He is, of course, a Great White Shark, and this picture of him was taken by me while trembling in a cage off Guadalupe Isand (Mexico) in the fall of 2005.
Slash was pretty banged up, with scars all over and a few teeth missing. The latter is unusual for sharks since teeth are constantly being replaced. In Slash's case, however, his 'gums' had been damaged, probably by a steel leader on a fishing line, and the teeth hadn't been replaced (yet).
I wouldn't worry about him too much. He's a big fellow, with a best estimate of his size being just over 16 feet. And he was very fat, which meant he was eating well.
If Slash manages to break all the fishing lines he gets hooked on (while eating the tuna and other fish that were on the hook to start with), and avoids trophy hunters and finning operations, and stays out of trouble with bigger sharks, he might just live to be a really big boy, say 19-20 ft.
As sharks go, Slash didn't come off as terribly aggressive. He just seemed interested in everything, particularly the half -tuna (bluefin) that was the lure to bring the sharks in.
The bait 'wranglers' were told to pull it away from approaching sharks, but Slash outsmarted them. After a couple of passes where the bait was pulled away before he could bite, Slash changed tactics and approached the bait from under the boat, where he was hidden until the last moment from the wranglers up top. He won his prize. And every one of us on the trip learned that sharks are not mindless.
By virtue of his persistence and willingness to adapt, and by his focus on things that mattered (the bait) and not on things that didn't (the divers in the cage), Slash proved inspirational.
And that's why you see him smiling at the top of this blog.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment