Warning: a seal gets DESTROYED.

Well today’s chum trip was a lot more eventful than yesterday’s! We left the house about 6:30, leaving the dock before 7 (still totally dark, by the way) and headed over to seal island. We anchored and were watching a cloudy sunrise when several people saw a shark breach (jump totally out of the water) in the distance. Which is a totally amazing thing to see, even on tv. Umm... I was looking at Justin, who was talking about women’s soccer. Yep.

Anyway, there was lots of obvious thrashing going on after the breach, which was probably a little more than a quarter-mile away from us. So what was super-cool about this is that we were witnessing natural predation, as in the shark was eating as they do in the wild, as opposed to attacking something we set out for it. People were really, really excited about it, I guess we don’t see natural predation all that often. So we found it by following all the birds that were checking out the seal carcass. And what a carcass. It was basically the second quarter of a seal—the head was bitten clean off, and then the back half was missing, with intestines and stuff trailing. I got some great pictures, but my job today was to take pictures of the dorsals, so my pictures are all on the SAMPLA camera. I will try to get hold of them. So anyway, we hung out by the carcass for a while, and the shark came back. It was huge for Mossel Bay; Ryan estimated about 3.8 meters, which is about 12.5 feet. So a big shark. It attacked the carcass a little more, then left. A smaller shark (more like 2.5 m) came around and messed with the carcass as well (we call that secondary predation), and eventually took it underwater. So that was awesome, and then we returned to seal island.

We watched the seals swim to the island, holding our breath for another attack. (I realize this sounds cruel. But it’s nature, and it’s what we’re here to do.) But nothing happened, so we reanchored by seal island, and set out our chum bags, decoy, and bait rope. Like I said, I was on photography duty. We had a few passes from the sharks, but nothing really to speak of. We all sort of chilled out, and started chatting and watching the whales that had come to hang out around the boat. They were there for a while, just flipping their tails and puffing clouds of steam. I did get a number of pictures, nothing spectacular. As we were all watching the whales, a shark zoomed past and stole the bait off our rope. We re-baited, and were more vigilant for another hour or so. We decided nothing else would happen, so Ryan said to give it another minute and a half, then we would pack up and go home. Right as he turned around, the same shark came and sniped the bait again. We waited a bit longer, and then headed home.

As I was driving the boat back in, we also saw a pod of dolphins, rounding out the day with seals, sharks, whales and dophins. Not bad. It’s not always exciting work (four sharks in five hours), but we have a good time chatting on the boat, it’s always nice to be out at sea, and the whales were seriously around all day. On the radio today—okay well first they were talking about which Olympic sport would be worst to do naked. I picked wrestling, although Ryan had a great point with synchronized swimming. So anyway, my point was that later, they were having people call in and talk about their dream jobs. The interns all looked at each other and were like, wow, we’re doing it. So that's pretty cool. Now I just have to find a way to get paid for it.