First day of Chumming

Today I went on my first chum trip. I woke up at 5 to skype my parents (like 8:00 pm their time), ate breakfast and were in the car just after 6:30 am. We got to the dock and couldn't get one of the engines to start, so somebody had to drive out to help us. Of course it started right up for the guy they had to wake up to drive to help us. Go figure. So we drove out to the spot - it was about a half hour boat ride. 

There were 5 interns on the boat and a person in charge assigning us jobs. One was on chumming, one was on photography, one was on data, one was on the bait rope, and I was on spotting. I had to climb on this platform on top of the boat and watch for any sharks to show up. If they did I had to tell the bait roper which direction they were coming from. The bait roper holds a line with a buoy (pronounced boy by most of the people down here - which is very confusing because most of the time its not a boy in the water, its just a buoy) and a tuna head on it. When a shark shows up they are supposed to drag the line away from the shark so the photographer can get a shot of the fin (used to ID individual sharks). The chummer had a bin of sardines and other little fish. He would fill the bin with buckets of water, stomp on the mixture to mash up the fish and then dump the fish water back into the ocean. The data person took data on when the shark showed up, how big it was, and any distinctive markings. 

We chummed and waited for about three hours, only pulling up the anchor to move once. The whole time we were in sight of shore, probably only a couple hundred yards off. I had pretty much given up hope, had eaten most of the food I had brought, and was kind of zoning out (bad idea for the spotter) when I looked left and to my surprise and excitement saw my very first great white shark!!!!!! 

So I had to yell to the spotter which way she was coming from, keeping the buoy in the center of the clock. My problem was I put myself at the 12 instead of the 6 where I should have been, so my clock was upside down and I was yelling the wrong directions. 

But after I pointed her out, the bait roper could see her and wasn't really even listening to me. Oh well. 

She didn't really want to play with our bait anyways, she just made a few appearances, circled the boat a few times and then peaced out. We had to leave too because it had taken her so long to show up. 

Overall it was a pretty successful trip. We stopped by Seal Island on the way home, and the smell of hundreds of seal and their poo laying in the sun all day is overpoweringly nauseating.... So so so so so so gross! People were gagging and eyes were burning and we didn't even get that close.