TIA

There's no shit shy in Africa.

"How's your bowels?" is a common greeting as meds are swapped on the advice of the coincidentally on-board Aussie nurse and pharmacist.  When not popping Cipro or "stoppers" for the travel days, any lingering reservations of pooping in public washrooms has literally disappeared down the toilet for our Commonwealth-citizened truck bound for Johannesburg.

With public washrooms a generous term, I have yet to encounter Thea's Malian "trous" or Risa's poo-bombed cement pads in Ghana but have been blessed with my fair share of filthy squat toilets where your and, more often, other's waste could not be more confronting.

While beach strolling in Essaouira, Morocco, I happened on a two-child couple engaged in the most compelling birth control: the father suspending a defecating toddler while the mother collected it from the sand in a plastic baggie.

As Dan was throwing his bag into his airport taxi - after his nth visit to the hostel's clean, private toilets - to start on his journey back to Chetwynd, I was dispensing his second course of Cipro.  Fingers crossed he lands an aisle seat for his 23-hour journey...

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

Home and dry

Never a fan of big last nights, my last night in Bimini appropriately was an animated games night at the kitchen table while the sky cried torrentially. These meterological tears were a precursor to my own the next morning as I said goodbye to the Sharklab and the amazing team of staff and volunteers that it housed.

A function of living, working and playing together for three months, we were a tight-knit group that often sounded like a gathering of the United Nations at a comedy club.

When not sharing vulgar, side-splitting laughs about sex or poo, we discussed at length the food items we would give our left breast/nut for. Failing to find common ground there, conversation reverted back to sharks - and almost always to their claspers or cloacas. Those four topics exhausted, chatter turned to taking the piss out of someone either for their accent or where they called home.

Home and 700 meters of elevation removed from sea level and four plane rides away from Bimini, my mental state is beginning to settle down. Emotions thoroughly all over the spectrum from leaving Bimini, part of me was ready and glad to be heading back to Edmonton - even if only for a while.

Departure downs

It's nearly time for me to once again roll on. After being minorly fucked over on my departure flight, I'm leaving Bimini on Monday.

I'm ready to move on, which is likely the result of 6.5 years of a dragged-out university degree. My uni terms were compartmentalized into four month segments and I seem to have developed only a four-month attention span.

The Sharklab further built on carefully controlled intervals.

We checked the gillnets every 15 minutes, changed tracking duties every hour, looked to first, second and occasionally third lunch to break up the day when on the boat for nine hours.

In my three months here, I was constantly awed by the diversity of the sea here, yet continually shocked and amazed at how filthy shark biologists are. I thought my summers working in the forest industry had exposed me to every rude comment imaginable, but it is outrageous what leaves, or occasionally enters, mouths here.

Conversations are quickly reduced to innuendos about sex and poo with remarks about sharks and food thrown in for variety. These four topics bind all of us together into a tight coagulation of what sounds like a gathering of the United Nations at a comedy club.

Amidst all the filth and occasionally trying tasks of manually clearing out the septic tank with shovels and buckets, being defecated on by pelicans and working through the night fishing for juvenile sharks over an entire tidal cycle in 20 mile per hour winds and sporadic downpours, assisting a PhD candidate collect her field research has been extremely rewarding.

Expectations more than satisfied, I have also learned and done things I would have baulked at in January such as accept a dinner party invitation from rowdy women claiming to be pirates driving a golf cart and consuming pink drinks, snake hunt and nearly daily handle sharks.

Five days left until I am back on Alberta soil and the rotating and often revolving cast of volunteers and staff along with a plethora of elasmobranches will ensure a second Bahamian stamp in my passport.

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.