Three Weeks and Near Death Experiences

I was almost eaten by a shark yesterday. Well, not really, I'll explain later, I promise. But first...yesterday marked exactly three weeks until I leave South Caicos! Which is crazy. On the one hand, that seems like forever from now. On the other hand, it seems like tomorrow. I have come to the conclusion that time follows entirely different rules down here.

We are halfway through data collection for DR (Directed Research, in case I didn't tell you before), and my project is actually shaping up pretty well. Lots of jellyfish to measure! But thankfully not as many as at that first site. Otherwise I'm pretty sure my group would have (understandably) rebelled. Yesterday we collected muck to plant mangrove seedlings...which are not doing well. Apparently baby mangroves do not like being ripped up and then planted in five gallon buckets. Who knew? But don't worry guys, it's for SCIENCE. This afternoon we're heading out to an old US Coast Guard station, one of the most beautiful spots on the island, to get more data. That is, providing the road isn't washed out from the rain storm yesterday!

But about that shark. If you have ever met me, you will know that I have an overactive imagination, and that it sometimes gets me into trouble. Yesterday was one of those times. We were on one of our lionfish hunts yesterday afternoon, with six students and five staff (which is a lot of people, in case you were wondering). We dove The Grotto, which is a fantastic site along the wall, so you're almost guaranteed to see at least one reef shark. We saw two, plus a bunch of eagle rays, throughout our dive, and we caught six lionfish, so we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. We'd been down there for about 40 minutes, and a couple people were getting low on air, so we started ascending to make our safety stop. That's when the shark came back. In case you forgot what a six-foot-long reef shark looks like, here is a picture (courtesy of the inter-webs):

Your neighborhood-friendly reef shark

So we were all just floating there in the water, between 15 and 20 feet down, and this reef shark came and started sort of circling us. It would swim towards us a little bit, then swim away, then come back, then swim around us, then swim away, and so on. It never went out of sight though. I wish I could tell you that I was floating there thinking something along the lines of "Wow look at that amazing creature, it's so majestic and beautiful" or even something intense like "It's the shark or me this time" (bonus points if you get that reference). But no. I was floating there like "OH MY GOSH LOOK AT THAT SHARK WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!" and imagining all the shark attack stories I had ever heard of (thanks a lot, Soul Surfer). Turns out the shark was actually interested in our little buoy, not us, but it was still pretty insane when the thing took off towards the surface ready to attack what it thought was a fish. It realized it wasn't a fish at the last minute, and dove back down and swam away (for real that time). Thankfully for my blood pressure, we finished our safety stop at about this point. 

So just to reiterate, everyone was totally fine, and I was the only one who was even nervous. Apparently my eyes were bugging out of my head. And we weren't actually in any danger. The shark didn't really care about what we were doing at all. I am an idiot. 

...I still sort of feel like I cheated death though. I do not plan on doing that again.