Parting photos

Leaving sucks.  Whether from Bimini, Calgary, Chetwynd or Phuket.  While I've lamented the bittersweetness of returning to where you started it still stinks saying what is likely "see you never" amidst tears covered by sunglasses (a trick I learned entirely too late) to truly great friends.  

Farewells wished with good intentions to stay in touch, I'm at stopover 1 on The Long Way Home in Davenport, Iowa where my younger sister goes to uni.  I was truly impressed with the St. Paddy's show Kelly's down the road from her flat put on.  Outdoors tents housed local bands playing covers, green beer flowed from the copious and well-placed stalls while the generations of green-clad party goers danced through it all.  

Not unlike Red Deer, Davenport is a city.  An offensive, loud, bright city filled with cars, SUVs, motorbikes and all manner of tards driving them.  I long for motorbike-filled cities with no traffic lights, golf carts driven on the left side of the road, a skiff, a chicken  or even Bimini's party bus.  

  No bullsharks for the Italian film crew, but a pod of pelicans was interested in our bait and the scraps from the cleaning table.  

Shit Pit prep

 Some Sharklab be(a)sties

 

A wee nurse caught gillnetting

Working her up

The skiffs

Chris swimming from our boat to the Twin Vee with bait

 This is not a hammerhead but still a sizeable nurse

Jean preparing hammerhead bait

 

Sunset at the Beach Club

Leaving Morning sunrise

Octoposses, painting and sunsets

Ocoposses are deployed nearly daily.  The exterior of the house is new colours.  Tower observations have taken on a new element of challenging.  SUR collection is great fun under water spouts.  Shark fishing continues with mixed results. 

 Octopus 1

 Day off on North

 Off Back Beach

 On the way to Shell Beach for sunset

 Hey, yacht with a 3 million dollar helipcopter, you're in the way!

 Jean, TJ and Mai-Britt on one of the towers

 Ravi with hairy SURs

Water spout over Bimini Bay

Nurse shark wrangling, suprise turtle, rainday everything

 The weather continues to be shite with today's winds nearly fitting into category 1 hurricane parameters.  Anticipating incoming volunteers on the 15th, the cool northern winds blew us inside and we cleaned, bleached and aired out the lab, house for their arrival. 

We've been catching nurse sharks for Laruan's project, tracking in the North Sound, sitting on towers observing for Jean's project and gillnetting.  The day-to-day pace has relaxed as weather appropriate tasks are prepared.  

 

Lab Manager Jim with one of eight nurse sharks we "wrangled" 

 Turtle found under a ledge

Boat shot

 The boys with our catch 

 "This is a record day for me," Jim exclaimed

 Depth stick = tin can telephone

 Raining again

Jean's exploration pen
 

Setting, or hauling a gillnet int the Duck Pond

Across the road from the lab

 

Watch out!

Shell Beach at sunset

Course's work

The Sharklab celebrated Easter Friday by tracking juvenile lemon sharks in the day and joining the invading hordes of American holiday makers on the north island for night one of Junkanoo and excessive dancing in the streets and dock-side pubs.

We needed a mildly wild night out after hosting a university elasmobranch course for five days. Kicked out of the lab for its duration, we were moved to an apartment down the road. We somewhat grudgingly took this minor inconvenience and made the absolute most of it. The volunteers often went out to help with their seatrips in whatever capacity we were needed - boat drivers, bait cutters and throwers, photographers. I helped out with baiting in 18 blacktips, and escorting the students down a mangrove-lined channel so they could hand feed juv lemons.





The second last night, I scored a dinner invitation that the others are still bitter over. Walking back to the apartment, a golf car pulled up and offered me a ride home - offering and accepting rides from complete strangers is normal and expected in Bimini. When I saw the driver and her three passengers had pink drinks in fish covered glasses, I knew it would be a crazy ride back. Stopping next door to where we were staying, the middle aged women invited me in for a dinner of steak, lobster, fresh wahoo, veggies and rum punch. The lobster or rum punch wasn't their cause of envy. It was the steak. Collectively, we haven't had steak in decades. I paid dearly for my dinner engagement the next morning.

Getting up hungover at 6:50 am to be at the lab at 7:10 am to set a vertical longline in the Gulf Stream on four foot rolling seas was the opposite of fun. The morning after a full moon has its perks though. Still stumbling and reeking of rum punch, I enjoyed these vistas.







Hauled up by hand, the 1800 feet of the vertical long line netted us three! tiger sharks.



The largest was 3.28 meters! They tied him alongside the boat so we could get in and snorkel with him.





I'm home in less than three weeks. Eeekk. It's going to be difficult to leave, but I am also eagerly anticipating my impending uni graduation and northern B.C. summer.

Motion of the ocean

The highlight of being evicted by American college freshmen on a springbreak shark course was my bed in our new lodgings that hung from the ceiling in a corner of the sitting room. Octagonally shaped, four industrial-strength chains suspend it as a paper mache bird with tasteful glitter accents looks on.



