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

All in a day's work

"What a bizarre last 24 hours," reads my journal.

In that timespan, I snake hunted, sang karaoke and danced around the top of the bar at a going away party, participated in manually clearing out the septic tank with the male volunteers dressed in outfits bordering on drag and assisted in impromptu pelican wing surgery with the assistance of a German vet we somehow rounded up.

Sending someone with a recently discovered fear of garter snakes out to track down a Bimini Boa was likely and thankfully the reason Team Commonwealth failed at their assigned task. Adding to my fear was the certainity that I was going to drown standing up in the forest. A torrential downpour passed though as we were searching. Having received advanced warning on the radio, we thought the palm trees would provide adequate coverage. They may look like nature's umbrellas, but in actuality, they are giant funnels that gladly pour the rain on the ill-prepared Canadians and Brits hiding underneath them.



Not inclined to public embarrassment, it's a great mystery how I ended up on the bar - the smooth Bahamian lagers might be responsible for most of that...



The majority of the partyers slightly to extremely hungover, we grabbed old shirts from the free clothes pile and went around the back of the lab. The male volunteers elected to dress in women's wear.



A massive hole had been hand dug across the road.



The lab managers proceeded to crack the top of our outdated septic tank. Words will never describe the stench, but it is forever etched in my nostrils.






Bucket by bucket, the contents of the septic were shoveled out and dumped into the prepared hole until only liquid remained. An industrial strength pump slurped up most of what remained and delivered it firehose style to the hole.



A few final bucket loads and filling in the now full hole concluded Shit Pit.

Following a bleach bath on the back beach, locals brought an injured pelican to our front porch. We got word there was a vet at the resort down the road. Interrupting her lunch, the briskly efficient German vet bandaged up the pelican's wing under very unsterile conditions with the lab's first aid supplies.



We made the large, prehistoric looking bird comfortable in a shark transport tub. Intentioned to be a healing tub, it unfortunately ended up being the pelican's grave.