was a very long, cold night, but my first shark breach (not to mention my omelet) made it totally worth it.