When not housing seven female biologists, the apartment is rented out to vacationing Americans and my bed is without a doubt a clumsy, oversized sex swing for the boozy, sun-burned holiday makers.

The volunteers' role for the course is one of support for the staff. We help out with the students' kick-ass sea trip as bait cutters and throwers, counter balance in the boats, hand holders, shark handelers, sous chefs, where ever we're needed.

Yesterday I helped out with blacktip baiting and lemon feeding. The latter I did little more than set an anchor and make rude jokes with the staff at the back while the students fed the lemons in a mangrove-lined channel.

I was pulled away from the calm of the channel and Jim, Jon and I started baiting for blacktips. While the steady high winds and equally large seas on the east side of North Bimini made this a difficult and queasy stomach inducing task we were quickly rewarded with 18 blacktips. One was even so kind to jump clear out of the water giving us a quick glimpse of its beautiful body.

I switched boats to help out with the blacktips. The Twin Vee is no Cadillac of the ocean, but she is significantly more comfortable than the 17' skiff I rode in on the way back. How I didn't spew is still a great mystery.

Bimini Sunrise

We spent the last three nights gill-netting for the local lemons. Mini-PIT lasts three nights and takes place roughly twice a year with the grand PIT occuring in June for 12 nights.

In short, this involves spending the entire night out on a 17-foot skiff in 20-25 mph winds for a 12-hour tidal cycle accompanied by two other people, a hand-held radio and the distant cries of equally bored crews about the bay to keep you moderately sane.

The goal is to catch as many juvenile lemons sharks as possible. Previous captures are recorded and new ones are given a PIT tag - these are the same tags that domestic dogs and cats have implanted in them.

After the gruelling wind and rain, we were given a glorious sunrise.

So far

The breakfast table sounds like a United Nations BBQ with a disproportionate number of English speakers. Eleven of the 14 of us currently at the lab are native English speakers with Swiss, Venezuelan and Quebecois volunteers making up the difference. The Venezuelan and Quebecois women converse comfortably in Spanish.

I have lived in shared housing throughout university and hosteled all over the world, but this is communal living at its extreme. We are literally in each other's bathing suits with up to four people sharing a single sex room, all 14 sharing two bathrooms and meal times resembling musical chairs with a violent twist as everyone clambers for an open seat at the table with too few chairs for the number of people in the mess hall. It's like summer camp with a purpose.

BBFS' Principal Investigator and doctoral student Kristine Stump is examining the effects of nursery habitat loss on juvenile lemon sharks around North and South Bimini Islands in the Bahamas.

A fine location, without question, but Stump's research is heavily tied to a foreign invader on North Bimini, Bimini Bay Resort. Scaled back since its inception, great tracts of mangrove-fringed habitat for the juvenile lemon sharks has still been bulldozed to make way for the resort's condos and estate homes.

All of Stump's research questions focus on changes the resort may have induced in areas such as abundance, first year mortality, prey assemblages, yearly growth, multi-year survivalship, habitat use and home range.

As her minions, the volunteers are responsible for various aspects of her field data collection. I’ve only had a limited sampling of what that might be, having just completed a week of classes and orientation.

Some of it was a refresher, like radio usage, GPS and map reading. The rest was completely new.

We learnt about long lining, a surveying method to gauge how the various shark populations in the area are doing; boat driving, which is extremely terrifying; knots, which included phrases like “the rabbit crosses the road” from Quebecois Valerie and “the tree hangs himself on the rabbit” from dyslexic Americans; and shark handling, which involved eight virgin shark handlers anxiously waiting for their turn with the juvenile lemon and nurse sharks.

Days off are once a week. So far I’ve mooched around the North Island, snuck into both resorts for swims and fresh water showers and popped into the cute, expensively stocked shops.

BBFS Project Talk

BBFS' Prinipal Investigator and doctoral student Kristine Stump is examining the effects of nursery habitat loss on juvenile lemon sharks around North and South Bimini Islands in the Bahamas.

Officially in a Marine Protected Area since 1999, this protection lacks clout. The boundaries have yet to be established and defined never mind enforced by a

Without question, a fine location, but Stump's research is heavily tied to a foreign invader on North Bimini, Bimini Bay Resort. Scaled back since its inception, great tracts of mangrove-fringed habitat for the juvenile lemon sharks has still been bulldozed to make way for the resort's condos and estate homes. All of Stump's research questions focus on changes the resort may have induced in areas such as abundance, first year mortality, prey assemblages, yearly growth, multi-year survivalship, habitat use and home range.

Stump is attempting to quantify these changes through PIT tags and telemetry. She is also using agent based modeling as a projection tool for shark survival.

Her work on nurseries is important because she has a unique opportunity for before and after comparisons from the impact of the resort. Her findings could also serve for the basis of protecting other threatened nursery areas both in Bimini and further afield. Concurrent research is also being conducted on comparative DNA analysis.