African black-footed penguins at the center we visited
The ocean here is so powerful!
I saw wild sacred ibis! How cool is that?!
I love the ocean
Well, it’s a
little before eight in the morning here at the great white shark project
volunteer house. I started to type this blog post up last night, but didn’t get
around to finishing it, so this post will mainly be talking about yesterday’s
crazy festivities. Yesterday was such a fun day! It started with me and the
other new volunteers meeting Karla, the volunteer coordinator of the shark
project, and getting our official introduction to the program. We met with her
at about 11 in the morning, and the whole thing took only a little over an
hour. Karla explained the majority of the project to us, from working with the
tourists to data collection to boat handling. She also said that, if the
weather stays the way it’s expected to, then tomorrow (now today) we’ll be
going out to sea for the first time! Since it’ll be the new volunteers’ first
time out on the boat, we’ll basically just be clients this time, so we can get
the hang of it before we start working with the tourists and collecting data
and other typical volunteer jobs. Karla also told us that, to get everybody out
of the house for a while that afternoon, all the volunteers were going to visit
an African penguin and seabird conservation center nearby. So, when the
volunteer introduction was over, we returned to the volunteer house and hung
out there until two, when Karla picked everybody up in the volunteer bus. It
was a total of Karla, both Alina’s (yes, there are two volunteers named Alina),
Aurelie, Ryan, me, and Maarten, who’s another staff member with this project.
He’s one of the leaders of the volunteers, and he’s around all the time. He was
over here at the house hanging out with me and the other volunteers until
pretty late last night. He’s the only person here that, to me, doesn’t sound
like he has an accent. He was born in Belgium but grew up in Canada. Since I’m
the only one with this project that’s from the US, talking to him makes me feel
a little closer to home.
Anyway, the
penguin conservation center was really fun to see. They had a pair of African
black-footed penguins that we got to see pretty close up, and we also got a
special tour of the lab and behind the scenes areas of the center. The team at
the center knew that a group of volunteers from the great white shark project
was coming, so they arranged an extra tour that most visitors obviously weren’t
provided with.
When we
returned to the volunteer house after the tour of the penguin center, the two
other new volunteers, Ryan and Aurelie, and I decided to take the five-minute
walk down from the house to the harbor, to check out the ocean that we’ll be
going in soon. Long story short, the harbor is absolutely beautiful! We
explored the area for almost an hour, looking at the cool shells we came across
on the beach, climbing over the precarious rocks around the water, and watching
the crazy waves that we’ll hopefully be riding in the shark team boat very
soon! It was definitely a very beautiful shoreline, with a lot of really cool
shells scattered all around, and some very intense waves crashing over the
rocks. The ocean definitely seemed very different than the Texas coast that I’m
used to. Not only were there some shells out on the beach that back home you
could only find in gift shops, but the clear power of the water was definitely
more intense than the type of ocean around Port Aransas. Climbing around the
rocks and hearing the crashing waves in my ears definitely made me all the more
ready to be out on that boat with the sharks! I’ve always loved being around
the ocean, and the fact that I’m spending the next few weeks living so close is
pretty much a dream come true!
I think this
post is long enough. In a couple of hours, I’ll be in the shark team boat out
on the water- not to mention in the cage with the sharks! This post’s food for
thought: “The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.”- Isak
Dinesen
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