So we left off yesterday around 11 am. We got back from the shark dive and the film crew went off to find some dolphins or some shit. Everyone knows dolphins are just gay sharks, so we weren't all that interested. The day before yesterday, two other volunteers and myself were tasked with chopping up bait for various activities. Four hours of that was enough to make a pair of shorts permanent bait-cutting shorts and force me to make some adjustments to the facial hair. Some bait splattered up onto the mustache and it was all I could smell so I decided to remove some. The end result looks something like if Wolverene were 100% Irish. Anyways, the three of us were rewarded by going out to bait for hammerheads to try to get some good shots for the film crew. It is still very early in the hammerhead season so we were not too optimistic. After a few hours, we finally had a visitor.
Lindsay was in the water scraping (holding a large piece of bait and consistently scraping down the fish to create a steady scent trail that the sharks can follow back to the boat) when she looked up and said, "There's a shark down there." We get excited and start putting on our fins and such to jump in when she comes back up and tells us it's just a nurse shark. It took the wind out of our sails a bit because nurse sharks are pretty boring. They can grow up to 14 feet long and are essentially harmless to people. They are almost always found just resting on the sea floor; they are one of a handful of sharks that can pump water through their gills without swimming. Not so exciting. But as Derek and I are about to get out of the water, Lindsay looks up and whispers, "There's a hammerhead down there." I had a much more enthusiastic reaction, after I looked down and saw this...
I looked up and yelled, "HOLY FUCK, there's a hammerhead down there!!"
This is the second post about hammerheads but I realize that I didn't really give the little briefing on the species like I have with the other ones. There are a few types of hammerheads, the one shown here and in the one in the earlier post are both Great hammerheads. These sharks are just magnificent, capable of growing up to 20 feet long and sporting one of the most unique and recognizable body shapes in the animal kingdom. Not only the shape of the head, but also the ridiculously tall dorsal fin. It is for this reason that Great hammerheads are listed as endangered. In many parts of the world, most notably Asia, sharks are killed by the tens of millions every year just for their fins. Having such large fins makes Great hammerheads ideal targets for shark finning.
Fishermen land the sharks, cut off all their fins, and then throw the body back into the water. Usually the shark is still alive at this point and either bleeds to death or suffocates because it cannot swim to keep water flowing through its gills. While it is estimated that populations of Great hammerheads have dropped 50% in the Western Atlantic, 73% in the Indian Ocean, and over 80% in Western Africa, there have been only 37 recorded attacks on humans by Great hammerheads, only 1 of which was fatal. Once again, that's 1 recorded fatality since the creation of the International Shark Attack File during World War II (the number of attacks and fatalities you see in this blog come from this source).
But enough of that depressing stuff, back to the awesome day yesterday. We called in the film crew so they could try to get some shots of our new friend, who was about 10 feet long. But before they could get there, he grabbed one of the baits and started "hammering the nail", thrashing his head back and forth until he ripped through the line and swam off with his prize. We thought that was the end of it, reveling in the fact that we got to witness a very rare shark. We were very, very wrong.
At this point, it was around 5:30, starting to get dark, when out of that deep, deep blue came first the original hammerhead, then a second, slightly smaller one, and finally the nurse shark from the beginning bringing up the rear. We were anchored in about 20 feet of water, so these guys came in nice and close to smile for our respective cameras. When we set out from the dock, Jim, the lab manager, said that best case scenario was that we would get a hammerhead to stick around for maybe 15 minutes. We were in the water with these two for 45 minutes, until it was almost too dark to see anymore. It capped a day that I will remember for the rest of my life as one of the best. I'll leave you with some of my favorite pictures. If you would like to see more, I have about 50 as well as a couple of videos, just let me know and I'll shoot them to you. There is a short clip at the end of this post, but I have a 3-minute gem of all 3 sharks. If you would like to see it, let me know and I will try to upload it to Youtube. Stay sharky kids.
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