this week has flown by! i can't believe it's friday again. the week hasn't been all that eventful, to be honest. i realized i forgot to mention something kind of cool. so for those of you that have seen the documentary Sharkville, remember that it's all about ryan's quest to film sharks attacking a decoy at night. this is the only place that has ever been observed. so on our last overnight seal survey, we decided to move the boat, since our anchor had been dragging a little. a few minutes after midnight, i started to pull in the decoy, and got completely startled as a shark attacked the decoy! it wasn't a full breach, but definitely a predation attempt. so that's a big deal, i guess, considering they made a whole documentary about trying to see that. speaking of which, i gather the producers of deadliest catch and ice road truckers have been in touch with ryan about doing a shark lab series. i think it would be pretty boring, but as ryan said, if they can make a whole series about crab fishing, they could make one about shark research.

and... oh yeah. so yesterday we went out for a chumming trip. christine and i had both gone out the night before, although i was actually feeling decent, but she was a disaster. the sea was very rough, and we took the boat to grootbrak, which is one of our farthest sites. on top of that, the weather was awful-- cold and rainy. add to that the fact that cheetah, our bigger, more comfortable boat is out of the water for repairs at the moment, leaving us on lamnidae, which doesn't really have many places to sit and is a little unstable (like when one person walks to one side, someone else has to walk to the other side to balance it out). so... bad conditions. we stayed out chumming for a few hours, got a genetic sample of one of the sharks, which i hadn't seen before so that was cool. then we decided enough was enough, we were all cold and wet, so we headed in. about halfway back, ryan stopped and asked me to switch over the fuel tanks. i did, because we had an extra half-tank or so of gas (there are two outboard motors on lamnidae). so we went a little further, then he stopped again, and started looking at the fuel. i guess even though we went out with three tanks, none of them were full, and we were running low, since we had gone all the way to grootbrak. it was a photo finish: we kept switching fuel tanks, running one engine at a time, going really slowly (keep in mind that it is rough, cold, and pouring)... but we did make it back to the harbor eventually. so... an exciting day. i guess that's the stuff the tv producers would go for.

so... that's all i've got for today. i don't really have any new shark pictures, since i was taking pictures with the official SAMPLA camera yesterday (which was a challenge, in the rain). so... here's a picture of a couple of hyraxes. they live on the cliffs near our house.