My meal out last night- it was dinner and a show! I love Lucy's face in the background
I came upon this little slice of paradise while on my beach clean this afternoon
At the end
of my last blog post, which I made two days ago, I said that I didn’t think I’d
be able to go to sea the next day. I learned later that night that I was wrong-
I was able to go to sea yesterday! Tom sent me a message that evening and said
that, since it would be the first time out to sea for all the new volunteers,
he wanted me on the first trip and Lucy on the second, so each trip would have
a more experienced volunteer. There were eight vols on that first trip
yesterday, including myself. The conditions that morning were on the rougher
side of things out on the ocean, and we definitely had some volunteers and
clients getting seasick. Days like that make me thankful that my body has now
gotten completely used to the motion of the boat, even on a rough day. Seeing
(and occasionally hearing) people getting sick on the boat makes me feel almost
superhuman, since I’ve come to actually like the movement of the boat. I’ve
noticed that, if some people are feeling seasick, they try to be as still as possible
and fight the natural motion of the boat, which is the totally wrong way to do
it. It’s much better to just let your body move with the boat.
I had the
job of doing data on that first trip out, and I marked down seeing a total of
seven sharks. A few were re-sights, which have come to be really easy to notice
for me. One shark we’ve seen several times, that I’ve come to really like, is
about a 3.5 meter male. We hear him referred to as “Long John Silver” or “Mini
Nemo”, because he has a stunted right pectoral fin, much smaller than his left
one. He often sticks around the boat for quite a while, and he’s very easy to
identify not just because of the smaller pectoral fin, but because he has a
unique behavior as well. A lot of sharks will rush at the bait from the front
or side, already at the surface, but this one has a different method. He almost
always uses an ambush technique, coming from deeper than most sharks to deliver
a vertical strike to the bait. This technique means we usually don’t see him until
the last second; his natural countershading (dark on top, light underside)
makes him camouflage really well with the dark water. We think that he probably
uses this technique because it’s propelled mostly with the caudal, or tail,
fin, so it compensates for his smaller pectoral fin.
Yesterday
afternoon was grocery shopping, as usual for Mondays. The volunteers had
planned to go out for dinner yesterday evening to The Blue Goose, a restaurant
in Gansbaai, since Lucy’s getting ready to leave. We so rarely go out for meals
here, so it sounded like a great evening. Tom joined us, and with the help of
Jerome driving us, twelve of us ended up going and eating out last night, and
it was great. Some of us got seafood, while some of us got steak. I was a little
torn between the two, until Tom recommended one of their steak dishes, and I
went with the recommendation. I didn’t know it would be dinner and a show, but
it was, as you can see in the first picture! From our expressions, Lucy and I
clearly weren’t expecting that! It was the right decision to go with Tom’s
suggestion- it was delicious.
There was
one trip out to sea this morning, but I wasn’t on it. The next few days look
like they’ll be no sea days, and since some of these new volunteers are only
here for a week, it was only fair to let them go out instead of me. I still was
up in the garage at 5:30 to get everything set up for the trip, then just came
back to the house to relax for the rest of the morning. After making lunch
here, I went out and did a really long beach clean, staying out there for about
two hours until my big trash bag was almost overflowing with plastic bottles,
bags, fishing line, and some of the millions of other pieces of junk that I
find out there. I went farther than I usually go, and unintentionally found a
beautiful little spot along the beach. I climbed out onto one of the biggest,
highest rocks that jutted out from the waves, took a few pictures of the
beautiful place, and just stayed there for a little while, feeling the wind and
the spray of the ocean on my face, breathing in the salty air around me, taking
in the moment.
Like I
mentioned, the next few days are looking like no sea days here, so the
volunteers have a few other things planned. Tomorrow Lucy is getting dropped off
at the airport in Cape Town, so we’ve decided to all get in the WSP van and
head to Cape Town with her, and hang out there. It’s a good two hours from here
to Cape Town, so we’re going to make a whole day out of it. I’m not sure yet
exactly what we’ll be doing, but I’m sure it’ll be a good day. This post’s food
for thought is a quote that I thought of when I found that really nice spot on
the beach this afternoon: “Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come
when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.”- Lawrence
Block
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